Week 3: Strategy

The hard part is commercializing that idea and continuing to create value for the customer and company over time.
So how do you develop your strategy? If you’ve done the first steps well, you’ve figured out how to create value.
Then you need to capture that value, plus sustain the value creation and capture over the long term.
Who is your competition? You need to assess how customers are getting their needs met now and how those competitors stack up against the priorities of your target customer.
Essentially, do you need to protect what you’re building through IP, knowing that this would take a bit longer? Do you need to move quickly to build capabilities, start reaching customers, get ahead of competition, and learn? The other key trade-off is collaboration versus competition.
In collaboration, you leverage existing customers, enhance value through partnerships, and can mute competitive pressures.
Competition is for serving new customers with new capabilities.
Finally, the third question- how are you going to sustain that advantage? This will be dependent on the type of competitive advantage you’ve chosen and will require you to adapt, to continue creating value for your customers, and stay ahead of competition.

Finally, we’ll cover putting together your MVP. This stands for Minimum Viable Product, though we also like to think of it as your Minimum Viable Proof.
First, what’s the most simple product or service you can develop that satisfies the needs of your target customer? A quick means of honing in on the top items to include will be to go through this process.
To make sure everyone is aligned on your MVP as quickly as possible, a great next step is to sketch out your product- either a 2D sketch of a product, mapping out the flow of a service, or doing a wire frame of an app.
Second, what are you asking people to do or think about differently? And can you isolate that one thing and test to see if it’ll work? Sometimes this takes a form of asking customers to buy from a drastically new place or integrate a lot of their previous products into one or put their trust in a new product where the stakes might be high.

As water flows through the water meter, the camera regularly gets updates by reading the number on the dial.
You can see a detailed view of your water usage and exactly how much you’re using at different points throughout the day.