Whether you’re a fintech startup looking to take advantage of an emerging opportunity, or an established company seeking to expand your fintech product suite, successful innovation is the key to future growth. But how can you pursue potentially impactful new product initiatives when your lean, high performing team barely has sufficient resources to execute on your current business? Introducing Product Discovery as a Service, a proven approach that enables companies to quickly and cost-effectively discover, evaluate, and build a strategy to execute on fintech product opportunities.
Through my work with the Fintech Strategy Group, I’ve assisted a wide range of clients who have been struggling with the same challenge – they see a potential opportunity in the market, but don’t have the resources to determine whether it’s worth pursuing and then build a customer-oriented product strategy. I’ve helped these clients with three key product discovery activities: evaluating customer needs, assessing the market opportunity, and identifying synergies with their existing technology and product suite.
Evaluating Customer Needs
A fundamental piece of any product discovery exercise, voice-of-customer research helps identify relevant customer behavior and aligns the product vision with the needs of target users. I’ve found that conducting structured one-on-one interviews with existing or potential customers is an essential step to uncover and validate existing pain points as well as evaluate potential product and positioning concepts. I’ve also utilized quantitative survey research to help validate (or refute!) potential features and concepts in a more statistically significant, albeit lower fidelity, approach.
Assessing Market Opportunity
No product is launched in a vacuum, and understanding the current state of the market landscape is critical to identify and evaluate market opportunities that can be addressed through product innovation. Depending on the nature of the initiative, this phase may include an evaluation of key market trends, analysis of the competitive landscape, and / or product teardowns of competitive offerings.
Aligning Product and Technology Assets
An effective product strategy also needs to take into account a company’s existing assets to drive synergies and leverage current strengths. This alignment cuts across a range of potential considerations, such as potentially unique access to customer data, regulatory licenses that may be used in new use cases, distribution channels that could open up adjacent areas of opportunity, or current technical capabilities that could be extended, among other elements. Identifying these assets, and determining how they might factor into a new product strategy are critical inputs to building and launching a successful product.
Product Discovery as a Service is an effective and proven approach to help clients accelerate their fintech product initiatives by allowing them to evaluate and scope the potential opportunity before dedicating scarce resources. By bringing extensive product management experience from leading companies such as PayPal, MasterCard and Payoneer, the Fintech Strategy Group has worked with clients across the globe to build and launch a range of successful consumer and B2B products.