What goes on to become a product in an organization? How do we approach designing these products and what’s the right approach? Who is eligible for designing products that will solve business problems and what are the skill-sets required to design such products?

My experiments in ideation and feedback based thought process gives these important learning:

No one else knows the problem better than you do, and there will be loss of importance/urgency or key insights while transferring the business problem feedback onto an external product team

– one would need to begin with defining the client side bottlenecks that the product solves along with the revenue opportunity that it solves for you

– one has to map the product-function versus the brand-function and the derivative of this relationship for different scenarios that the product would address

– you can’t directly attempt to design the complete product. So approach the product by creating special-purpose-vehicle (SPV) and let the SPV evolve into a full fledged product

Sales folks can be the best guys to figure out client side bottlenecks and revenue generation issues due to these bottlenecks.The bottlenecks can be perceptions against the existing offerings, money/budget, measurability, or even the complex decision making system for B2B deals.

If the sales people are empowered with SPVs and they take these up as side/special projects, defining the product functions and the derivative brand-function that’s addressed through the SPV, then there is a great opportunity for the SPV to take care of client bottlenecks as well as revenue generating challenges.

The SPV’s core is formed by the definitions that would solve the problems that can’t be addressed by the product or services sales-reps are selling. That happens because current products, while still being relevant, may not have all the answers for the entire spectrum of clients prospected in the market.

SPV allows sales reps to constantly innovate components of the product and brand definition, and since the SPV is not meant for a mass market, the sales-rep can actually price the SPV deliverable at a very competitive level so that the client experience isn’t stymied.

SPVs can be created for any domain by any sales rep who may not be actually responsible for that market or domain. For example, a domestic sales rep can very much build an international market SPV, and successfully evolve that into a product.

The culture support that sales reps need for such SPVs is from their Sales VP or Senior Sales managers, who are themselves involved in the work for each SPV and nurture the discussions and thought processes for each sales rep and their respective SPV. A point to note here, that all SPV are revenue generating ideas that have only “existed” because of a business side bottleneck that can’t be solved by the scope of current products of the company.

The SPV model has given me couple of B2B solutions/products already that are generating great reviews from amongst the clients themselves. Which means that it has been successful in solving the bottlenecks that these clients envisaged in my services before this and therefore revenue generation will also follow this trend.

Special purpose vehicles are the answer to the impending issue of product development by sales reps or marketing professionals. It needs a lot of reading in product dev, designs, models, behavior, and mapping all these into the idea or SPV for a given bottleneck or domain.

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