The following questions relate to the new platform which was shared with you on the first interview
Who do you think the target customer is the Platform for?
How would you successfully launch this new Platform?
How might you gather and evaluate feedback on this Platform?
🛤 Mission Alignment
This exercise is mainly focused to help assess my abilities to successfully showcase strategic and technical thinking towards the product management role.
🔬 Scope
Based on the initial interview received definition: “SaaS platform with the idea to help companies with a semi-automated way to help them get the right direction to satisfy certification for specific IoT devices.” A marketplace kinda vision that has different phased modules from certification (a spectrum of self-certification processes to EAL and Common criteria), tools (blackbox testing, hacking, etc...), and third party service integrations.
For the scope of this exercise, I would like to focus on the Certification Spectrum MVP.
, smart homes are forecast to grow to 350 million by 2023.
There were 258.54 million smart homes in 2021, which accounted for 12.2% of all homes.
It’s estimated that there will be more than 400 million houses with smart home devices and systems by 2025.
⚠️ What is the problem to be solved?
bringing trust to the IoT by providing IoT Security Assurance & Certification Services designed to help manufacturers, service providers, and customers take a more informed decision when buying or selling IoT products.
🎯 Target Audience(s) [Customer(s)]
Figuring out a particular target audience for a platform is a collective research based decision that takes into consideration quantitative, qualitative, internal and external research encompassing all stakeholders.
Since you already have a simple demo product, you guys have already passed the validation stage and understood the need and market for it. So, I’m going to base my assumption that enough initial research has been done.
Therefore, based on the initial shared information, your website and the knowledge that France as a government is bringing awareness to the importance of Cybersecurity especially for consumer and industrial IoT whilst the global number of hacking and security breaches is augmenting every day. Here is an attempt on an elevator pitch statement that should include the target audience.
FOR medium+ IoT manufacturers, WHO seek to certify their IoT products, Red Alert Labs' "PRODUCT NAME" IS a one-stop-shop accreditation SaaS THAT provides a step by step, ‘self’ up to ‘government’ certification processes. UNLIKE LCIE Bureau Veritas or other certification entities Red Alert Labs' "PRODUCT NAME" is a smoother and faster semi-automated experience.
🚀 Successful Launch
We all know that every product has a particular lifecycle, and there are many models that exist in the product management ecosystem. Here is what I usually adhere to:
01 - Research
Audience Size
Personality
Problems or issues
Value add
02 - Plan
Define the timeline
Determine features
Create project plan
Get stakeholders agreement
03 - Build
Build features
Test
Certify
04- Release
Make available to customers
Beta test
05 - Refine
Evaluate
06 - Retire (EOL)
Provide transition support
Therefore, a successful SaaS product launch campaign consists of three major stages: the pre-launch stage, the launch stage, and the post-launch stage.
Pre-Launch Phase
The aim of the pre-launch phase is to get our product and our business ready.
During the pre-launch stage we need to conduct market research, define our UPS (Unique Selling Proposition), identify our target audience, and define user persona
Launch Phase
The launch phase revolves around building and implementing our go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
In collaboration with the/a marketing team, we could be launching the product on Product Hunt, content marketing, paid advertising, and product demos.
Setting our KPIs will help us track the effectiveness of our marketing strategy.
The most useful performance indicators include the visitor-to-sign-up rate, the sign-up-to-PQL (Product Qualified Lead) rate, the PQL-customer rate, the sign-up-to-customer rate, and the activation rate.
Post-Launch Phase
The post-launch phase is all about user onboarding.
We would use UI onboarding patterns and elements like welcome screens, checklists, interactive product walkthroughs, and microsurveys (for user segmentation and to gather feedback).
Gathering feedback is one of the most critical phases of the project, as we need to avoid the ‘squeaky wheel’ syndrome (the loudest voices are the customers who are the most upset with the product), and really be able to listen to all the stakeholders.
That being said, in the previous ‘Successful Launch’ section we’ve somehow covered how we would gather initial feedback pre-launch. Therefore, in this section, I will focus on some of the methods that can be used to gather additional feedback post-launch.
User surveys, interviews and polls
Focus groups for upcoming idea validations and MVP testing
User Forums and discussions in Reddit as well as Quora or similar relevant cybersecurity / IoT related avenues
In-app User Feedback
Analytics on user journeys and conversions
A/B testing different journeys
Create an ideation venue to have potential customers suggest creative ideas
Usability tests
We can surely elaborate on every one of those techniques, but come on! I should leave something for our upcoming interviews!
Certification SaaS Platform
