AMA: Matterport VP of Product, Preethy Vaidyanathan on Product Strategy

Key steps to plan external releases and to make them successful: align on cadence, release themes and map features and outcomes to releases. Align on cadence: * Start by understanding external requirements specific to your product category. Consider industry events, conferences, or seasonal needs (e.g., travel or shopping seasons). * Determine the number of releases based on your company’s needs. For instance, Airbnb follows a summer and winter release schedule (two releases per year), while others may align with quarterly cycles. Align on release theme: * While internal teams drive the release, always keep the customer in mind. Start by defining the customer benefits and value that each release will unlock. * Create a compelling narrative around why customers should pay attention to your release. Map features to release: * Connect customer and business outcomes to specific features. Work closely with your product development process to map features to each release. * If you’re using agile methodology, releases provide an opportunity to showcase and spotlight features for your customers. Remember, successful external releases involve collaboration, customer-centricity, and strategic planning.

Product team should have the ability to collect idea inputs. Idea generation can come from everywhere including * Customers (both existing and potential) * Internal teams (product development, sales, marketing, customer support, customer success, sales engineering and more) * External entities like industry experts, competitors, technology trends etc The key role for product team is to distill the ideas and decide * What problems to address * Prioritization order * Implementation approach (working with design and engineering) * Positioning of the offering (in collaboration with GTM teams) Having a well defined product vision helps prioritize what to build and in what order of sequence. Use clear customer and business goals as your guide. Align features to outcomes, create a feedback loop for testing assumptions and refining prioritization decisions.

Three dimensions of product investment strategy to consider for market leaders: * Sustaining your core differentiation for your target customer group * Creating an environment to expand customers or use cases * Groundwork for strategic disruption Lets review these three dimensions in detail: * Core differentiation for customer engagement and retention: * Protect your core product-market fit * Measure new product launches against customer and business engagement KPIs * Continue to also review existing feature engagement * Monitor key health metrics on a weekly, monthly cadence (e.g., feature adoption rate, weekly/monthly active users, time spent on the platform, activation rate like free-to-paid, upsell, retention rate etc) * Customer expansion: * Prioritize expanding within your core customer group with the highest product-market fit * Thoughtfully invest in strategic expansion. Some examples include: * Explore the same customer segment in different geographic regions * Identify new use cases for your current customer base * Consider expanding to new customer groups (e.g., SMB vs. enterprise, different verticals) * Groundwork for future strategic expansion: * This typically needs to be internally driven because your customers will likely not ask for this * Think of this group as projects you will undertake that could potentially disrupt yourself * Example: Netflix transitioning from DVD rentals to streaming, playing offense as a category leader Based on your company stage, a 70/20/10 type investment structure can guide allocation and prioritization.