Product-Market dimensions
I use the following dimensions to map out the different characteristics of product and market in an exhaustive way. This mapping helps me structure a Go-to-Market strategy including positioning, messaging, value propositions, and more.
- Champion: a person who actually cares about the pain you solve
- Organization: the company or organization that you target as a customer
- Context: what causes them to approach the task-at-hand
- Task-at-hand: the job they are trying to do and is a potential use case for your product
- Current way: how they are doing the job now
- Limitation: the limitation encountered doing the job
- Pain: the problem caused by the limitation
- Category: the kind of product you are in the mind of your audience
- Feature: a concrete functionality of the product
- Capability: an ability unlocked by using the product
- Benefit: the business outcome of using the product
How reality maps to Product-Market dimensions
Your prospect exists without you
When you look at your prospects (those who are not yet customers), you can think of them in the following terms:
“Champion” at “Organization” is in a certain “Context” and has a certain “Task-at-hand”. They try to “Current way” using “Category”. Because of “Limitation” they experience a certain “Pain”.
With all this in mind, your prospect will be looking for:
- A better product in “Category”
- A better way to perform the “Task-at-hand”
- Removing the “Limitation” they face
- Gaining a “Capability”
- Resolving their “Pain”
- Reaching a “Benefit”
Getting your prospect to engage with you
When you present your value, you can think of your narrative in the following terms:
As a “Category”, your product brings “Benefits” (that address “Pains”) through “Capabilities” (that neutralize “Limitations”) delivered through “Features”.
This is your value proposition: the intersection between your prospect and you. Your prospects learns about your value proposition through your positioning and messaging.
If what they learn about you relates to what they are looking for, they will engage with you.
Mapping out your product-market fit
It is useful to keep track of your current understanding of each box and update this snapshot every time you learn something new or update your strategy.
Not all dimensions may be defined
At any point in time, only some of the dimensions may be defined and clearly stated. Especially in an early stage, it’s possible that some dimensions are very clear (often features, capabilities), while others haven’t been identified yet (often champion, organization).
You may have multiple combinations of these dimensions
You may have different types of champions, problems, matching capabilities, and so on.
A typical example are companies that have multiple products or multiple value propositions (i.e. the same product sold to to different people to solve different problems). In this case, you may have multiple combinations of these dimensions.
In such cases, it is beneficial to also have an “umbrella strategy” which logically groups all the value propositions in a higher-level go-to-market.
Definition your positioning
You should choose which dimensions you are using as anchors for your positioning. Your messaging will be based on them and will help your audience get an immediate idea of you and why you are relevant to them.
Not all dimensions are good anchors for your positioning
Although it’s good to map all of these to have a complete internal picture of your market and your product, not all are a good choice when it comes to providing anchors for your audience.
For example, Problems and Benefits are most of the time too high-level to show your differentiated value. Every product out there can easily promise the same. Also, people rarely shop for benefits. They will do their own analysis and shop for the capabilities they believe they need. If you use Benefits as an anchor, make sure you choose concrete, relatable benefits and not high-level business KPIs such as “making more revenue” or “saving costs”.
In general and especially at early stages, you should choose dimensions that:
- Are the clearest possible to your audience;
- Make your uniquess clear.
Not all dimensions are required for your positioning
You do not need to have all these dimensions clear, and you especially don’t need all of them to come up with a working positioning (i.e. with the most effective anchors for your audience).
What you need is at least:
- Something related to your market, so that the person will find you relevant
- Something related to your product, so that the person will understand how you can help them
Capabilities are usually a good choice. They are close enough to your product to make your diffentiated value evident and they are relatable to an interested audience. They are also usually clear even before you consolidated your product-market fit.
Examples of how to use anchors in your homepage’s hero:
- “The email protection tool for the public sector” (Category + Organization)
- “For founders to accelerate product-market-fit” (Champion + Capability)