MeshThink

Chances are, you’ve seen this vision statement before:

“We will be the leading global provider of ____________ to _____________.”

Sometimes it’s dressed up with fancier words, or more qualifiers. But, at their core, many vision statements are simply saying, “we’re SOOOO going to win this market”. 

Look, there’s nothing wrong with that. Not every company needs to reframe their business as an altruistic humanitarian mission. If you’re just trying to build a better mousetrap, you don’t need a vision statement that says, “We will foster a global environment where every person can store and consume cheese freely and without concern.” 

When a vision statement is broad, however, there’s a risk that it doesn’t give significant direction. (Or, even worse, says, “go in every direction, at once!”). If you don’t have a strong product strategy to go along with it, it’s easy to lose focus. I won’t go into the key elements of building a good product strategy — this has been done by many others before me, and probably far more eloquently. I’d recommend this series from Marty Cagan as a great starting point. 

But once you have a strategy defined, it can be hard to determine if it is a *good* strategy. To gut check, I like to go back to my childhood Mad Libs days, with a template to check our direction. This one is the Primary Need Mad Lib — and if you’ve done a good job of formulating and communicating your product strategy, everyone in your organization will fill it in the same way.

The Mad Lib goes like this:

We will win {customers/users}__________ by addressing this need: “{User Need}_____________” better than {competitor(s)}___________.

Here’s an example from my own past, at a company that built a SaaS platform for Sponsored Product ads:

We will win retail customers by addressing this need…

“As a retailer, I want to offer native advertisements in my shopping experience, so that I can maximize advertising revenue without impacting sales.”

…better than Google’s Ad Manager. 

“But, Chris,” you might say, “that sounds an awful lot like a user story. We have tons of those!

”Yes, any good, robust product is going to frame and satisfy many user stories. However, most of these stories are like the supporting cast in a movie — you can’t make the movie without them, but they weren’t the reason you bought the ticket. Radically successful products usually have one “Lead Story” that is the primary user need driving their success. It can’t be successful without the supporting cast, but it’s this Primary Need that’s getting everyone into the theater.

What makes a good Primary Need? First, the need should have some urgency. In the case above, it was a time where retailers were quickly falling behind in a fight for advertising revenue in the US market, and recognized this as a legitimate threat to their ongoing viability. Big revenue impact, and a rapidly evolving market that demanded immediate action. For consumer apps, the needs with the most urgency usually map to core human needs – I like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or Madanes’ 6 Human Needs as framing references.  

Second, the leading competitor currently satisfying that need (if one exists!) should be doing a mediocre job. Ideally, you’ll be able to say that the competitor best serving the need today has a different “Lead Actor” — the story you’re focusing on as a Primary Need is only in their supporting cast, and it’s not the star. In the case above, retailers were using Google’s platform because it was the best available platform, but its primary need at the time was, “As a content publisher, I want to add advertisements to my pages so that I can earn revenue for the content I publish.” The need we chose to address wasn’t served well, because it was only a small bit part, not the featured role.

Third, when someone asks you, “Why do you think you can do that better than ________?”, you have a convincing answer. You don’t need to be able to articulate a full product design, but you should be able to talk about the foundation of your idea to address this need – be that different use of data, different user experience, leveraging social connections… you should be able to list the things which will give you an advantage in satisfying that need.

Here are some other Primary Needs you might recognize for products that went on to become quite successful:

We will win users by addressing this need…

“As a person, I want to share things with all of my friends and family, so that I can deepen our connection.”

…better than email. 

We will win users by addressing this need…

“As a consumer, I want to know more about the lifestyles of celebrities, so that I can be more like them.” 

…better than TV.

 We will win subscribers by addressing this need…

“As a viewer, I want to discover movies I haven’t watched yet, so that I can have more entertainment options.”

…better than Blockbuster

Once you’ve framed a primary need, check yourself — can you answer the questions framed above? Does answering them make you more or less confident about your ability to succeed?

• Is this need urgent? Why?
• Is the company or technology filling this need today treating this as a “supporting” need, rather than a primary one?
• No, really — why do you think you can satisfy this need better?

If you can get through this exercise with confidence, the next step is to see if other people in your organization (engineers, salespeople, stakeholders) come up with the same answer! When you have a good product strategy that has been well communicated, people throughout the organization will understand this need and know the answers to these questions. If not, don’t fret — product organizations exist because this doesn’t happen organically. As a product manager, you’re (hopefully) empowered to create this alignment — time to get started!