Startups- Strategic & Experimental mode

At the beginning of my career as a Product Manager, I was introduced to the concept of lean startup. Later, this approach helps me to realize how the startup can easily and efficiently implement the product strategy which is very important in their long-term growth. While speaking on product strategy with startups founders and aspiring entrepreneurs in technology, rarely I found they see the potential of defining the strategy that realizes the vision of the product in the beginning. However, more than anything, product strategy is important to understand the problem-solution fit, product-market fit and scalability. Number projections, go to market strategy to TAM/SOM/SAM should come much later step when startups fully convinced with the problem-solution fit. Ultimately, it ensures not to force the product on customers, but attract them to like your product in less effort and investment.
This article will help mostly two types of startup founders- one that has already a solution ready and looking for their product-market fit and another is who is in the process of ideating and building a product. The first one is something like asking the user to solve their problem as the product wants. In this case, where potential risk is so high and thus chances to fail. However, the right alignment of product strategy, experiment and success measure helps fail faster or succeed faster without wasting much effort/money and time. Additionally, through small experiments, startups may able to find the product-market fit and scalability during ideation phases. Around 60% of the time the startups’ owners should spend in building the right strategy and running small experiments like wizard of oz or concierge testing to di-risking the assumptions. Studies show that more than 90% time many startups invest in ideating the product, however, it is equally important to get quick feedback from the customer and that is possible when the strategy is aligned with the experiments and success measure. To conclude, a vision, goals, strategies define the build measure and learn to incorporate the success or failure of a startup quickly.
You can see to solve the right problem is key as given in the example. Connecting dots will easily help you to visualize how to implement this in your space.

Get in touch to discuss more on onboarding your startup. I help startups defining their product strategy to fail faster to succeed faster in advance and keep ready the startup launchpad.