Your Strategy names one audience; weak evidence describes another

​Dear Reader,​

One of the most common questions that came up in my recent Strategy to Execution workshop at the ProductLab conference revolved around intentional strategic audiences vs. reactive chasing of new business.

Many teams either operate where the company focuses on all customers of a given market (i.e., "all lawyers") or throw a wishful-thinking segment out there.

In a warehouse of productivity software context, one thing I ask teams to consider is whether average task completion time would look different for their chosen audience. That insight could support a central assumption in the strategy, so understanding whom it described mattered for deciding how much confidence to put in it.

Choosing a specific audience should help you decide which problems to solve and which opportunities to say no to. But you can lose that focus when you start using whatever research or analytics are available to support your choices. The audience in the strategy stays specific, while the insights informing your priorities become increasingly broad.

For example, a team working on expense-reporting software might choose to focus on employees submitting their first expense report. Feedback from frequent users about how tedious it is to upload receipts could suggest that bulk uploading is worth pursuing. But first-time users might struggle with understanding which expenses they can claim in the first place. Making it easier to upload more receipts would do little to reduce that uncertainty.

Both are potentially valuable problems to solve. Your audience choice should help you decide which one deserves your attention, and your discovery needs to establish whether that problem exists for the people you have chosen to focus on.

Remember that a strategic audience focus does not necessarily mean you won't make solutions available to other audiences as well. But you will use insights from this strategic segment to prioritize your efforts and evaluate the success of solutions based on audience-specific metrics.

In our expense-reporting example, that means looking at whether first-time users can successfully submit their expenses. An improvement in completion time across all users could come from making life easier for experienced users, while the people you intended to help continue to struggle.

Of course, you might already have useful insights about your chosen audience within a broader study or dataset. I would start by looking at who contributed to those findings before deciding to run more research. And if the evidence repeatedly points to a more valuable problem in another segment, that can be a reason to revisit your strategic choice.

When reviewing your next strategy iteration, pick one proposed priority and look at the strength of the evidence supporting it. Can you trace those insights back to the audience you want to create value for? If you can't, checking whether the problem exists for that audience gives you a concrete starting point for discovery.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

If you consume one thing this week, make it this...

Who is Tim Herbig?

As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.

I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.