translating business outcomes to product outcomes, examples to find the right problems

As for your question I’ll give a quick example - Guitar teacher wants to increase revenue - probably not changing price, but instead focuses on growth - Sees that 80% of new guitar students churn and that’s a major roadblock to growth - How does he create a product that is more “sticky” with new users? Who are the people who stuck with it and why? Who are the people who churned and why?

Some find it too hard to hold the guitar (strength or pain resistance), some find it sad they can’t play a song they like (enjoyment/satisfaction), some find it too confusing, some are just too lazy, some find it boring.

If he decides to focus on some of these problems like laziness, he’ll probably grow really slowly and run into things outside his core competencies. I.e. many are dealing with depression and lack motivation, so he invests in antidepressants? Or he tries to make his content more “fun”?

Instead he sees that he can focus on the first two. How does he make it require less strength and more enjoyable early? Could change guitars or strings (might be unrealistic since they bring their own guitar or he’s an online teacher - or it might encourage bad habits). Could choose easier songs, but he likely is already. He could teach them the ukulele instead, but that’s a different market and need.

He identifies a common outcome between both of the pains - first week success - or being able to play a song after the first week of lessons. So he finds music that’s easy and combines it with simplified chords (if you play music this makes more sense). Instead of teaching them the full chords they might run into later, he focuses the first week on teaching common chords that only use the bottom three strings which are lighter/softer and make a more beautiful sound when played incorrectly than the top 3. An A-chord is simply 2 strings fingers instead of three, a G-chord is 1 finger instead of 3, etc.

The business outcome is ultimately revenue or MAU (they’re almost always trailing). The product outcome could be returning users after 1 week (or lesson 2). The customer outcome could be “week 1 songs learned” or week 1 “victories”.

Hope that’s helpful. Sorry for the novel.

/r/ProductManagement Thread Parent