Focus on Minimal Viable Audience and Sequence your Scale

We started on the series of articles with broad imperatives of B2B Product scale(here) and moved specifically on Product usefulness via behavioural Segmentation (here, here, and here). 

This article will take to first logical conclusion on how to focus on Minimal Viable Audience and Sequencing your scale.  

Minimal Viable Audience is not a common term used in Software Products yet. Alternative, two other words are 'Target audience' and a 'Viable' Product. And if we combine the two words, we have one common three-letter acronym emerges Minimal Viable Audience (MVA). 

MVA makes it a lot more powerful and sets a benchmark to Product team that what is an acceptable product and what is not. It brings in the perspective of a customer segment getting value as well as whether it is a viable business options or not. 

Before we dwell deeper, it is good to talk two prevalent & incorrect practices now. 

 Incorrect Practice #1: Incremental Product Shipment with no clue of the Audience

All of you must have seen this picture; I don't want to comment on MVP, but what the image communicates and implies.

We are mapping the possible Audience of the products: (1) & (2) Kids, (3) Sports Persons, (5) Youth and (6) Women/Men.  

Each of them is a different segment and different Businesses model as well as different approach to do business. If the Audience changes like this, you are sure to have a disastrous failure. Don't shift business model like this for the sake of staggered construction. 

I would instead go for the first one in the picture and preparing accordingly. You can look for different variants of Skateboard, Scooter, Bike, Motorbike, SUV Business based on your position of strength. 

For example, if you want to make SUV like in the first Row, make sure you have early success with one variant and then plan for other options that could apply to different segments. A good example is Tesla Cars, where it was feasible for only one variant and a segment of customers to buy, but it was still a viable business. Now they have expanded to other options of Cars as well as new business models of Trucks too.  

Incorrect Practice # 2: Product is Relevant for All 

In general, whenever a product is released, there is the Euphoria of optimism of 'relevant for all'. Hence, the unmet expectations on goals that bring down the confidence of the team. It is found both in early-stage product as well as growth-stage product. These are hard lessons learnt in my career of 20+ years of product. 

An early-stage product wants to be relevant for the wider Audience to increase its chances of success. The problem is not the wider Audience but no proper focus. It is about trying to build a product where no particular segment feels delighted about the product. 

While early has one problem, a later growth stage product gets confused because they have a wider audience, and it loses its ability to filter noise and bring focus. Everybody in the organisation is looking for their pet projects in the roadmap. A Product is trying to do everything like below:

 - get new customer in (a) a newer segment and (b) new markets for existing segments

- increase stickiness with existing customers by (c) adding more value(new feature/ new product) as well as, (d) adding more users to existing customers and (e) Customers asks on enhancements & defects.

The challenge is balanced investment lacks prioritisation. And investment in all also not a wrong decision subject to there is a focused investment. It focuses on an audience and its related Product & Technology, which is propelling growth. 

Moving forward on Minimal Viable Audience (MVA)

MVA becomes as a useful concept both in early stage of scaling as well as in growth stage. You need to limit Audience via MVA for a product release (or set of product releases) and bring focus to the team, as well as think about scale and be relevant to broader Audience with a stepped journey.  

A good example is Microsoft focus in recent years where they brought clarity of Audience they are chasing and on their strengths. And this weeks they shifted from office 365 to Microsoft 365 to cover consumer audience too. But before doing that they took years to first focus on improving the productivity of Enterprise. 

So, how do you go about doing this that all gets covered with some focus? 

Activities to finalise MVA and Sequence your Scale 

Here are the proposed activities that you can do in any order. It also can be done in parallel. Since it's is nature is iterative, you can expect more details and more predictability on outcome with every cycle. So, don't forget to apply: 'Thinking, Doing and Adapting model'. 

A: Arrive behavioural Segments for your product 

We covered this in these two articles on how do you arrive at different behavioural segments (here and here). 

B: Arrive at Sequence within Behavioural Segments from Product perspective 

Split the segments into three buckets and answer these questions here: 

 Who should be your 'MVA'? 

• What should be done to 'delight' them with your product? 
• What can still be done later for the same Audience?  

 Who should be your 'Adjacency Audience' assuming above is done? 

•  What they would find it 'useful'? 
• What they aspire to get 'more'?
• What will it take to move the adjacency audience to become 'MVA'?

What should not be your Audience? 

• What parts of the product would be sub-optimal or not usable at all for specific Audience? 
• How would you say 'no' to them, if they express to use your current product? 
• What should all be covered before we think of entering this Segment? 

C: Breakdown work-units based on Audience Sequencing and fine-tune Activity B

Have a rough idea of Features, Functionalities, Systems, Sub-Systems, Components & Parts for all three – MVA, Adjacency Audience and Not your Audience.  

There are three things to watch out for: 

• you need to define for all three audience groups and ensure that you know what it takes to build for all. Even if, the Audience is not in consideration for a release, still define at least to some degree. It will help you to do design for the future, and then future sequencing can be easily realised.
• Within MVA and adjacency, ensure that you have covered behavioural diversity as in previous article. 
• While efforts and resources are limited, cut the scope of a product release for an MVA that ensures that they are delighted. It is to ensure that product outcomes has a higher probability of achievement.  

D: Validate the Business Viability and fine-tune Activity B 

Business perspective would include, opportunity size, your ability to reach to the Audience, external triggers, competition, changing landscape, whether it is viable Audience in terms of value to the customer, price-point, etc. From an internal perspective; the cost of sale, cost of operations, ability to fund the project and the right people are needing for the project. 

E: During Execution be aware of MVA & Sequence of Scale 

Execution is where the ball gets dropped as the intent doesn't propagate to the team in the execution lifecycle, and hence, everyone runs think from a different perspective. Get this aligned during further Discovery, Design, Construction and GTM is useful for everyone to make the right decision to get the right product for its Audience. 

In one of the previous article here, I took a case study to explain how we did this.

F: Do, Learn and Adapt Continuously 

As you would move in the journey, spend enough time with customers to further learn on the whether your hypothesis failed or succeeded. Learn from each of them and continuously adapt.  

Summing it up – MVA and Sequence your scale

As Product Manager, you have responsibility of Product Usefulness, Viability and its Outcome. As a Designer, its Usability of product and as the engineer making it differentiating by leveraging technology & its constraints as well as limited means available to its disposal. 

Similarly, for Marketing, it's right positioning as well as awareness outreach for the audiences. As sales ensuring customer conversation have the real story, so that the user converts. And at the end, you are product manager measuring the outcome of product success/ failure and bringing back the feedback.

All of these will have laser-sharp focus if they have Minimal Viable Audience. And the confidence comes because you also know the journey of scaling is sequenced. 

Parting Asks

What is your practice of scaling with the audience? What challenges do you see in implementing MVA for yourself?