The Product Success Statement

The Product Success Statement is a method to help you define the desired outcome (or outcomes) of your plan. If you recall in my previous post, Success First, Roadmap Second, I stated that for you to effectively document a roadmap (i.e. your plan / strategy) you needed to understand what it means to be successful.

I have based the Product Success Statement concept on the Customer Success Statement concept found here: “The Customer Success Statement” by Bennu Group. The core idea behind this concept is to start with the output of the chain – the successful customer outcome. The Customer Success Statement method will be a great addition to your user scenarios methods. The Bennu Group outlines five directives when defining a customer success statement:

1. Use action statements when describing the customer success statement
2. Clearly define the beginning and the end of the experience from the customer point of view
3. Include a statement for ALL points where the customer touches the business
4. Make sure to consider time
5. Also consider the number of customer actions

To craft your Product Success Statement, you can start by replacing the word customer in the five directives with product to help you structure your statements. Simple enough. Let’s work through a very simple example. To start, we need to identify the primary driver for our product. Fortunately, our newly minted company, Tunes Inc. is guided by the following business driver: registering new users. Using this, we can start to apply the directives to our new Product Success Statement for our fake product, Mytune.

Mytune Product Success Statement

On March 30th, Mytune has 145 registered users, of which 132 have been active within the last 15 days.  Over the next 365 days, following the corporate business driver of registering new users, Mytune will grow to 25,000 registered users with 22,000 of them active within the previous 15 days.

This statement has an action statement – grow, defines the beginning and end, highlights how the product is going to improve the business, considers a timeframe and in this example only has one action. Additionally, I think it is important that you have done sufficient research to support your statement. Perhaps this example is too simple, but it helps with deciding which features are on the roadmap and when.

In closing, you will likely have many success statements to support many initiatives and your strategy can and will change over time, but remember that if it changes your definition of success may also change.