Blueprint Series Part 1: Beacon Framework

Building a product and company from scratch is hard.

My business partner and I have built four of our own companies. We've also independently consulted on product, engineering, sales and marketing for hundreds more. I've also personally invested thousands of hours helping coach and mentor entrepreneurs.

There's a common thread. You have an idea for a solution or observe a problem that you want to solve. It could even be a hunch based on your personal experience (we'll call this your gut). Regardless, you feel the desire to run.

This is why you need a beacon - something to run towards.

Beacon has a unique set of attributes. It carefully balances business opportunity with practical product design and execution. The output of the framework includes a positioning statement, the major components of an executive summary, and a guide for internal decision making and external communication (e.g. raising capital, pitching pilot customers, communicating with software developers).

Beacon has five key components:

• Buyer and User Roles
• Product Outcomes
• Target Market
• Differentiation
• Positioning Statement

As we walk through building a beacon, we'll use a made-up product idea called "ForecastAI"

Step 1: Buyer and User Roles

Start by documenting the roles that will be interacting with your product or service. Include end users and buyers, even if they are not an end-user.

Then, create a detailed list of tasks ("jobs") they are trying to accomplish day to day. Your product does not exist yet, so this should be what they are doing today, without your product. Do not prescribe any solutions in this step. Only focus on the current realities of the people you hope to help.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that people will drop what they are doing if a great product comes along. The status quo, how they execute their day to day, is a very hard pattern to break. You can't help people without creating shared understanding for their job. We'd like to credit The Value Proposition Canvas and its sister framework Jobs To Be Done (JTBD), which has had a positive influence on how we've built products over the years.

Step 2: Product Outcomes

Product outcomes are similar to value propositions. Answer the question: if the product does what it's supposed to do, what is the outcome?

Then brainstorm how you would accomplish these value propositions with a product or service. The hows convert nicely to product functionality, story cards, and other components when mapping a minimum viable product. You don't want to build anything unless it improves the life of your users.

Now, map these to measurements of value. These will translate well to KPIs and other trackable metrics as you move to execute on engineering, sales and marketing. Product functions could easily turn into multiple features downstream, try to keep them high-level.

Hint: Most value comes down to saving time or money, but can include social/emotional job such as "look good to my boss."

Step 3: Target Market

Create a narrow set of target markets for your identified roles. An important lesson if you are selling your product or service to businesses (B2B), is that businesses are made up of people. You don't sell a business, you sell a person at a business. So another way to think about target markets is where you will find your target roles, and how many of them are out there?

There are many different ways to attack a target market, but we're not there yet. Those are what we call "Traction Channels" (example: SEO, Viral Marketing, Direct Sales). For this step, you are simply drawing a circle around who you are going to try bringing this product or solution to, to size what success looks like, and how you will differentiate.

Hint: ChatGPT has become a remarkable asset to do quick sizing exercises based on role, company size, geography, etc. We don't claim that this replaces an exhaustive market assessment, but it's a fantastic tool at this stage.

Step 4: Differentiation

For each target market, articulate what the current status quo is (How the user accomplishes their jobs today, without a product), as well as products or companies you will be competing with.

You can pull orange role stickies and yellow task stickies over to your status quo differentiation. Similarly, you can pull blue product stickies over to competitor differentiation to articulate how you will be solving the problem differently.

At the end of these four steps, you will have:

• a firmer grasp of who your product is for
• what they are trying to accomplish
• how you will make their lives better
• where you plan to find them
• And what will set your solution apart

It's time to summarize your beacon with a positioning statement.

Step 5: Write a positioning statement

Your positioning statement is the lens or filter that you use internally to guide product and go-to-market decisions as well as tradeoffs. This is part art and part science. It should be extremely succinct and stand alone.

Here's a sample for our example company:

ForecastAI allows sales teams to close deals more predictably through the creation of more accurate pipeline reports

The positioning statement encapsulates the essence of how all these components interconnect. It becomes your beacon. As you are executing the build of your product in the months that follow, there will be hundreds, if not thousands of decisions that need to be made. Having a user-centric statement that quickly shines a light on how you will succeed is a very valuable tool to help ensure that you get to where you need to go.