Many organizations are discovering how serverless technology enables the creation of new features or applications in a matter of hours and days instead of weeks or months. With this accelerated development timeframe value can be delivered to customers faster.

So, how do you ensure you're introducing the most innovative products that truly meet your customer's needs?

At Stackery we often ask ourselves this very question.

While our focus and expertise are providing serverless cloud governance and DevOps tools to organizations who use our technology to achieve compliance, security, and auditability with serverless applications - we've found one of the keys to delivering products is having a New Product Introduction Plan (NPI). This plan guides your go-to-market initiatives and includes having a keen understanding of your customer needs and wants, how your product compares to your competitors and describing your product in such a way that it is compelling, unique and different.

We've found that by following these five steps increases the success rate of product adoption and customers certainly will appreciate having their needs considered.

1. Develop a competitive comparison - Analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses; identify and understand key competitors - and how your product is unique, better and different.

2. Define the target audience - What are their problems and how does your product meet their need? Paint a picture of the target audience by developing a buyer persona where you capture what is important to them. A detailed buyer persona will help guide product development, increase marketing effectiveness and allow for alignment across your organization.

3. Create a market facing product/feature description - This is the most critical element of the NPI as it needs to accurately describe the new product/feature. The product description needs to also be compelling and make the product/feature attractive to a perspective buyer or industry influencer, such as a publication that wants to provide value to their readers.

Product descriptions can make or break a sale. While they can be easy to overlook, choosing the right set of words can compel even the most skeptical of customers to make a purchase.

4. Build a Creative Brief - The Creative Brief integrates the market, competitor, and product knowledge into differentiated statements of product value that form the foundation of the outbound marketing plan. It will simplify and expedite content creation, by building content from an agreed upon messaging framework and includes:

• Background/Market Overview
• Competitive Landscape
• Target Audience
• Pain Points
• Product Description
• Features and Benefits
• Key Messages

5. Create a Go-To-Market (GTM) Plan - The GTM plan creatively applies marketing methods that complement demand generation and sales enablement to achieve the desired new product/feature introduction results. This includes setting metrics for attaining leads and other success factors.

Following these five steps has proved highly successful for many companies launching products. While serverless offers many benefits in bringing products to market faster and Stackery is paving the way for enterprises in their adoption of this new technology, spending time upfront to architect your New Product Introduction will pay dividends down the road.

If you are interested in learning more about Stackery's approach to introducing products, feel free to reach out to me at: marketing@stackery.io.