Executive Roadmap Communication
Every product development process is punctuated with key decision points when the value of the product needs to be communicated to stakeholders – whether it is to executives who evaluate project funding milestones, internal organizational meetings where product roadmaps are communicated to staff, or executive keynotes to communicate product direction externally at events or conferences. Empirical works closely with leads in the organization to develop compelling presentations that are most likely to achieve their goals. User Experience (UX) efforts are often either too far downstream in the development process or not utilized at strategic crossroads within the product lifecycle. UX strategy is much like Quality Assurance planning – the earlier and more effectively you implement it in the process, the more robust the design becomes and the less costly it is to fix any “bugs”. Empirical will help you analyze your product development process – whether agile, waterfall or hybrid – to identify key user experience research and design opportunities. We help our clients at any stage, from incubation to post‐release. Brainstorming sessions are often misunderstood or misused. Because they are designed to break outside of traditional or programmed ways of thinking and generate new and random ideas, they are often random in their planning and execution. Effective ideation and brainstorming actually requires thorough planning, pre‐work and framing so that the sessions can be as free, fun and effective as they need to be. Empirical facilitates the entire process with our clients, from framing and pre‐work to session activities such as mind mapping, concept mapping, ranking & rating, and post‐work. If customers aren’t ready to incorporate a new product into their lives, even the best idea or most usable design will inevitably fail. Market readiness ultimately answers the question: Is now the right time to launch this product idea? Empirical has found that it is essential to shift away from traditional market segmentation based on gender, age and socio‐economic status to analyze market readiness. Instead, we use a process that understands your potential customers based on their values and other lifestyle factors that transcend traditional market segmentation approaches to uncover what will truly resonate with today’s users. Hand in hand with market readiness is pricing analysis. How do you maintain a defensible and market‐appropriate pricing strategy for your product? Empirical’s price modeling efforts include not only elasticity studies – how much flexibility in price your customers will tolerate – but also insight into deeper pricing questions such as which features and/or offerings are key value triggers for your customers. When developing a product, it is imperative to understand the competitive landscape. Which companies are already offering products either like yours or designed to address one or more of your major value propositions? We analyze competitor products based on factors such as features offered, usability, market share, analyst reviews, pricing and patent applications to determine their key strengths and weaknesses. We use many pieces of information to create a more complete view of the competition. We offer tailored deliverables including SWOT analyses, weighted ranking and ratings or targeted data slicing depending upon your needs. Requirements gathering begins with the user. What does the user need? How can our product best fulfill that need? Empirical brings together the results of multiple efforts, including user and stakeholder interviews, competitive analyses, market studies, participatory design, focus groups, prototyping, user testing , design feasibility studies, and others to help your organization develop a coherent set of requirements. From the marketing requirements document, to product requirements specification and use cases, Empirical works with companies to help ensure the voice of the user is present at key decision and definition points during product requirements development.