Product strategy is the process of defining and communicating how a company’s products or services will meet customer needs and achieve business goals. A successful product strategy requires careful planning, market analysis, and customer research. In this blog post, we’ll explore the role of market research in strategic planning and how to create a winning product strategy. What is Market Research? Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about a market, including customers, competitors, and industry trends. It helps companies understand customer needs and prefere ..read more

First, let us say that we at Craft.io are fans of Southwest Airlines. The company has been a technology pioneer for decades, and many of its ingenious business practices have forced other airlines to improve as well. Just a few of Southwest’s innovations over the years include: Using only one type of aircraft fleetwide (which simplified maintenance and lowered costs). Flying point-to-point instead of the traditional hub model (which enabled faster and more convenient travel for customers). Offering the industry’s first electronic (ticketless) travel on every flight — an enormous time- and pap ..read more

You don’t earn both the International SaaS Award for “Best Enterprise-Level SaaS Product” and G2’s “Best Est. ROI” badge just a few months apart unless you listen to your users and  continuously make your solution more valuable for them. But we recently won both of these awards (and several others) for our product management platform. Already the most complete solution of its kind for Product Managers and Product Leaders, we added even more value for our users in just the last few months of 2022. So, whether you’re looking for a product management solution for your enterprise or for your ..read more

What’s Your Product Portfolio Management Methodology Today? If you’re a product leader at a large company managing multiple product lines, you know you need visibility across your teams to ensure you have all the necessary information to make the best possible strategic decisions for the business. Every product organization has some process for managing their portfolio of products and initiatives. But unfortunately, because the industry has historically lacked a solution specifically designed with Product Portfolio Management in mind, most product executives have faced challenges in effectivel ..read more

Product roadmapping is awesome. That’s a fact, and it’s not up for debate. Also, saying that is a super sophisticated way to start a blog post.   Roadmapping gives you a chance to visualize your product strategy, see how all the important pieces fit together, and tap into the knowledge of the stakeholders you share it with — who might spot a strategic oversight or timeline conflict that you missed.   That’s why police detectives (at least on TV) post everything related to the case on a whiteboard: pictures, maps, notes, org charts showing the crime family’s hierarchy, and lines conne ..read more

A properly developed and shared product roadmap can add massive value to an organization — and provide a big boost to the product’s chances for success. When built and shared the right way, a roadmap can align key participants across the company around a shared set of goals and plans. It can build stakeholder enthusiasm for the product. And it can help ensure everyone is steering in the same strategic direction.   But roadmapping is a challenging process. Product Managers often fall into one or more of the many pitfalls that can undermine a roadmap’s strategic value. In this post, we’ll r ..read more

If you’re like most Product Managers, chances are you’re spending far too much time tending to your product roadmaps.    We’re not referring here to roadmapping in the strategic sense: reviewing your product roadmap, weighing priorities, making adjustments to timelines, updating strategic goals, discussing capacity levels with your teams, etc. That’s time well spent and there are no shortcuts for the decision-making that is exclusively yours.   We’re talking about the tedious side of working on your roadmaps. Moving and resizing text boxes. Reducing font sizes to accommodate new ..read more

One reason product management is such a difficult profession is that you are responsible for the success of your products, but you don’t have authority over most of the people whose help you need to bring about that success. So it all comes down to your persuasion skills.   To illustrate some of the challenges Product Managers face in persuading coworkers and decision-makers, try this hypothetical.   Imagine you’re preparing for a meeting with all of your key stakeholders: VPs of Development, Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing, along with the CTO and CEO. Your goal is to ..read more

Product Managers deserve a purpose-built, end-to-end solution designed just for them   Given how much value product teams can contribute to a company’s bottom line—in terms of making smarter decisions about what to build, and keeping the organization aligned around a shared set of strategic goals—finding the right product management software is a critical step in the path to company success. But which solution should organizations choose for their product teams?   The international judging panel at the 2022 SaaS Awards just offered their opinion, naming Craft.io’s end-to-end product ..read more

With the phrase “product-led growth” popping up so often in business conversations these days, you’d think we would all have a shared understanding of what the concept means. But I’ve heard and read the product-led approach described differently many times. That’s unfortunate, and here’s why.   I’m seeing a lot of product teams get overwhelmed and lost in the details of the product-led growth (PLG) approach. And the fact that PLG generally describes strategies taken by SaaS companies also creates a second challenge. Many organizations in other industries assume the framework is not releva ..read more