I. Struggling with Too much Freedom
While the lack of restrictions and guidelines seemed like a positive at first, our group found it difficult to identify the best target market and business model. Initially, we believed licensing our technology to large shoe companies in order to avoid paying in-house designers to redesign our shoes was a great solution. Yet after many discussions, we struggled to find shoe brands that would be willing to buy our technology as they already develop their own technology in-house and/or have an existing loyal customer base. We needed to pivot towards a business model that leveraged our existing customer base.
Looking through our user interviews to identify common pain points, we found an overwhelming number of complaints about formal women’s shoes, most specifically high heels. While all our customers loved the sleek look of heels and the confidence they had while wearing them, they hated the style’s discomfort and their negative long-term foot health effects. By pivoting towards reinventing the high heel, our team stopped being bogged down by the freedom of too many choices. Instead, we could focus on developing features that address the key pain points of a single style.
II. Incorporating Pitch Feedback
While we were confident our proposal was a well-research idea due to our user interviews, we refined our pitch proposal with two main pieces of feedback.
A. Specifics Over Generalities
A consistent piece of feedback we received was that our product’s comfort and style claims didn’t seem plausible. To show the viability of our product, our team needed to directly tie our user’s pain points to our product’s specific features. To do so, we create a slide that shows our direct solutions to certain pain points such as our rounded toe box to solve toe pinching and interior cork material for shock absorption.
B. Pitches are Stories
The second piece of feedback we received was to explain more about our target market choice. Because our introduction slide was overly simple, it didn’t include details that explained the company’s existing customer segment of professionals consistently on their feet. To fix this, we sought to connect our slides together to create a persuasive story. We created a user persona and customer journey map which serve as a running thread to the other slides like target market and TAM/SAM/SOM.
III. Final Takeaways of the Learning Experience
Working on the GoodWalk pitch proposal was my first experience creating a viable product pitch with a significant amount of freedom, and I learned a lot about product development and strategic decision making. While the lack of restrictions was initially overwhelming, it ultimately helped me grow as a PM. I learned the importance of focus: when faced with too many choices, narrowing down to a specific pain point allows PMs to design clear targeted solutions with the end user in mind. Secondly, incorporating feedback was crucial in refining our approach. Moving away from vague promises to concrete features helped increase the credibility and persuasiveness of our pitch.
All in all, I gained experience in creative problem solving and structured pitch execution which are crucial in a PM career. I developed skills that will enable me to confidently tackle future product cases in team settings.
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Mina Ky
