Everyone believes that their product has a few strengths, This is the set of things that your product does better than anything else out there. If you didn’t you wouldn’t be building it right? But do you really know what those strengths are?
The reality is that you have very little to do with what your true product strengths are. True product strengths (or TPS for office space fans out there) is really defined in the intersection of what you do well and how customers use the product you sell them.
On the left side you see “Employee Talents”. This is what you are good at building and what you may currently be defining your product strengths as. On the right side you see customer usage. This is how your customers are using the product you sell. In the middle is your TPS… this is the set of things that you really do excel at that combines the two.
Strength based product development would be a set of practices that focus on growing the True Product Strengths intersection by focusing on them. A very simplified set of practices could be incorporated into any development methodology:
- Self Evaluation – Always re-evaluate your employee talents, what you are good at building, and define the list on the left hand side.
- Customer Listening – Working with your customers to identify what parts of your product they really love and leverage you for.
- Create your TPS Report – Create the unison (TPS).
- Prioritize the TPS items in your development.
It’s not rocket science and any good company is doing at least #1 or #2, but doing it right involves combining the two into step 3.
The side effect of doing this right… You will stop focusing on your weaknesses and your requirements become absolutely clear. Other than baseline requirements for all products like security, performance, etc you are wasting time you spend not focusing on TPS. Features & requirements that don’t focus on TPS will only frustrated your teams since they aren’t good at delivering those things and your customers will complain they get things they don’t need to pay for.
Executing strength based development properly will result in growing the true strengths of your product, employees will love working on things they are good at, and customers will be delighted that you are delivering more of the things they already love about your product.