When building a product roadmap, a Product Manager needs time to study the industry, understand the problems of the clients and the users, understand the business, process input and data, ideate, and consider requests from customer support, to turn them into products. And everything under the umbrella of the product and organizational strategy.
Let’s say that the analysis is complete, or to put it better, you have focused on an opportunity that looks promising. How do you start looking for solutions?
It is critical to consider valid options to drive and debate with your team to start doing your early validation. So, how don’t you look like being into paralysis by analysis or being “too B2C” on your ideas?
I believe the best recap of available frameworks to choose where you prioritize is available in the Lean Analytics book. But as I tried to use them, I found them “too B2C”. When you work on B2B, data-related, bulk action products, the rules on how you can generate value for your clients change. Through the years, I developed my own ideation matrix called “APRIOrI” to help me generate potential solutions for B2B products. I have used it for years, and I would like to open it for debate to understand if it can be useful for more teams.
APRIOrI - Building B2B products
APRIOrI (inspired by apriori analysis) is about prioritizing the jobs of your B2B users so that you amplify the value your product may generate. Before you go into the solution validation or use other prioritization frameworks (e.g. RICE, MoSCoW), you hypothesize :
Automate - Can you automate tasks your users do? Such features can create new revenue for your clients; at least, they should be able to save time and reduce costs. Try as early as possible to automate things, and reduce the manual processes for users. For example, if you are a fraud detection system, you should automate a big part of the transactions.
Prioritize - What cannot be automated should be prioritized for human validation and review, so you should help users have a greater impact with their actions. This includes giving filters and options to your operations or users to find the most effective way to run through a list of tasks. For example, a media service should review viral content first if the automated screening process doesn’t have a big accuracy score.
Report - If your product is doing well, someone needs to know about it; At least, they will need to export the outcomes of your system. Thus, if you create value, you will soon need a reporting functionality. For example, generate a daily or weekly CSV with the outcomes, or build a web reporting tool with download functionality. Remember, CSVs are gold in business software because they can be used as input for other systems, including spreadsheet analyses.
Integrate - Having a good product, your users will need to integrate it deeper into their operations; they already use quite a big set of tools, starting from their email. So, can you generate additional value by integrating with one of their existing tools? This could even be a plugin on their Chrome Browser to pass data from your tool to/from their business tool. E.g., Atlassian can turn an email into a ticket, or Expensify is integrated with your email or Uber business account.
Organize - B2B software typically includes the management of teams. People need to allocate tasks, review actions, generate reports and have roles with permissions. As your automation will amaze your clients and allow them to scale their operations, they need to align with their internal policies. If you are lucky, your clients will not ask about this early on. So, when they need more people to use your product, they will start asking for more sophisticated permissions or processes.
Inform - With a stable tool and operations, your teams will ask for a more detailed operational analysis to extract knowledge and optimize their operations. This is the time for analytics, dashboards, etc. But also, this can be another offering or an existing BI tool. Don’t try to build everything on your product unless you have so much success that your users don’t need or want to leave your application.
Don’t forget, your product is an experience
Identifying a high-impact automation feature doesn’t mean you have a product; potentially, you are value-creating, which is amazing for a product. As your product grows (the product lifecycle) or if you need to address a more mature market (market adoption curve), you will need to focus on the whole experience of your product. You need to realize that to create a self-served, scalable and repetitive application, you need a set of features; it’s a matter of prioritization to meet the market-fit and bit competition.
Ideally, (a) if you achieve a level of automation and you can export the output of your system, you have created the minimum value of your product. Progressively, (b) you can allow your users to prioritize tasks, so they need to use the application to cover what cannot be automated. Then, (c) it will be easier for your users to use your product if it can collaborate with their existing ecosystem of solutions (don’t forget that import-export of CSVs is the minimum integration out there). Finally, as adoption of your product grows, you may be in the (d) pleasant situation to organize a set of teams to use your product more effectively, with the proper permissions. Lastly, or even in parallel, (e) as you want to beat the competition, your product will need to retain your users and inform them with more insightful metrics about their operational excellence.
However, don’t forget that these frameworks and tips are just a way of generating ideas and prioritizing. The final product is about the experience of the user while interacting with your product, and this includes a subjective view and the vision of the product team that builds the product. So, don’t blindly follow any framework presented, including mine; use whatever you like and is useful for your own analysis and thinking.
Why is this B2B related (mainly)?
As the dictionary says, apriori means reasoning which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience. In the B2B world, where you have a limited pool of clients and input, and it is tough to ideate as your competition is typically the usage of the workforce or excel files, I have found that these practical rules have been helping on ideation. So, these areas of opportunities can be used as focus areas by B2B PMs to identify what problems are trying to address and understand the maturity of the product in its lifecycle.
These areas of idea generation may be useful for B2C PMs too, but in the client-facing world, awareness, conversion, and retention are important and well-defined areas of interest for the PMs, and there are multiple frameworks out there to follow.