Product Collective - What is your product exactly?

Positioning your product in the minds of your customers

Whenever possible, you want your customers to have a clear idea about how your product fits in the marketplace and compares with competing products. If you don’t help them form the picture that you want them to have, they will come up with their own ideas. Here are some suggestions for helping your customers form the right idea about your product.

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What is product positioning? Product positioning is the process of determining the position of a new product in the minds of consumers. It includes analyzing the market and competitors’ positions, defining the position of a new product among the existing ones, and communicating the brand's product image. The folks from Send Pulse discuss the importance of product positioning, its benefits, several strategies, explore the steps to positioning your product, and see several examples.

(via @SendPulseCom)

A quickstart guide to positioning. April Dunford wrote a high-level introduction to the product positioning ideas in her book, Obviously Awesome. If you're wondering if the book is for you, this is a good place to start. The book gets into additional details about how to execute the methodology, how positioning changes in new versus existing markets and how you can take advantage of trends. That said, April’s article is a pretty good summary of the main positioning concepts.

(via @aprildunford)

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Productboard's annual Product Excellence Summit is right around the corner! Learn how Dylan Field, CEO & Co-Founder at Figma, Rachel Obstler, VP of Product at Heap, and many others are building customer-driven products, transforming their organizations, and accelerating the pace of product innovation.

Virtual Events are Here to Stay

Just last week, we held our third Virtual event since the beginning of 2020 – and it was an awesome two days of learning, networking, and fun. Heck, we even aired a unique spoken word performance from Emmy-award-winning filmmaker, Chris Webb, all about the life of a Product Manager (which you can catch right here!). Of course, we’re excited about what 2022 will bring – and we’re hosting two in-person events next year – the New York Product Conference (April 7th) and the return of the in-person edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference (September 20-21). 

But with the return of in-person events, does this mean that virtual events are going to the wayside? The market sure doesn’t think so. 

Just two months ago, the virtual events platform Hopin (which we run our virtual events on) raised an eye-popping $450M. It’s especially notable considering its more modest $6.5M seed round took place less than two years ago. 

But Hopin isn’t the only virtual events company to find massive support from investors. Companies like Bizzabo and (just this week) Hubilo have also raised 9-figure investment rounds – with so many new competitors sprouting nearly every week.

While these investors are betting real money on the fact that virtual events aren’t going to be a passing fad only relevant in these COVID-times. At this past INDUSTRY Virtual, we heard similar sentiments from our attendees. Many let us know that they couldn’t wait to be back at INDUSTRY in-person (and believe us, we can’t wait to have you back!). But others urged us to make our virtual events a permanent fixture. For many, making multiple trips to various conferences just isn’t possible. It’s not an “either-or” choice for them. Our virtual edition may be the only way they’d experience INDUSTRY.  

So while we’re so excited to get to see everybody in person soon enough, we’re also bullish on the value that virtual events will continue to bring – not just ours, but throughout the entire events landscape.

What about you? Do you plan to continue to experience certain virtual events – even when things feel more like the “good old days?” @ me and let me know – I’m curious!

Deploying and Scaling Analytics That Get Adopted

3 Product positioning and branding failures: What NOT to do. Shopify defines product positioning as “a form of marketing that presents the benefits of your product to a particular target audience.” In B2B SaaS, product positioning is the market fit part of finding product-market fit (the first step before ensuring product-market-price fit). There are many ways to do product positioning right, but it can be instructive to see how product position goes bad. Margaret Kelsey takes a look at three ways product positioning can go totally upside-down.

(via @OpenViewVenture)

12 Examples of positioning statements & how to craft your own.  A positioning statement is a brief description of a product or service and target market, and how the product or service fills a particular need of the target market. Positioning statements are used to describe how your product or service fills a need of your target market or persona. They're a must-have for any positioning strategy because they create a clear vision for your brand. Meredith Hart explains how to build your own positioning statement and provides some examples to help you out.

(via @meredithlhart)

Top tips to improve your product positioning strategy.  Positioning is not simply a marketing strategy. It should provide the foundation for your overall business strategy. You need to know your target audience and position your brand in a way that both caters to and is appealing for a certain segment in the market. Positioning is a brand’s unique way of providing value to its customers and a successful product positioning strategy relies on a deep understanding of the marketplace that it wants to compete in. Makayla Bowler provides five top tips on how to develop and maintain a clear positioning strategy, which is both sustainable and recognizable to potential customers.

(via @PLEDalliance)

In the early days of launching a product, it's important to set your product and team up to scale. To do that, though, it's important to build a culture that supports scale. Introducing product discipline in areas such as research, data, and user feedback is critical. We'll be discussing all of this, and more — plus, you'll have a chance to ask your own questions about what it means to scale product culture.

Great product people are attracted to great organizations for a number of reasons — but oftentimes, it's a strong culture that keeps employees engaged and motivated. At a company like The Home Depot — an organization that has successfully navigated a major digital transformation over the last several years — it's especially critical. In this fireside chat with two product leaders from The Home Depot, you'll learn:

• Why a strong product culture really matters.
• What you can do as an individual contributor to help shape a product culture.
• What product management looks like at a Fortune 18 company.
• You'll also have a chance to ask questions of your own as well — so come ready to interact!

This session is sponsored by our friends at The Home Depot.