Could an “Experiment Roadmap” help guide your Innovation?
Daniel Elizalde, B2B Innovation Expert and Product Advisor
Product-Market fit is often held up as a key milestone that new products and services need to achieve. But is it clear what it is? Or is it fuzzy? How do you get there? And how do you know you have achieved it?
The lack of clarity and need for better approaches to get there is the position of B2B Innovation Expert Daniel Elizalde, our guest for Episode #3. There are various definitions for product-market fit such as “the degree to which a customer or market need can be satisfied by a suitable product or solution.” Daniel believes that the search can quickly become a moving target, and organizations often struggle to find agreement around the concept.
Instead, Daniel advocates a different approach to innovation—one that initially involves an “experiment” roadmap that takes you from the initial idea to your first 10 customers. Using an experiment roadmap at that initial stage, rather than a fully-fledged product roadmap, allows you to test your assumptions and identify what your customers really want based on research and feedback from those first 10 customers.
Who is Daniel Elizalde?
Daniel Elizalde is an innovation coach who works with B2B companies to take their ideas from conception to commercialisation. He has worked in technology for over 20 years in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, aerospace, energy, semiconductors, and telecommunications. He also served as Vice President and Head of IoT for Erricson, and he teaches IoT product management at Stanford University.
“In my view of things, When you get to a product [roadmap], it’s because you have a certain idea or a certain validation that what you are actually going to invest engineering cycles on, [and it] is something that the customer would be willing to pay for.”
Daniel is also the author of the forthcoming B2B Innovator’s Map, which covers many of the topics we delve into throughout our discussion.
Simply put, he knows his stuff. And in this conversation, we cover a range of topics surrounding innovation, new product idea validation, and the role roadmaps play in all of it.
Setting the stage for market-driven innovation
Daniel and I discussed how building a digital product is extremely complex, especially for enterprise B2B, and it’s difficult to visualise what it will come to look like in its later stages. The product roadmap is designed to anchor that vision down and identify what you’re building, but that can only happen once you’ve got a fully validated idea. For Daniel, it’s the experiment roadmap that gets you there.
One reason product is so challenging is that innovation, which is all about delivering new value to your customers, comes in a variety of forms. Daniel explains that it’s not just about features—innovation can mean introducing a product that:
● Positions itself differently than others on the market
● Employs a different pricing strategy than the current market leaders
● Offers unique functionality that sets it apart
● Targets specific verticals
● Stands out, in one of a countless variety of ways, to solve an unaddressed problem
““[When we’re] saying our goal is to get to market fit, it’s really hard to have milestones [and] know progress. That’s why I advocate, instead, for a concrete milestone of [the] first 10 customers, [You can] say to your executive team, ‘In this stage, our goal is to do all these different things, and when we get to 10 [customers] we can reevaluate what our next steps will be.’”
It’s an experiment roadmap, designed to help you learn from your first 10 customers, that helps you answer these questions.
Should you invest in infrastructure? Should you pull the plug on certain features? How should you start scaling? All these questions become much more concrete, Daniel contends, when you’ve used that experiment roadmap to understand your first 10 customers.
What are some other key takeaways from Episode #3?
- It’s important to narrow your roadmap down to a specific target audience—especially in the beginning
- Junior PMs are tied too much to the agile methodology and focus on a bunch of little features and minutia
- At the early adopter stage, consider the internal tools your team needs to deploy, deliver, and operate for those customers
- The product roadmap at the strategic level that is owned by the CPO, and as it cascades down to different levels, you’ll increasingly add detail
- Think about the internal tools that your team will need to deploy, deliver, and operate that customer.
Curious to learn more? Watch Episode #3
Is 10 customers too many?
One question I posed to Daniel during our discussion was whether 10 customers is a large number in certain industries, where the total number of enterprise customers is small. Daniel agreed that in some industries, such as the automotive industry, the threshold could be much lower.
The principle, however, remains the same regardless of the industry! Building a truly innovative B2B product that successfully serves the market requires a clear understanding of the problem you intend to solve for your customers. An experiment roadmap just might get you there!
