When you’re developing a product strategy, or a new set of features for an existing product, you need to find a way to capture, and also communicate that strategy to the world. That’s very important, because as you create your vision, you’ll need allies, supporters and sponsors – and being able to convey the idea in very simple terms, to get them interested, is key.
The idea of an elevator pitch is not new: condense the message you want to convey to a minimum, so it fits into a 15-20 second elevator ride that you share with the receiver of your message. It should be compressed to the minimum, but contain the essential and most vital components of the idea. The challenge in producing the elevator pitch is that usually, it’s easier to explain an idea in a few sentences, that consume closer to a minute or above of time. The more words you have, the more wasteful you could be.
A similar phenomenon exists with presentations or letters – it’s far harder to convey context, problem statement and proposed solution in a presentation of 25 minutes, than in 7 minutes.
Mark Twain said: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – That says it all.
For conveying your vision, you’d need to incorporate a few key bits of information into your elevator pitch:
- Who is the product for (persona, group, individuals)?
- What is [who’s] desire, requirement, need that you address?
- What is the product?
- What is the product (category, segment)?
- What is it, that the product does well – why should someone buy?
- What can it be compared to (other products)?
- What makes our product better (in that comparison, the unique selling point)?
See for example How to write a great elevator statement | ScrumDesk, Meaningful Agile, Elevator Pitch Framework — Product Strategy | by Product Gurukul | Analytics Vidhya | Medium.
Building a sentence or a set of sentences, the elevator pitch framework suggest the following sentence structure:
- For hotel guests
- Who want to regulate and control their room’s temperature in a smart way,
- Our product SmartTherm 3000
- Is a thermostat for hotel rooms,
- Which allows for flexible, app-controlled and easy handling adjusting for comfortable room temperature.
- Unlike traditional, analog thermostats,
- This product leverages user-friendly, cloud-connected technology that people will love.
Quite neat – in conveys most of the relevant information. Certainly not all of the differentiators or key features, but enough to create idea of target audience and target market, product category and the unique selling point (USP) to the receiver of the pitch.
Like with every tool, there’s practice and jugging different versions and ideas around, before you land on a version that you want to try out or feel happy with. As your product evolves over time, so may your elevator pitch – and what you pitched in the beginning, may not be what the vision evolved to weeks later.
One of the things that I find not optimal with the sentence structure is that it ends with a comparison with existing products, even naming them in some cases and examples. I find that not elegant for a number of reasons:
- You’re talking about your vision, trying to establish an understanding – focus should be what *you* and the team do
- You’re naming competition that the receiver may not have known about
- Information about market research, who else there is, can happen in a follow-on conversation but isn’t necessarily adding to your pitch in the first 30 seconds
So instead of saying
(…)
- Unlike [competition]
- This product [USP]
Why not just say
(…)
- By differentiating through [USP]
That way, focus stays on the product and the vision – and the market research, comparison and detailed discussion of competition we share market with or don’t, follows later.
FRICKELSOFT 