How to Build Your Product on Solid Ground

Impressive products and companies are built everyday that struggle to find an audience. The development work is solid, the features or services polished, but something is just… missing. The product doesn't address a real need, doesn't stand out from alternatives, or can't explain its value clearly enough for people to care.

These aren't coding or design problems - they're strategic gaps. And they happen to experienced builders and business owners just as often as newcomers.

This guide explores the key strategic elements that help products succeed, from defining purpose to developing positioning. This is for founders, builders, and anyone creating products or services who wants to build something people actually want.

TL’DR: The Five Essential Elements

If you only have 2 minutes, here's what you need to know:

1. Purpose: Define what specific problem you're solving and for whom
2. Positioning: Determine how your offering fits among alternatives
3. Audience: Identify who will value your solution most (hint: not "everyone")
4. Messaging: Develop clear language that resonates with your audience
5. Value Prop: Articulate why people should care about what you've built

These five elements form your strategic foundation. Even a simple one-page document addressing these points will dramatically improve your chances of success.

Finding Balance: Strategy in an AI Paced World

The landscape for building products and services has fundamentally changed. Tools and technologies that have emerged in recent years - particularly AI - have compressed what once took months into weeks or days.

You can develop and launch faster than ever, but without some strategic direction, you might simply build the wrong thing more efficiently.

The traditional approach of spending months on strategy before building now feels unnecessarily slow. But jumping straight into building with no strategic thought could leads to wasted effort.

Many successful builders now take a middle path: developing just enough strategic clarity to point in a promising direction, while using rapid build-and-learn cycles to validate and refine.

This balanced approach helps avoid common patterns we see across both product and service businesses:

• Creating solid offerings but struggling to explain their value
• Frequently shifting your narrative without finding what resonates
• Adding capabilities without seeing corresponding adoption
• Pursuing too many directions simultaneously without gaining traction

A thoughtful strategic foundation doesn't slow down execution - it actually accelerates progress by reducing false starts.

The Five Pillars of Strategic Foundation

You don't need a 50-page strategic plan. You need clarity on five key areas:

1. Purpose

What problem does your offering actually solve, and for whom? This isn't about features, it's about the job your product or service performs.

Focus on these questions:

• What specific problem are you solving?
• Why hasn't this been solved effectively before?
• How does your approach address the problem differently?
• What specific experience gives you an edge in solving this?

Your purpose becomes a compass for decisions about what to build and what to skip.

2. Market Positioning

Positioning is how your offering fits among alternatives in people's minds. It's about carving out territory you can realistically own.

Clarify these elements:

• What category does your solution belong in?
• What makes you meaningfully different?
• What alternatives are people comparing you to?
• What strengths do you have that others would struggle to replicate?
• Which value areas will you compete on? (And which ones won't you focus on?)

Effective positioning requires making clear choices that create focus for your team and clarity for potential customers.

3. Audience Definition

A common pattern among struggling businesses is trying to appeal to too broad an audience. A common phrase in Marketing is, “If you market to everyone, you market to no one.” Defining a specific audience doesn't limit your potential - it increases your chances of creating something people genuinely value.

Bring focus to:

• Who feels this problem most acutely?
• How do they currently address this need?
• When and where do they encounter this problem?
• What factors influence their decisions about solutions?

The goal is focused impact, not unnecessarily limiting yourself. You can expand once you've built something truly valuable for your core audience first.

4. Messaging Framework

Clear messaging translates your thinking into language that resonates with your audience, in other words this is your product’s story. Good messaging makes complex offerings simple to understand.

A basic messaging framework includes:

• A headline that captures the primary value
• 3-5 supporting messages that expand on different aspects
• Common objections and how you address them
• Evidence that supports your claims
• Language that matches how your audience actually talks

Consistent messaging helps potential customers quickly understand what you offer and why it matters to them.

5. Value Proposition

Your value proposition, sometimes called “value prop”, connects what you build with why people should care. It synthesizes your purpose, positioning, audience understanding, and messaging.

An effective value proposition:

• Identifies specific problems you address
• Articulates concrete benefits you deliver
• Explains why your approach works better than alternatives
• Links features or services to outcomes people want

Your value proposition should guide product development, marketing, and internal decisions about priorities.

Using AI Tools as Strategic Thinking Partners

Strategic planning inherently involves making educated guesses based on limited information. Now AI offers a new approach to developing these hypotheses more thoroughly.

Tools like ChatGPT or Claude can serve as thinking partners that help stress-test ideas, identify blind spots, and consider different perspectives.

Understanding Client and Customer Needs

AI tools can help process and analyze feedback with prompts like:

"Here are 20 customer comments from my recent interviews. Can you identify patterns in the problems they mention?"

"I'm considering offering [your idea]. What questions would help me understand if potential clients actually need this?"

"My target audience is [description]. Where might these people already be discussing their challenges online?"

Assessing Business Viability

Use AI to examine your concept from different angles:

"I'm planning to offer [your idea]. What similar solutions exist and how are they positioned differently?"

"Analyze my business concept from a skeptical perspective. What assumptions might not hold up?"

"For my [service/product] priced at $X, what would be the decision process a potential customer might go through?"

Clarifying Strategic Decisions

AI can serve as a thinking partner to work through key decisions:

"I'm weighing [option A] versus [option B]. What information would help make this decision clearer?"

"Here's a decision I need to make. Can you help me think through the tradeoffs involved?"

"I'm planning to [business action]. What potential outcomes should I prepare for over the next six months?"

Moving from Guesswork to Educated Hypotheses

Strategic planning inherently involves uncertainty. No founder has perfect information. In reality your strategy will never be done and you should always be iterating. The goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty but to develop better-informed hypotheses that you can test quickly.

Talking through ideas with AI tools helps this process in several ways:

• Articulating thoughts in writing naturally exposes logical gaps
• Explaining concepts to an external entity clarifies your own thinking
• Dialogue helps refine incomplete ideas into more structured concepts
• External questioning helps separate evidence-based beliefs from wishful thinking

The value comes from having a space to develop ideas without the social dynamics of impressing investors, team members, or advisors.

A Practical Approach to Building Your Strategic Foundation

Strategic foundation work doesn't need to be overwhelming. Here's a streamlined approach:

Step 1: Document Your Current Understanding

Capture your current thinking about purpose, audience, positioning, messaging, and value proposition.

This template provides a useful starting point:

• We believe our offering is for [target audience description]
• Who need to [achieve goal/solve problem]
• But they struggle with [specific challenges]
• Our solution is [category/description]
• That delivers [key benefits]
• Unlike [alternatives]
• Because [key differentiators]

This initial document isn't meant to be perfect. It establishes a baseline that you can test and refine.

Step 2: Identify Critical Assumptions

Review what you've documented and mark the assumptions that would significantly impact your success if incorrect.

These often include assumptions about:

• Whether people care enough about the problem to pay for a solution
• How your target audience currently addresses the need
• What specific aspects of your approach will provide value
• How your solution compares to alternatives (including doing nothing)

Step 3: Test Key Assumptions

With your critical assumptions identified, find lightweight ways to test them:

• Have conversations with 5-10 potential customers about their experience with the problem
• Examine how competitors currently address the need
• Create simple experiments to test messaging and value proposition resonance
• Find online communities where your audience hangs out and get to reading

Some validation can happen in parallel with building. The goal is gathering enough information to refine your direction without getting stuck in analysis.

Step 4: Create a Working Strategy Document

Based on your initial testing, develop a concise strategy document (1-2 pages) focused on practical application.

Include these core elements:

• Purpose statement (what problem you solve and for whom)
• Audience definition (who you serve and their key characteristics)
• Positioning framework (your category, differentiators, and alternatives)
• Messaging framework (how you talk about what you do)
• Value proposition (specific benefits and unique approach)

Step 5: Apply Your Strategy to Daily Decisions

A strategy document is only valuable if it influences real decisions. Use it to guide:

• Development priorities - what to build first based on core value delivery
• Communication - consistent messaging across different channels
• Opportunity assessment - evaluating new ideas against strategic fit
• Resource allocation - where to invest limited time and resources

Common Strategic Pitfalls to Watch For

Through working with early-stage businesses, certain patterns emerge that can derail otherwise promising projects:

Feature Focus Over Problem Solving Many of us naturally get excited about what we're building or offering and end up emphasizing capabilities rather than outcomes. Consider asking: "If someone had no interest in how this works, what would make them care about the result it delivers?"

The Generic Audience Challenge A common tendency is designing for "everyone who needs X." This approach typically results in offerings that don't strongly resonate with any specific group. While counterintuitive, narrowing focus to a more specific audience often leads to stronger initial traction.

Technical Excellence Overemphasis Those with technical backgrounds sometimes assume superior technology naturally wins in the market. In practice, factors like ease of use, accessibility, pricing, or marketing often outweigh technical superiority.

Competitor-Centered Positioning Defining your offering primarily in relation to competitors ("like X but with Y improvement") can limit your thinking and tie your fate to their choices. More effective positioning often comes from deep understanding of user needs.

Premature Expansion Adding features, targeting new audience segments, or entering new markets before establishing solid footing can spread resources too thin at a critical stage. Building something that works exceptionally well for a smaller group often provides a stronger foundation than moderate success across many fronts.

Working through these challenges benefits from honest assessment outside the pressure of impressing stakeholders. Strategic foundations evolve through an ongoing cycle of learning, adjusting, and refining based on real-world feedback.

What are you wrestling with in your product journey? Share your experience in the comments below.