Game Changer

Challenges: You need to capture, de-silo, and unify your product knowledge, vision, and market intuition for everyone to share and act upon.

Solution: The Value Map framework and methodology give you ready-made structures to articulate your communication and strategy, with or without a dedicated marketing team.

Benefits: Remove the guesswork from building your communication strategy and accelerate telling the world about the value you deliver.

Challenges: To help you come to a consensus on your product positioning and get buy-in from all stakeholders, you need a single source of truth about the features and benefits of your product.

Solution: OSP works with you to collect granular, comprehensive, structured data about your product’s features. Then, we “distill” these, concentrating them into logical-functional groups, then into product positioning.

Benefits: Connect with your critical, tech-savvy audiences (via fact-based positioning, free of hyperbole or guesswork).

Challenges: Planning strategically aligned campaigns and editorial coverage related to large, complex products is challenging.

Solution: The narratives, topics, prioritization, and personas captured in your Value Map are the tools you need to get the job done consistently.

Benefits: The OSP Value Map is the link between your strategy and effective, efficient content production and ensures targeted messaging.

Challenges: Sales teams (and potential customers!) struggle when comparing similar products from different vendors due to their wildly varying feature-naming conventions and levels of detail presented.

Solution: Create a Value-Map-based competitive matrix. Compare your product to your competitors using unified naming, categories, and detail. Identify gaps and opportunities in the feature sets and roadmaps across the competitive landscape.

Benefits: Understand and prioritize the areas where your product shines for marketing, sales, and communications. De-prioritize others (or add them to your roadmap!)

Challenges: It is difficult to describe, position, write, and talk about your product consistently across many communications and sales touchpoints and as it evolves.

Solution: The Value Map is a central repository that all stakeholders can consult and contribute to for up-to-date messaging, accurate features, and the value they deliver.

Benefits: Accurate, compelling product communications — sales, marketing, investor pitch — 100% backed up by your technical truth, the feature set under the hood.

Challenges: You can’t automatically assume that your high-value technical teams are also experienced strategists, writers, and communicators.

Solution: Years of industry experience go into OSP’s communications toolkit. It includes refined and documented best practices, templates, and workflows tailored to the strategic and communications challenges you face daily delivering complex technical products and services.

Benefits: Flourish as an effective communicator, whether you are in sales and marketing or just have to wear that hat on top of your other responsibilities.

Challenges: Content authors hate staring at a blank page, not knowing where to go. The fear of forgetting a feature or missing a priority can be paralyzing ... or maybe you just don’t know what to write about today.

Solution: You have put in all the hard work getting to an approved strategy. Based on the Value Map, you and your teams can focus on production with confidence, your canonical source of alignment between your communications, vision, strategy, and technical truth.

Benefits: Content creation is smoothed and accelerated by building on a solid, approved informational base (your Value Map), standardized content templates, and an editorial workflow.

Challenges: Creating a comprehensive account of everything your product does is a big task. Connecting all the features to the challenges they solve, the business value they deliver to different target groups is much, much bigger.

Solution: The OSP Value Map is a repository and inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information stored as interconnected entities such as features, benefits, challenges, and personas.

Benefits: Document your product or service at every level of detail, from individual features to entire platforms, and even against your competition.

Challenges: Not everyone needs to know everything about your product, but everyone needs to speak with the same voice, using the same facts.

Solution: Working with your stakeholders, OSP helps clarify and build a collaborative understanding of what your product is, what it does, how it delivers value, and to whom.

Benefits: Keep your whole organization on message with consistent communications true to the facts under the hood while taking up less of your technical team’s time in onboarding, explaining, and helping others.

Challenges: Product data and customer research harbor great potential to deliver insights, but the more data you have, the more difficult it is to bring it all together and use it.

Solution: Sort and study your product through the lenses of its features, the challenges it addresses, the benefits it delivers, and the needs of your target personas.

Benefits: Structured access to all your product information lets all stakeholders populate sales materials, content marketing assets, technical roadmaps, and more with impactful, factual arguments.

Challenges: It is a big job to capture the information about product features, benefits, and the challenges they solve. Updating it all for every release is a massive one. Following up across published communication assets and channels is ... gargantuan.

Solution: The OSP Value Map is your structure for capturing all product information. Update your Value Map based on the release notes for every new version and patch. Tag every feature in the Value Map with a version number, and you can be ready to communicate the benefits of new features immediately, update relevant content, and unpublish deprecated materials.

Benefits: Couple your content lifecycle with your product development cycle. Keeping everyone in the loop about changes and additions benefits all stakeholders, from Sales, to Support, to Marketing, to your customers.

Challenges: Complex products with many features are a huge communication challenge, from selling and writing about them, to onboarding new team members and planning roadmaps. You need consistent (simple) stories and easy access to relevant information.

Solution: Effective sales are based on building trust. You need to recognize and address customer challenges, then provide technically accurate answers quickly and confidently.

Benefits: Prepare for calls, create sales decks, pitches, and demos quickly, accurately, and consistently from your comprehensive inventory of product features and benefits. Call up new information on the fly and pivot during a sales call or demo. Easily complete RFPs (or answer questions for one).

Challenges: Siloed product knowledge, whether locked in a senior role’s head or in a document you don’t have access to, crushes productivity and potentially productive time gets wasted asking for information or in meetings.

Solution: Give all teams and roles easy, equal access to your product information linked to relevant information (features, personas, benefits, etc.) and internal or external content assets (documentation, blogs, tutorials, videos, battle cards, data sheets, etc.) tagged by version.

Benefits: Improved autonomous and asynchronous workflows. Self-service product information speeds up everyone’s ability to get work done. Plus: Unblock your teams from time zone tyranny! Never have to wait for your team lead or product owner to wake up and get online again.

Challenges: When new people join your team, or return to a complex project after time away from it, getting them up to speed can be time-consuming. This is especially true if product information is stored in multiple systems, formats, and in varying degrees of relevance. The less structured and maintained the necessary information, the more time the new people will need from important senior technical staff before they can deliver value.

Solution: The Value Map is your comprehensive repository of accurate, up-to-date product information compiled and agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders.

Benefits: The easier it is to access reliable information, the less demand you need to place on senior staff time, the easier it is to progress to autonomy and mastery, and the quicker you can create effective communications or make informed strategic decisions.

Challenges: Creating product positioning and communications based on siloed processes — for example, leaving out key stakeholders from the tech or business sides of the house — you can end up with messaging that is inaccurate, hyperbolic, inconsistent with your technical truth, or incomplete.

Solution: OSP Value Mapping is a collaborative process, ideally involving all stakeholders — technical, business, design, etc. Together, we collect, debate, and distill facts and perspectives to arrive at a unified vision and representation of your product.

Benefits: You get a single source of truth for consistent messaging and planning, in which everyone can see themselves and their needs reflected.