Getting Investments in Your Growing Product
It is easier than you think
You've launched a new product months ago and finally sales are starting to pick up. Your product team is struggling to keep up with the demand while delivering new features. How can you get more investment in your product to stay ahead of demand?
You and your team has little time to justify additional investment. You have a few hours each week to update your strategy and get buy in to spend more on your product. How do you break this down and get that investment?
Growth Strategy
The strategy that got your product launched is no longer valid. You've had many more customer conversations. You understand the good and the bad use cases for your offering. You have a few early customers and a healthy pipeline of more customers.
As you consider the near term growth strategy, think about these major themes to grow your product:
Market expansion - an adjacent market or unaddressed segment that can be a splashy marketing announcement
New capability - a new feature that early customers want
Enhancements - a few of the things that the team decided to delay from the launch
The themes are easy for your stakeholders to support for new investment.
For example, suppose you are the product manager for a new cloud service for software engineers. This cloud service launches a development environment in Google Cloud. You are finding that testing teams are using the cloud service and that customers need support for more cloud platforms. You could do the following themes to get stakeholder support for your growth strategy:
Market expansion: support for test engineers that need a development environment
New capability: run the service on AWS
Enhancements: synchronization of development environments between multiple clouds for developers
Following these themes your stakeholders can see the value in continuing to invest in the service:
New announcement about testing use cases to increase sales
New cloud support for existing customers
Cloud development environment synchronization for existing customers that use the new cloud support
Your definition of this growth strategy has the additional benefit of getting the whole product team focused on a few key items.
Update the Business Case
After settling on the growth strategy, it is time to update the business case. Updating the business case is handled in these steps:
Update the forecast from the product launch - be sure to keep notes on the changes so your stakeholders can understand what has happened since the launch
Add the incremental business from the growth strategy - note the assumptions behind the additional business forecast
Make any cost changes in the business case - show additional costs separately
Recalculate the 1-3 year P&L with the incremental business
Review this with your stakeholders and get their buy-in to the updated business case.
Talk Up the Product Growth Story
Once your product growth strategy is kicked off, you need to communicate the change to the affected teams. Timing of communications is critical. You need to work with architects and developers right away to start on the growth items. You need to enable the rest of the product team to absorb the product changes after the architects and developers.
Back to the example growth strategy for a cloud service for developers. After architects and engineers understand the new requirements, you will need to update these teams about the growth strategy:
Marketing to prepare for the new use case
Pricing to keep the existing strategy
Finance to discuss how new customers will follow the current sales motion
Sales to plan sales force training
Be sure to continuously include feedback on the growth strategy into your roadmap and backlog for the next round of product growth.
Conclusion
Defining your growth strategy and getting investments are key to keeping momentum on your launched product offering. Taking the lead on defining key growth themes and managing the changes can be done in small steps and has high value in your product lifecycle.