How to validate strategic alignment of your product ideas

Innovation is something every business should be doing. It shouldn’t be done, though, without a valid why.

It’s not just about coming up with great ideas. It’s about coming up with great ideas that support your wider business and product strategies and help to drive genuine growth.

Without this strategic alignment, you could well find that you invest time, money and resources is a “nice to have”, when they could be invested in something else that will drive your business forward.

As we described in our last blog on determining idea viability, your C-suite is likely to lose interest or change the focus if they can’t see how an idea will benefit their business.

That’s why strategic alignment is so important – and why validating strategic alignment is the final part of our four-part series in determining project risk.

Start with your product strategy

The first step in validating strategic alignment is to have a strategy that is specific, clear and well-defined: without this, innovating towards strategic goals will simply not be possible. Of course, this is not the remit of the product team but of the business as a whole.

If your business strategy is solid and needs no further work, your next task is to ensure that you understand it fully. With complete clarity around your vision, your mission, your goals and your target market you’ll know that you can assess your project or product idea in the context of where the business wants to be.

Articulate your idea

You and your team will already have a good handle on how your idea will work. To align it fully with your strategy, though, you need to get things down in writing.

Your idea needs a clear definition – written, specific details of its features and benefits, and value proposition. It should be clear to see how it addresses a particular need or problem in the market (which will have been determined by your earlier desirability research).

Once done, your defined idea and your business strategy can be analyzed side-by-side. This will allow you to identify the key elements of your business strategy that your idea will align with. The elements that you look at here could include market positioning, target audience, competitive differentiation, core values, and the long-term goals of your business.

Create and share a low-fidelity prototype

One of the best ways to validate strategic alignment – both with current and potential customers or users – is to create and share low-fidelity prototypes of your idea. This can be done either qualitatively or quantitatively (or both), with both options giving you different results.

Qualitative prototyping will involve you speaking with users on an individual basis or in small groups. When you share your prototype with them, ask them how they would use it, asking them to go into as much detail as they can. It may be that they would use it in ways you hadn’t envisaged…does what they say still align with what you want to achieve as a business?

For a more quantitative approach, consider using a tool like a UsabilityHub. This will allow you to employ a whole host of testing tools that will not only provide you with evidence of how they would use your idea, it will also help to uncover any design issues that need resolving..

How we can help validate product ideas

Your organization will be full of ideas. If you want to be sure that these ideas will actually work, though, you need a system in place to prioritize them and decide which ones to progress.

You’ll also need to screen for four key risks, as discussed in this blog series: desirability, feasibility, viability, and strategic alignment.

We know that keeping track of an innovation project can be a challenge, which is why we created Acclaim Ideas. Our innovation management solution offers a proven and consistent workflow for all organizations, a raft of metrics and dashboards and the ability to prioritize your innovations in line with your strategic goals: essentially a way to manage the entire process from ideation to prototyping, in a single place.