For new products and major features, I find it invaluable to go through a complete messaging exercise. This is an iterative process that involves collaboration with Product, Marketing, and Sales. I've developed a template for this over the years that combines the things I liked most from the past messaging exercises. While this list is not exhaustive, these are the things I have found are most valuable to building messaging that resonates not only externally, but also internally with the teams that need to market and sell the product:
- Define worldview - What is the problem we are seeing in the market that necessitated the creation of this product/feature?
- Define solution - What have we built that helps solve the problems defined in our worldview definition?
- Positioning statement - How are we differentiated from similar players in the market?
- Competitive value - A deeper dive into the competitive landscape, how we compare at the feature level, and our differentiated value.
- Messaging matrix - This is the holy grail of how to message to various personas. This includes a mapping of value props, key messages, and features/use cases to the challenges faced by different personas. I often abstract this out into its own asset (which I call the Value Framework) that acts as a kind of cheat sheet on how to message to various personas.
