Stop competing on features, focus on use cases that matter
As a VC, we met a lot of teams pitching us incredible technologies powered by awesome tech teams. Perspectives of these wonderful technologies are often boundless in terms of usage, industries, client typologies, etc. In those cases, the issue is to find the winning formula, that is to address the right customers with the right value proposition. The same technology does not have the same value depending on sectors, customers or use cases. This reality can be hard to grasp for tech guys.
A great techno is definitely cool, but a great techno dedicated to limited well-chosen usage scenarii is definitely a game-changer, especially when it comes to acquiring quickly your first customers and scaling your business. That is why you should begin to work hard on the identification of your best usage scenarii before beginning selling your techno to everyone.
Well-chosen usage scenarii are user stories that relate specific types of user needs (personas), how they face them and how you’ll bring them high value.
In this article, we offer you a 4-step method to identify efficiently the most powerful usage scenarii. Keep in mind that you will need to iterate a few times to find the right formula.
→ This article was co-written with Charlotte Fanneau, Product Marketing Manager at Heuritech, an Artificial Intelligence for fashion and beauty. If you’re in a hurry, you can download the spreadsheet at the end of the article ;)
Switch from a features-based to a valued-based approach
Benefits are quite significant. In fact, it will help you achieve your product market fit but not only… Here’s a list of main payoffs :
- Pitching your company really clearly. You will move from a pitch focusing on features to a value-oriented pitch. More convincing both for your prospects and potential investors!
- Defining a common language into your company with a clear shared goal. Naming and working on your best usage scenarii will help you create cohesion and accession around a common value-oriented approach from the CEO to developers.
- Switching from a technical roadmap to a customer-focused roadmap with pragmatic offers and products that will allow you to achieve quickly significant turnover without any additional technical complexity. It will definitely help you make decisions and prioritize product developments depending on their perceived value: a key to increase your company’s performance.
When to start such an approach?
You already have a team, a mock-up, a product starter, one or two customers and you need to know how to focus on your product development, marketing and sales efforts in a consistent way to capture growth. This template is dedicated to you: a quick method to find your product market fit and to design your offer.
We frequently encounter 2 different ways to choose use cases to address and build a roadmap:
Reactive: analyse the customers insights you get from your sales team ;
Exploratory: Interview potential customers on different scenarii identified in advance.
Our intention with this article is to introduce you the second method, for it is usually much more interesting for early stage, recently funded startups. If you’re in that case: take the time to think ahead and build a highly scalable product that was not created from a succession of customer insights integrated along the way. Doing so at the very beginning will allow you to deliver maximum value to as many people as possible. Hence, you will go even faster on your market later: it is a case of more haste, less speed.
Now, let’s dive into our 4-step method to identify quickly your key usage scenarii. On your mark, ready, go!
A 4-step method to identify use cases that matter
1. Explore your market and interview as many people as possible
The first part of your job is to meet many many people that could be potential customers, users, decision-makers or experts. Your goal is not to begin selling your technology but to retrieve as many information, ideas and feedback as you can.
Your job seems quite simple: ask open questions, listen carefully and take notes.
How to prepare this scoping phase. To be as methodic as possible, we recommend that you :
- Identify:
1. The key markets you want to explore ;
2. The job title you want to interview ;
3. For each job title, the pains you think they have ;
4. How you could solve this issue with your solution (one usage scenario)
5. A few usage scenarii and give them a name and a very brief description ;
Hence, you’ll be more effective in establishing initial contacts. It should be easier to identify the key interlocutors (sector, business type, team…) through Linkedin, personal network, VC network, BA network.
- Prepare an intro e-mail: “half an hour of your time to find out if we are on the wrong track or if if our product and our vision have value for you”.
- Prepare an interview guide upstream defining the timing, the objectives and the different parts of the interview (intro, Q&A, synthesis…). You may want to privilege open questions like how often does the problem occur, how much does it cost, what are you using today to solve this issue, what are the alternative solutions…
Listening will be your motto
Let’s insist on our previous point about listening. It is definitely the key of your exploratory interviews. Let your interlocutor speak a lot (really, a lot) without interrupting them.
Why?
Your perception of your interlocutors’ needs doesn’t always fit their real needs. If you talk too much, you’re going to spotlight YOUR ideas, the features that YOU think are good for your interlocutor and YOUR vision of their needs. That’s not a good thing if you want to learn from your meetings;
When your interlocutor is speaking, they use a very particular wording dedicated to their sector, their business and their job. We recommend that you take as many notes as possible on their speech. If your interlocutor agrees, you could even record them. It is always interesting to listen again. It will help you significantly become more subtile defining your scenarii, packaging your offers and interacting with prospects like a pro.
At the end of each interview, we recommend that you synthesize your discussion and highlight the main scenarii from the interview in the sheet of your template called « Interviews insights » and keep all your notes in a safe place.
At the end of this exploratory phase, you should add a column for each new scenario identified and evaluate the potential of all the scenarii for each prospect met scoring them from 0 to 1 ; 0 meaning there is no fit with the scenario and 1 meaning it’s almost sold.
For each scenario, you’ll get a score that will help you prioritize the scenarii. In theory, the higher the score is, the more you should prioritize the scenario.
2. Identify recurring scenarii and qualify them
Now you’ve completed at least 15 interviews with users, experts and decision makers. It seems that a few scenarii are quite recurring. It’s time to identify and qualify them.
We’ve built a second sheet to help you with this task. Each column corresponds to a usage scenario and rows correspond to criteria like market sizing, technical challenges or competition to fine-tune your vision of each scenario. Criteria outlined in the template are just there for inspiration, feel free to adapt them to your business.
It will help you rationalize your thinking, begin your prioritization and eliminate scenarii with lower potential because of the competition intensity or a too small market size for example.
3. Prioritize your scenarii with your team and your advisors
Prioritization will help you identify recurring scenarii with the highest potential.
It’s time to bring your entire team together to do the scoring of your usage scenarii based on your established criteria. It is very important at this stage that all the business lines are present (product, sales, marketing…) to have the richest possible vision and feedback as well as to anticipate the maximum technical and market-related risks.
Once your scenarii have been prioritized with your internal team, you can complete the last line “Resulting Prioritization” of your “Usage scenarii qualification” sheet with the choice made by the team and especially the rational rational thinking that brought you to this choice.
Finally it is interesting to present it to the board to have their validation and to confront these choices with external advisors. It will help collect their opinion and check that nothing is missing and all the risks have been anticipated.
Once usage scenarii are qualified and prioritized, it will definitely be much easier to package your offer (value proposition, website, commercial pitch, pricing…).
4. Prioritize your POCs (be selective!)
Following on your exploratory interviews, you’ll have good chances to receive a lot of requests to test your techno. Be careful, it will ask you a lot of energy to work on these projects. If you don’t want to waste too much time and money with irrelevant projects, it’s really important not to accept all of them. Prioritization is once again key.
The 3rd sheet (« POCs prioritization ») is dedicated to helping you decide whether you should accept or not a POC request. You just have to list all the POCs and evaluate their strategic value, potential, technical complexity… Evaluating these criteria will help highlight projects with the most potential for the future of your business.
What now?
Congrats, if you go through those 4 steps you should have identified usage scenarii with the high potential for your business and prospects ready to sign at least a POC contract.
Re-engage with your contacts: it is always nice at the end to re-engage with the people you met before and who have advised the scenario X to properly confirm along the way (finer specifications) that you always match their needs.
Put your scenarii to work: now is the right time to turn these large usage scenarii into different steps to be prioritized within your product roadmap. At this stage, we are talking about stories that can be related to one or more usage scenarii and given priority. A story is “I want to be able to do this and that with such an output result”.
The Product Managers then take over these stories and refine them in terms of specifications, delivery, etc. But how Product marketing managers & product managers should work together is a distinct topic.
>>> The template to defining your use cases, in an excel sheet <<<
Love,
Amélie & Sébastien
ps: if this list is helpful, don’t forget to leave us a clap ;-)
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About Serena
Founded in 2008 by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, Serena invests in bold ventures and provides them with an unrivaled level of expertise and operational support.
In just ten years, the firm has already contributed to the emergence of many success stories and has currently 40 handpicked startups in its portfolio such as Dataiku, Evaneos, Malt, iBanFirst, CybelAngel, or Lifen.
Find out more at www.serena.vc
