Assessing Product Opportunities
By Marty Cagan
Legendary product guru Marty Cagan, founder of Silicon Valley Product, shares his concept of the "Product Opportunity Assessment". This is meant to be a lighter-weight and more practical version of a Product Requirements Document (PRD) and is meant to 1) Prevent you from wasting resources on poor opportunities and 2) Develop shared understanding of what it will take to achieve success. The Opportunity Assessment seeks to answer 10 fundamental questions:
1. Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)
2. For whom do we solve that problem? (target market)
3. How big is the opportunity? (market size)
4. What alternatives are out there? (competitive landscape)
5. Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator)
6. Why now? (market window)
7. How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)
8. How will we measure success/make money from this product? (metrics/revenue strategy)
9. What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements)
10. Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no-go)