Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Creating your new space

September 30th, 2008

One of the product management books I frequently recommend is Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.  When you’re looking at creating a product roadmap, it forces you to take a broader perspective than the immediate tactical “copy what our #1 competitor is doing”.

To understand “blue ocean strategy”, look at the Nintendo Wii.   Nintendo looked at what the competitors were prizing highly (performance, tech specs, highly detailed graphics rendering) and what they were essentially ignoring (low learning curve/”pick up and play”, real-life group play) and flipped those:

Here’s how I applied it to a real product roadmap exercise.  When looking at my current company’s place in our industry landscape,  I started with a traditional SWOT analysis.  But SWOT, I think, is a better tool for seeing where you are than seeing where you should go.

So I looked at our competitors and made a list of all the elements they bragged about, or where they claimed superiority over a competitor.  For each element, I drew a continuum – instead of just using “low” and “high”, I used more descriptive terms.  Basically, a Blue Ocean-like strategy chart flipped on its’ side:

The attributes are going to vary from product to product (these have been changed a bit from my original document), and a more mature market is going to have tighter clusters.

Interestingly, my current product line is the first one I’ve worked on where the “ease of use” / “expert” continuum isn’t relevant.

With all of the consumer products I’ve worked on, that is usually a big differentiator: are you targeting consumers who want to learn the whole system in 5 minutes, or consumers who pride themselves on learning details and being experts?

There are always limited resources, which means as a product owner you can never fight on all fronts.  But with some good analysis, you can choose your battles wisely and win them.

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  • http://tynerblain.com/blog/ Scott Sehlhorst

    This looks great, Cindy! The high-low chart looks sort of like an unfurled spider graph. What I like about the way you’ve laid things out is that you have labeled each axis.

    This points out that not everything is high-low, but more like left-right.

    This provides a great view of “where everybody isn’t.” I wonder if there’s a way to add an element of “where do we want to be?” For example – is ‘out of the box’ going to appeal to a larger population of users (or a market segment that will pay more for the product)?

    I think this helps especially when your competitors solve the same market problems with very different approaches (to the point that they don’t look like competitors at first glance). Like the post office and the phone company. They both solve a communication problem. You can draw a “real time” to “high latency” axis describing how two-way communication happens, for example.

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