All the products are unique and have their own features. Not every customer will be happy with every product. There is always some percentage of customers who find one or two features lacking in any product. The only way to discover this product gap is to determine why it fails to resonate with customers. Let us see about Strategies to Address Product Gap.

However, even after you have launched the product, there could still be potential product gaps. When we come across the term Product Gap, most people are concerned about the functionality or features that are missing from the product. 

But, this is just one way of determining the product gaps. There are still other strategies. 

Read on to know more about product gaps and their types. 

Discovering a product gap

A product gap emerges when a customer says that some feature is not available with the product or doesn’t work with them. In most cases, customers will come up with the solution that it would be great to have a feature that does ABC. However, if you are trying to figure out the potential product gap and come up with a valuable product feature, then you should try to find the real problem that your user is trying to solve. 

This is considered as one of the best approaches for various reasons. 

Various users might be experiencing the same issue, but each one of them would be imagining a different solution. Hence, if you are trying to implement the user solution, you may need to build dozens of solutions suggested by different users with the same underlying issue. 

In most of the cases, customers may not be clear with what they actually want unless you show it to them. Hence, the role of the product manager is to understand user needs and requirements. 

Examples of Product Gaps

Misguided flagship feature

A brand can create product gaps by investing a lot of effort and resources into functionality that customers may not find useful. These kinds of product gaps occur from failing to incorporate an essential feature but rather developing the product around the misguided flagship of pieces of a feature that the market doesn’t want. 

For instance, consider that you have developed a mobile shopping app that enables users to take a look at the products from various vendors before purchasing. Your research states that Strategies Address Product Gap customers show interest in comparison of mobile apps for shopping. However, as you built the strategy, you got excited about the idea to showcase comparisons of user reviews for each vendor. This feature turned out to be the focus of your development budget, time, and marketing campaign. The final product was mainly focused on comparing vendor reviews when your customers were mainly looking for the shopping app with product comparison. 

Analysis and prioritization

Product gaps notify the roadmaps. As much as the brands wish to solve the customer issues, they prioritize what should be done as per the impact and urgency. In simple, the prioritization falls under the following factors:

The severity of the problem

The number of customers impacted.

Level of business impact 

Does it align with the organization’s vision and mission?

The severity of the problem, the level of business impact, or the number of customers affected can be estimated with Weighted ARR, which begins with the absolute ARR of the client that detailed the gap divided by the quantity of gaps that the user has answered, to measure the business effect of each gap.

Be that as it may, all product gaps are not equivalent in the amount they matter to the client. At the point when product gaps are logged, they get allocated an impact ranking on a scale from “pleasant to have” to “major issue,” where adding another color scheme, for instance, would rank lower than, state, a usability issue that makes individuals invest a lot of energy on critical tasks. Product gaps with a higher effect are assigned a greater extent of the client’s ARR. Gaps with a lower effect are assigned a lower extent of the client’s ARR. We total up the weighted ARRs from all the users that have reported the functionality gap for each product gap.

To wrap things up, we likewise take a look at the critical fit. We ask ourselves: Is the product gap lined up with the company’s vision and mission of offering the most impressive self-serve customer analysis tools to the groups behind the world’s driving automated items? A gap that lines up with the overall feature direction will receive the top priority. A gap that is outside of the product scope will probably get the lowest priority. 

How do You Spot and Fix Product Gaps?

As mentioned above, product gaps can be exposed in several ways. Now, the next point comes as to how to figure out and fix the product gaps. The below mentioned are the various methods to fix the product gaps.    

1. Loss Analysis

If you realize that your brand is failing to make the potential lead conversion and convert viewers into customers. One approach is to figure out where the actual problem exists and where the real gap lies. This can be determined by asking the leads themselves why they decided not to purchase the product. Though you had to lose potential leads, you may gain valuable business insights.  

2. Competitive Analysis

If the product is not generating a good measure of leads and sales or revenue you expected, then the other reason could be your target audience could find the competitor products as more valuable. 

3. Product Analysis

You can likewise discover pieces of information to a product gap directly in the product usage measurements. On the off chance that customers aren’t drawing in with your item as frequently as you have foreseen, or in the way which you expected, these could be pointers that you’re missing something.

Takeaway 

The best methodology is to determine the right balance. Utilize the strategies above to look for the product gaps that might be letting in the open in your strategies. If you want to keep your product moving forward, then continue to learn from your customers and markets. This was all about Strategies to Address Product Gap.