Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore distinguishes five customer groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The innovators are technology enthusiasts; they buy and use your product as soon as it is launched. The early adopters are visionaries who can see how the product benefits them. Together, they make up the e

don’t make the mistake of overoptimizing your product for the early market.

The Innovation Ambition Matrix is based on the Ansoff matrix, which explores the relationship between the product and the market; it distinguishes an existing product from a new product and an existing market from a new one. This gives rise to four growth strategies: market penetration, product development, market development, and diversification.

Products like the Sonos hi-fi system are sometimes called vitamins, as they don’t solve a pain or an urgent need.

The vertical axis describes the degree to which each competitor offers or invests in the factors.

Building an initial customer base and finding out if and how people use the product is particularly important for disruptive innovations.

Before the launch your primary goal is to find a valid product strategy—a strategy that results in a product that is beneficial, feasible, and economically viable.

If your business does not have an overall strategy, or if you are unaware of what it is, then delay formulating a product strategy until a business strategy becomes available—unless you work for a start-up, in which case your business and product strategy are likely to be identical.

To achieve disruption and to do different things, a company has to do things differently and therefore disrupt itself—at least to a certain extent. It has to discontinue some of the practices that have helped it succeed in its established markets, acquire new skills, find new business models, and often embrace—and in some cases develop—new technolo