How to create a data-driven product strategy in 2021

2021 is knocking at the door, and so are all the strategies' updates - no matter if we are talking about business, sales, or Product Marketing.

Here, at Wolfpack Digital, we have lots of internal discussions, meetings, and workshops to take Data-Driven Decisions and to identify the best ways to help each of our clients in their Product journey. So we thought it is a great moment to share our knowledge with you as well.

What is a Product Strategy?

A product strategy represents the set of actions taken to build a customer-centric product lifecycle that meets both business and users' expectations. 

Hence, Outlining a product strategy involves a list of action points in a given time-range aiming to align the business goals and market needs with the product features and functionalities.

How to make data-driven decisions?

When we work on a product, we tend to look at it quite personally. Which is nice, but not necessarily efficient. So, in order to make strategic changes - be it from a time or money efficiency perspective, or to ensure we build a product that actually solves a problem - we need to analyze the data we have.

So, What type of research you should do for product marketing and what data should we look into?

•  Qualitative vs quantitative research

Analytics can be quantitative and qualitative. And to have a good overview of your customers, you should cluster them and get some key takeaways.  Quantitative data refers to metrics that you can count — say website visitors; While qualitative analytics refers to a somewhat holistic view — such as customer behavior or feelings.

If you can have count-able metrics, you can easily create datasets to help you make strategic decisions. 

Qualitative analytics represents a rather subjective point of view, as it can have behavior heatmaps or open questions for your customers on why they chose your product. This may (or will) offer you a new perspective on your company’s competitive advantage, but leaves a lot of room to play around with the information.

•  Win-loss interviews

No matter if you run online or via phone interviews, a win-loss review helps you understand why a sales opportunity was won or lost. So you can tweak your process fast.

•  Customer feedback

Try to see how people feel about using your product, how much it takes them to get their job done within the app, what they like the most or what they never use while scrolling through the app. Are they happy with the customer support they've received?

•  Observations + the rest of your market
•  Competitor analysis

Needless to say that you have to check the overall statistics in your industry or vertical, check your competition - both as a customer and as a business. Outline the pros and cons you or they have and play around the insights with new ideas that solve problems and have an impact.

Of course, you may have only a few of them, but no worries, no matter if you have them all or just an analytics tool, it still counts and it helps you validate your hypothesis and building a product case.

How to apply data findings to my product development process?

There are a lot of things you can do, but let's break them into 4 verticals! 

1. Understanding your customer

Checking demographics, psychographics, and all the data you might get from interviews, people's opinions about similar products is crucial in delivering an effective product - from defining a tone of voice for your brand to identifying the right features.

2. Onboarding

A data-driven onboarding will place your product focus on giving the user a pleasing and memorable experience and keep them engaged.

3. UI/UX design

Every country is different, every type of user is different, we are all different. And understanding this aspect leads to one of the best-practices in data-driven decisions: creating funnels and clean user-flows to discover where users drop out, so you can improve your process, and segment everyone based on their interests (e.g., specific feature users, new-comers, pros, etc.)

4. Performance

Performance can make it or break it! Most products tend to only look at their features, as standalone, but never as a whole process. Or through the buyer journey: check the overall performance metrics of the product but also on the average time to answer to a customer or the solving time in case of an outage. 

The impact of a data-driven product strategy

Setting up smart objectives and key results is always a good idea. Analyzing the metrics that matter helps your business with the go-to-market strategy, enables sales, boosts lead generation, builds a better product adaptation, frames your communications, and provides you with a better overview of your product.

What to consider in 2021 in terms of customer expectations

2020 changed all of us and this has an impact across all strategies no matter the industry. So, while building your product strategy in 2021 do consider:

• An Agile approach and flexibility
• Data privacy and consent
• The perks of Conversational marketing and engagement
• Purpose and empathy
• Human connection and ethics

We hope you will build an amazing strategy and your product will grow up to the moon and back. And, of course, if you need any help with your product strategy or just a discovery workshop to go through your product and see what can be done before developing your web platform or mobile app with no data-backed information, just drop us a line in the chat or via the contact form and we can set up a discovery call in no time!