Adapting Product Vision and Strategy to Changing Marketing Conditions

Market conditions change by the minute—we live in a world where it is just inevitable. How do you change your product vision and strategy to take advantage of this? The reality is that if you do nothing in a changing market, you will sink. But you don’t just want to stay afloat and not sink; you want to really swim and learn to use these changing markets to your advantage.

In this guide we will address how to not only stay afloat, but how to swim and beat your product competition.

We are in a data decade. The amount of data is beyond numbers, and the speed at which the data we tracki changes is lighting fast. You must be able to innovate and foresee these changing market conditions to adapt your product vision and strategy.

Innovation sets companies apart from one another. Historically, the most innovative companies are the ones who the most successful. Those that not innovative may see short-term success, but if they do not continue to innovate, they will not see long-term success.

Here is the most important thing you need to take from this guide: market conditions are always changing, so you always need to be evolving your product vision and strategy.

Do you innovate as market conditions change? If not, you are missing out on an opportunity. These innovations help push your product vision and strategy forward and help them adapt and grow.

How can you measure whether you are evolving your product vision and strategy? There are some key ways.

• Number of Patents

• New Products or Features to Market

• New Internal Ideas Filed

• Research and Development Budget

Let's dive into each of these forms of measurement so that you can easily track pieces of your product strategy and vision.

Number of patents is a simple one. How many patents have been filed by your company or employees? Setting a goal for this is key. If you are going to evolve your product vision, you must have new and innovative ideas. If patents are being filed, you know that the ideas are innovative and unique.

New products and features to market are also extremely measurable to ensure you are evolving your product vision. How many new products do you bring to market, and how many new features are you adding to existing products? This will vary for each company and is proportional to company size. For example, if you have one product line, you are going to bring fewer products to market than if you have ten product lines, but it’s more important to look at the percentage over what you currently have. If you have one product in market and you bring that up to three, that means you have tripled in size. But if you have 100 products currently and you bring two new products to market, that is not a great percentage of growth for this measure.

New ideas filed refers to a way employees can bring ideas to the company. You should have an internal system in which ideas can be entered so you can easily measure these new ideas. These don’t always get to market right away, but it is good what to track what is coming down the pipeline. You should be looking at these ideas for up-and-coming innovations and ensure you are applying these to your product vision and strategy.

Research and development budgets put your money where your mouth is and are commonly referred to as "R and D". What do you do with all your new ideas and patents? You have to have the budget to innovate once an idea is born, and setting an amount for R and D will help measure this. Using these budgets to adapt your vision and strategy is important.

We have discussed innovation, how markets are changing, and that companies need to ensure that products need to innovate their strategy and vision. But how do you align these two?

It’s important to innovate with market conditions, and it’s important to track innovation, but these two must align. For example, if you make shoes and the market is trending toward open-toed shoes, but all your patents, R and D, and new ideas are for closed-toed shoes, that is a problem. It’s great you are innovating, but it needs to apply to market trends. I am using shoes as an example, but this can really be used for any industry.

You must first understand and discover changing market conditions and where the market is heading and then make sure your measures of evolving your product strategy match that. If the market is moving toward open-toed shoes, then you should make sure your new ideas, new products, and R and D are around open-toed shoes. You have to align these metrics with your market.

Innovation and evolution of product vision and strategy are key. Understanding changing market conditions is key. These must align.

You must ensure that you are continuing to innovate at a product and company level, but also that the innovation is aligned with market conditions.

This will ensure you are prepared for what your customers want as the market changes.