How can you narrow down countless product possibilities to find your winning concept?
In Part 1 of Honing your initial product direction, we explored how to use benefit statements to filter your product ideas. In Part 2, we'll dive into creating landing page copyframes and product wireframes - powerful tools that will help you refine your product concept and validate your ideas with potential customers.
If you're ready to turn your ideas into a validated product roadmap, this post is for you. Let's continue the journey towards finding your optimal early product direction.
The goal if this step is to gain the insights you need to whittle down the few most compelling product directions to a single concept that you can explore more deeply. It starts with refining your core concepts, continues with structuring each concept as a landing page copyframe, and ends with testing each copyframe with potential customers.
Through benefit statement testing, you’ll find some ideas resonate with customers, while others don’t. Customer feedback will help you develop new ideas and iterate on existing ideas; continue testing these updates if they seem worthy of pursuit. And you can stop testing individual concepts once you heard a sufficiently clear negative reaction.
You’re working to narrow down to about three concepts. But this doesn’t necessarily mean three benefit statements. Often times, you’ll find from your interviews that some benefits are dependent on other ideas. So you’ll need to be pragmatic in finding the smallest scope of product that could solve a sufficiently meaningful customer problem. Including too many benefits will dilute your message and make it difficult to deliver in the short term.
Continue testing and iterating on your benefit statements until you can narrow to about three core concepts that you want to pursue more deeply.
Deciding which core opportunities to focus on is a gut feeling, not a science. It’s based on your situation and risk tolerance — ideally a decision made with your fellow cofounders.
Narrowing your core concepts should also create clarity on a more specific target customer profile, with each core opportunity targeted at a specific customer type based on what you learned through benefit statement testing. You should use this to apply this narrower filter when recruiting for subsequent customer interviews.
Finally, I find it helpful to write out 1-2 sentences in plain language (not for showing potential customers) explaining what each core idea means to me. This should make the distinction between core ideas clear, and help you stay true to the core idea in the next step.
Once you have your top three concepts, get ready to present them to your target customers. The way prefer to do this is by using landing page copyframes, because these simulate how a prospective customer might hear about your product for the first time.
A Landing Page Copyframe is a landing page wireframe that focuses on a few key pieces of high-quality copy, with minimal emphasis on design fidelity and customization. With it, you’ll apply a basic landing page design template to each core concept and swap out the copy and relevant (basic) imagery.
Structure each core concept with a headline explaining the overall product, followed by 3-5 value propositions. Each should be as clear an concise as possible. Think of the headline as the summary and the value propositions as the evidence that your product will deliver the headline (such as key features and explanations of how it works).
If your concepts are similar enough, you might reuse a few value propositions across different concepts. This isn’t a problem as long as each core concept aims to solve a different overall problem or to solve the problem in a different way. However, if there’s too much overlap, it might indicate that the concepts should be merged.
Aside from the copy, keep as much as possible the same between the concepts. Big differences between colors, fonts, information hierarchy, and imagery, could all unintentionally skew the feedback from interviewees. For example, I like to stick to basic images from a free icon library like the Noun project to provide visuals next to each value proposition. These make the landing page look more realistic without distracting too much from the copy.