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Strategize

Capitalize on market and product opportunities.

It’s often the case that a client approaches us with a pressing business need, thorny customer problem, complex technical challenge or valuable market opportunity. And while the need, problem, challenge or opportunity is clear, the path forward isn’t.

That’s where Strategize engagements begin.

TXI assembles integrated teams — often a blend of experts from our organization and yours — to reveal new perspectives and illuminate possibilities. By gathering customer insights, assessing competitive landscapes, and exploring technical horizons, we enable our clients to set direction confidently and prioritize focus pragmatically.

Strategize

Shape the opportunity

At the start of these engagements, we lead a series of collaborative exercises to articulate the “3Cs” that influence how we’ll collectively approach the opportunity ahead of us.

The answers that emerge from these sessions help us define the boundaries of our initial efforts and highlight the exploration that would be most valuable in understanding the overall landscape.

Market analysis is a crucial component of this work. When applicable, we’ll analyze market trends, industry reports, and competitor strategies to identify market gaps and product opportunities.

The result? A holistic view of the key forces to harness, obstacles to navigate, and factors to consider as we bring form and focus to the opportunity.

Company

  • What are your strengths and capabilities?

  • What are the assets you can leverage in this new space?

  • What are the main challenges around company capabilities in this area?

  • Why are you uniquely positioned to be successful?

Competition

  • How is the market performing?

  • Who are the main competitors? Where are they strong? Vulnerable?

  • What makes this market attractive?

  • What are the industry or technology advancements affecting this space?

Customers

  • Who are the likely audiences for a new offering?

  • What are their options today?

  • What are their challenges and frustrations?

  • How low or high is the switching cost?

Case Studies

Turning audience data into an action plan with ISACA

Strategize

Identify a linchpin customer

To many organizations, targeted means “for someone.” Marketers use large quantitative studies to divide the world into segments based on demographics, attitudes, or usage. Segmentation is a good way to size up a market, but relatively useless when defining new products.

At TXI, targeted means “for someone very specific.” We call these very specific someones “linchpin” customers, and they represent your ideal user.

They’re behavioral archetypes that provide a clear picture of a real person you exist to serve. To zero in on these customers, we uncover extreme users (those with intense needs and distinct challenges) who are passionate about products or services like the one being explored and have high expectations. By seeing the world through the eyes of your linchpin customer, we can get explicit about how your product can create value for them and connect with values shared by broader audiences.

This clarity and specificity are essential to aligning your product focus with your linchpin customer.

We typically accomplish this through a mix of research methods:

  • Talking with people (one-on-one in-depth interviews, focus groups)

  • Observing users (contextual inquiry, diary studies)

  • Understanding current solutions (competitive review, heuristic analysis)

  • Experiencing things for ourselves (shopping for products, trialing existing products)

In synthesizing what we learn in research, we’re able to surface the unique ways a new product can:

  • Meet customer needs (functional, emotional, social)

  • Relieve pain (cost, risk, negative emotions)

  • Deliver on previously unexplored needs (unmet/unarticulated needs)

  • Out-deliver on existing needs (underserved needs)

Strategize

Define product positioning

Positioning is the process of creating a unique space in the market and the mind. Good positioning creates positive mental image customers can readily identify with that’s ownable (unique) and memorable. Positioning also helps relate the new to the known.

A strong position strikes a deep chord with customers—it’s meaningful (delivers something that matters); it’s different (stands out from the crowd); and it’s targeted (appeals to someone very specific, not everyone). At its core, effective positioning is about resonance:

  • Functional resonance: “This will help me do something better / faster / cheaper!”

  • Socio-emotional resonance: “That’s exactly how I feel / who I aspire to be.”

TXI advocates for “pre-positioning” which enables clients to explore multiple value propositions and ways of articulating that value to consumers. Like nearly everything we do, TXI approaches pre-positioning iteratively; first focusing on low-cost quick experimentation, then on refining, reshaping, amplifying, and clarifying what “it” is and how to communicate value.

The first step in defining a position is establishing the frame of reference (mental category) the product belongs in:

  • Product category

  • Competitors/alternatives

  • Target customer

  • Key needs, pain points

  • Context of use

  • Brand attributes

The second is highlighting the points of difference (why yours is different / better):

  • Promise

  • Features

  • Benefits

  • Technologies

  • Reasons to Believe

Explore the five principles that guide our design

We believe these five design principles hold us accountable to each other, our clients, their users 
and our own work.

Begin your exploration

Strategize

Develop product vision and vignettes

With a linchpin customer identified and product positioning established, our next step is to generate a compelling product vision to provide clarity and build conviction within your organization.

Critical components of a great product vision document include:

  • The opportunity: Brief, cogent summary that sets up the opportunity space

  • The idea: Positioning and key components that help bring the position to life

  • The audience: Who it’s for and why it’s a target customer worth addressing

  • The differentiators: Why it’s different from current options (pain / promise)

  • The upside: How it fits within your capabilities; business model; size of the prize

  • The plan: Primary challenges to overcome; markers of success; best path forward

We find that most client organizations greatly benefit from the design of product vignettes to convey key “scenes and screens” of the experience.

Scenes are glimpses into the moments of real life where a customer encounters a need for or derives benefits from your product. Often visualized through illustration; scenes foreground the linchpin customer and their story, relegating the product enabling these moments to the background.

When it’s useful to get into the specifics of screens, we keep things light and directional. Open layouts, vibrant color, clean interactions. All in the service of clarity, everything focused on advancing the narrative and driving home the utility of each feature.

All of this adds up to a tangible and persuasive narrative about where you’re heading and why.

Case Studies

Automating high-stakes business analysis to empower faster decision-making

Strategize

Make the business case

The product vision will likely appeal to your organization's big-picture, intuitive thinkers. We suggest a shift in focus and tone to reach the more detail-oriented, analytical thinkers. Crafting a compelling business case is predicated on getting specific about the nuts and bolts of your product opportunity. We’ve found that the strongest business cases answer four fundamental questions.

Beyond these fundamental questions, look for ways to leverage your organization’s core competencies, such as technology advantages, structural advantages, skills, and capabilities, or manufacturing processes, as well as assets, such as brand equity, existing products, customer relationships, and partnerships.

Finally, demonstrate where key trends support tech, industry, and lifestyle opportunities.

1

What’s the opportunity?

Succinctly recap the opportunity, idea, and audience sections of the product vision document, underscoring how this product aligns with and advances your organization's strategic goals.

2

How will we address it?

Outline a plan for the short term with an emphasis on the initial time frame, upfront costs, and estimated impact. Highlight operational aspects, including product fit with existing internal capabilities.

3

How will we know it’s working?

Share the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure traction. Get specific with financial projections outlining realistic cost, revenue, and return on investment (ROI).

4

What could go wrong?

Avoid the temptation to downplay the dependencies and risks inherent in the opportunity. Pair those elements with your mitigation strategies and contingency plans.

One of the most important parts of our strategy was not to force people to use NUcore. That meant we had to build good software that met people's needs, or nobody was going to use it.

Jeff Weiss, Director for Research Analysis, Northwestern University
Strategize

Plan the product roadmap

Whether your preferred lingo is “minimum viable product” or “minimum lovable product” or simply “v1,” it’s critical to define thin slices of your end-to-end product experience so that you can ship something smaller, sooner.

The smaller your initial release, the earlier that initial product expression can be tested and iterated on to ensure that it meets the needs of your linchpin customers and begins generating the ROI calculated in your business plan.

In defining a product roadmap, our team emphasizes:

  • Generating an inventory of foundational epics

  • Defining the initial shape and focus of the first release

  • Articulating the features we’ll work on Now, Next, and Later

  • Estimating the effort and duration of key features

  • Surfacing the riskiest assumptions to validate and the most critical experiments to conduct

  • Planning for ways to build awareness among linchpins and foster adoption

We understand that building a new product involves risk, and we help our clients assess the risk-return tradeoff, identifying the potential risks and rewards associated with each opportunity and working to determine the level of risk they are comfortable with.

With a draft product roadmap in hand, it’s time to move onward to Realize your product.

Strategize

FAQs

  • How does automation improve the performance of a digital product?
  • What is speed to value?
  • What is agile delivery?
  • What is a linchpin customer?
  • What is the process of defining product positioning?
  • What is the purpose of identifying the "3Cs"?
  • What are the benefits of synthesizing the research results?
  • How can you reduce risk through design thinking?
  • How do you craft a compelling business case?
  • What is a minimum viable product or MVP?
  • What is a minimum lovable product?
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