AMA: Shopify Senior Product Lead, Lizzy Masotta on Product Differentiation

There are 2 exercises I use to evaluate bringing differentiation into the products I'm building. What sucks? User value mapping Where they originated I came up with these frameworks in collaboration with Paul Pedrazzi (SVP, Salesforce) while we were working on a 0 → 1 product for small business. We repeatedly re-visited the artifacts of these exercises throughout the product development lifecycle. What sucks? What the outcome will be A list of the Top 3 issues for your target user. How to do it ...Read More

I love this question. Through my work at both Salesforce and Shopify this is something that comes up regularly because of our platform and healthy partner ecosystem.  Do the majority of my users need this? Are there problems with the partner meeting the needs of users today? Do we have the expertise and staffing to build this? Would building this natively unlock new value, new opportunity or a new market? If the answers to questions 1-3 are yes, then it warrants a discussion with your team. The ...Read More

The most common mistake is to not think about it at all. It can be so challenging to get a product built and shipped at your company that Product Managers naturally become very internally focused. They have dependencies to manage across other teams, they have timeline pressure from leadership, there are technical challenges to work around, etc. On top of it all, most Product Managers don’t engage their Product Marketing counterpart until they are almost done building the thing. This should be av ...Read More

Start by analyzing why this might be happening. It’s a key signal that shouldn’t be ignored, and needs further digging to understand what’s behind it. Is there a misperception of your brand? Is there a misunderstanding of the product offering? Are you missing features? Is there a lack of awareness of the company / offering? Consider conducting interviews with users and salespeople to get a better understanding of the misperception. If you can diagnose what exactly is behind this miscategorizatio ...Read More

Don’t forget about marketing, positioning and acquisition of customers as a key part in your differentiation strategy.  It’s easy for Product Managers to solely focus on the bits and bytes of how the product works once someone’s in it, but if you cannot acquire or entice new customers - you need to move your differentiation focus further up the funnel.  Is your product too hard to set up or use? Does it take a long time for users to see value in your product?  It’s key to partner with sales, pro ...Read More

It’s important to know your competition, but it’s equally important not to obsess over what they’re doing at a feature level. You should never aim for a feature vs. feature battle with competitors. The focus, instead, should be on the problems you’re solving for your users and what’s most important to them. In order to have productive conversations with your team around where to focus, ensure you are aligned on answers to these questions: Who are we targeting? What segment, industry, persona? Wh ...Read More

A common mistake exec teams make is focusing on output and forgetting about outcomes. Product teams present roadmaps to execs and once they’ve shipped a thing, they tell them it’s complete and move onto the next. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what’s on your roadmap or what you’ve successfully shipped if you’re not moving the needle in the outcomes you care about. Questions to align on with your team to help you get there: Do we have clearly defined desired outcomes for your team? Do w ...Read More