UEV Templates for Events and General Guidance
Product and technology strategies come in many flavors, but in general, they all seek to enable the business strategy as described by the overall value proposition (i.e., your pitch and solution) and the GTM/Sales strategy. The following are details for you to consider which will help you define your product and technology strategy and structure a quick presentation to explain.
If you only have time or capacity for one, or if you are not technical and there isn’t a technical person on your team, focus on Product Strategy. Also, this is a good deal more detail than you will likely have time to think about during a competition event. This is guidance not instruction.
Product Strategy
What it’s not (or at least, not only):
A list of features you think are cool.
A UX mockup.
Your pitch deck.
Your back story.
Your user story backlog.
What it is or should include:
A timeline of what you’re trying to accomplish and why.
Based on evidence, not just personal experience.
Flexible in the face of new evidence.
Your prioritized product milestones described as high level themes or epics.
For each theme/epic you must be able to answer these questions, which define priority:
Who is this for?
Does this increase the value of the product?
How much effort is it to build this (tech strategy tie-in)?
Will customers pay more for this or is this table stakes, value add?
Has anyone explicitly asked for this?
Is there a window of opportunity to deliver this?
Additional questions you should be prepared to answer:
How long will it take you to deliver your MVP and start onboarding customers?
How many prospective users did you speak with before deciding on these features, or if you haven’t yet, how will you find prospective users and how many will you target to get their input?
For your prospective users, what did you ask them or do you plan to ask them?
How do the features of this product directly address the problem your solution solves?
What is your product onboarding strategy?
What is your product monetization strategy?
What are the top 3 most important features you need to launch? And what makes these most important?
What UX considerations are you considering for your specific ICP – what do they need to be successful?
Which is the least necessary feature epic/theme on your list, and why is it on the list?
Does your product require third-party licensing of any kind – meaning does it have as a dependency an external product you don’t own?
Is your product a convenience wrapper on existing AI LLMs GPT or does it offer specific unique functionality that is augmented by LLM technology? Can you explain?
Does your product have regulatory or other data security/privacy concerns?
What don’t you know about the solution yet?
Technology Strategy
What it’s not:
• A list of technical tools, stacks, or concepts.
• Bleeding edge for the sake of being cool.
• A diagram of AWS or GCP logos.
• Agnostic of the business needs.
What it is:
A high-level overview of the components of the solution that need to be built and how they connect to each other. Keep it simple, boxes and lines.
Aligned to the business themes and epics. There should be a clear line from what and why you’re building to how you’re building – there should not be a “how” when there isn’t a “what/why”.
A practical solution driven and constrained by the business need. For example:
If the business is selling to the SMB, your technology may not need redundant failovers and disaster recovery, but if it’s to the enterprise, these are non-starters.
If the business is only ramping to a few thousand users in the first 18 months, you can focus on functionality over scalability. If you plan to scale more than that, you need to pay attention to performance.
Never spend more than you must to accomplish the business goal.
Costs centric – it should have estimates of the cost per month for resources and infrastructure.
Pragmatic technology choices. It should consider cost of developers, AI, and business goals when choosing technology stacks and integrations.
For example, Golang is a powerful and highly performant technology stack that very few developers have expertise in as compared to a stack like Node.js. That makes Golang an expensive choice, and so you must ask why you need it if a more accessible and affordable solution is “good enough”.
It should show all third-party integrations and dependencies.
Additional questions you should be prepared to answer:
Is data security a concern and if so, how is it addressed?
Will you need SOC, HIPAA, or other certifications?
What do you expect your ballpark per quarter costs to be in terms of people and infrastructure for next year?
Do you know how to build this or is there a research element built into your plan?
What is your stack of choice and why?
What is the most complicated part of the product for you to build and why?
Where do you need help?