It’s common for product teams to work out messaging for new products just prior to launch, but seeking message-market fit at the outset of the innovation cycle yields a host of benefits, including stronger product ideas, a better understanding of customers’ problems and experiences, awareness of competitors and market niche, and potential roadblocks to market uptake.

This is one reason why Amazon, for example, asks its teams to respond to a simple prompt at the vetting stage of new product development. “The Amazon Method ‘’ asks innovators to begin with a story: Imagine that the product is ready to ship to customers–and that it is a success. The product team then drafts a press release to the target customer announcing the product launch.

While the purpose for writing this piece is to empower, inspire, and align internal teams around getting the initiative to market, it also helps teams identify key aspects of the innovation process in advance.

To write the press release, teams must answer:

• What does success look like?
• What goals do we have for this product or initiative?
• What hurdles do we need to overcome to achieve our goals?
• How does what we are making improve the customer experience?

Amazon Marketplace–a business ecosystem that has transformed the consumer experience–was ideated through this story-centric approach. John Rossman, author of Think Like Amazon: 50 and ½ Ideas to Become a Digital Leader, envisioned the press release for Amazon Marketplace with this story:

“A seller, in the middle of the night, can register, list an item, receive an order, and delight a customer as though Amazon the retailer had done it.”

Marketplace found success in large part because the customer story was top of mind from the start.

Pro-tip: Empathize with your target customers

Dwelling on the needs and pain points of your target customers–that is, practicing empathy–is critical for achieving message-market fit. Most companies have multiple audiences to inform, convince, and convert as part of their business models. We tend to categorize these audiences as users, buyers, and champions.

Users are the people who will use your product in their day-to-day work: their problems are those that cost the organization money and time. Buyers are the ultimate decision-makers on whether or not to purchase your solution. And champions are those advocates for your product who communicate the value of your solution to buyers, and evangelize its adoption among users. Achieving message-market fit requires considering the values, pain points, and needs of all of these customers, and developing a cohesive content strategy that speaks meaningfully to each.

Directions:

1. Choose one persona: user, buyer, or champion. Then ask a cross-functional team to create a persona for this customer: they should imagine everything from day-to-day work, frustrations, and successes, to stage in life, hobbies, and demographics. Teammates should reflect on this persona’s ways of thinking, their concerns, and their sense of value. It helps to give their persona a real name!
2. Next, teammates identify the transformation they want to take place when this customer engages with their product or service.
3. What’s their current state? Why are they burdened? Frustrated? What’s their urgent, expensive problem? Where are they when they feel that problem the most? What triggers the pain? Paint a picture of your customer at that moment.
4. How does this innovation transform them? What does success look like for that person? What emotional transformation occurs? What ease do they feel? What’s the ah-ha moment?
5. Then, write the story of this persona’s transformation. Think through the specifics: envision exactly how your product interacts with users, buyers, and champions to resolve their frustrations.

Framing your story in this way asks you to move from thinking about your product as specs and features into one that solves a customer problem. Then use this story to communicate the power of your innovation with empathy to target customers and internal stakeholders alike.

Pro-tip: No good idea should be left untold. Make space for everyone at the innovation table.

In Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars, author, business consultant, and innovation leader Patrick Lencioni explains that nothing devastates a company faster than working in silos. Not asking your talent to collaborate wastes resources, squelches innovation, and puts the company’s success at risk. According to Lencioni, healthy organizations are ones that are able to tap into all of their intellectual capital through effective collaboration. Working together to achieve message-market fit is one way to break down barriers between teams in a way that helps everyone–and the company–to its goals.

Marketing and content teams should be pulled into new product development sessions—even if briefly—to bring their superpowers in communications, writing, and marketing to bear on product concepts when ideating. The added critical bonus is that because marketing teams are on the front lines listening for how best to communicate products to customers, they are constantly hearing new product ideas and enhancements. Having their voice in the room during product ideation is essential to the R&D discovery process.

At Untold, we’ve experienced firsthand the magic that happens when everyone’s voices are at the table to ideate your message-market fit. When we facilitate content strategy sessions for innovative companies, for example, we incorporate prompts and exercises that help guide cross-functional teams on a path toward message-market fit. In these company-wide sessions, we listen to teams articulate the product vision to identify disconnects and overlaps that we can map onto the target customer personas to craft a shared innovation vision.

Our MA and PhD-level content strategists and writers help to identify gaps in messaging around meeting customer needs, or in product understanding. Each of your teams brings a piece of the message-market puzzle to the table: when the story of what you are making and why becomes clearer to everyone involved, you are better equipped to explain it in a way that resonates with all stakeholders.

Take for example how this works at a company well known for leading the way in innovative customer-centric product design: The Honest Company. In our interview with Don Frey, Chief Innovation Officer at The Honest Company, he shared compelling insight into the role of message-market fit in product development:

“[O]ne of the things I tell my people is that R&D needs to be the first salesperson in the process. And so as they’re developing products, you know, that’s something I keep trying to make them think about—is like, how are you going to tell this story? Because we have to sell this product to the marketing people. We have to sell to the salespeople. And the more that we can get in front of that, as we’re formulating or as we’re developing a package, then the better off you are. Start to think about that as you’re doing the technical work of putting things together.”

At Honest, Marketing sits alongside R&D as they work together at the project outset to drive product ideation. This allows R&D to gain valuable insight into what the customer needs which in turn, can shape the product design and prevent it from being shelved due to poor product-market fit.

Expert-led content strategy sessions are a way for your company to rapidly align all teams on the story of your brand to speed up innovation.

In our interview with Kate Maxwell, former Technical Director & Innovation Leader at Raytheon Technologies, she shared that to foster an innovation culture, you have to create an environment to make innovation accessible to everyone in your organization. Maxwell noticed that while the company had thousands of employees, it was “only the same handful of folks that brought forward ideas for new R&D projects every year.” Maxwell thought: “Surely in a business of this size, with this many brilliant people — across all functions, not just engineering — there must be other ideas out there. How do we capture those and help people advance them and accelerate them inside of the corporate environment?” Instead of relying solely on R&D or technologists to come up with the next big idea, Maxwell had an idea: remove the barriers for folks from other teams to work together to contribute to innovations.

To do this, pitch challenges for innovative ideas were open to all employees. Rather than start with the technical specs of a product, employees were tasked with connecting their idea with customer pain points to address in their pitch. Product-oriented teams were also developed that were integrated across multiple functions to increase the diversity of thought and to make sure that ideas had “business value that could make a difference for our customers.”

Not only did these integrated product teams generate more ideas, they also provided a way to learn how to improve product design. According to Maxwell, breaking down organizational silos provided useful feedback to everyone involved in product development and communications. Teams were able to learn from each other, and to take that learning to refine their product, or in some cases, “take that exit ramp because something didn’t quite work out.” Maxwell made sure that marketing and communications were involved throughout the innovation lifecycle as “they really hold the keys and own all of the magic to getting things sold.”

Focusing on messaging alongside the technical specs at the start of product ideation has been essential to Raytheon becoming an innovation powerhouse. As Maxwell explained, her role in essence was to “inspire and empower people to innovate no matter where they were in the business. And I think that’s ultimately what made us successful.”