What are common product decisions that a firm can make Descr

What are common product decisions that a firm can make? Describe these in detail.

Solution

Customer Wants

Companies are selling products to make money by creating happy customers. With the “customer wants” model of making product decisions, you reach out to prospective and existing customers, since they’re the ones who will ultimately be buying your product. If you are able to deliver what prospects want, they are much more likely to buy your product.

To gain insight into what they want, companies listen to what prospects say during sales and customer support calls, tally up feature requests, monitor support and discussion forums, and conduct focus groups and surveys. A conversation with a customer might include explicitly asking her what she thinks of a particular feature idea, or she might offer her own feature ideas.

Deal Driven

The ultimate measure of a successful product is how much money it makes. At any particular time, sales may be working on a deal that could bring in a large amount of revenue for the company. The prospect in such a deal often has particular needs that the product could address with some additional development. In the deal-driven approach to product decisions, the needs of prospects in these major deals drive the product decisions and priorities.

Intuition

Disruptive and innovative products often come from visionaries who incorporate cool technologies and have an intuitive sense for what consumers want. Executives and members of the product team are themselves consumers and thus have their own personal opinions about the most effective ways to market and sell a product. Developers on top of the newest technologies see how they can apply the technologies to implement innovative product features. Since everyone in the company is a potential user of the product, they all chime in on what the best design and user interface is. In many organizations, these sorts of intuitions drive product decisions.