Product Readiness is a metric in B2B that defines the amount of work needed on a product to make it live for the maximum number of customers (or all customers using the product). If the Product Readiness Score is 100%, then the product doesn’t require any further work from the product and development teams, and only maintenance is needed. However, in certain scenarios, even with a Product Readiness Score of 100%, the product and development teams might want to focus on innovation to increase the product’s Total Addressable Market (TAM). The Product Readiness Score can be measured in two ways:

  1. Defining the entire scope of the product before the development stage and periodically gauging how much has been achieved. Once your vision is final and your roadmap is in shape, the feature list might change from the initial scope due to varying priorities and customer requirements. In such scenarios, the feature list and product readiness score can be adjusted.

  2. Conducting a competitive analysis of other products and identifying what they offer to their customers in the same space. Since you are targeting customers who use similar products in the market, this provides a good benchmark for your product and a better metric for the Product Readiness Score.

Note: Competitive analysis is crucial, even if you aim to bring innovation to the market. Otherwise, it will be challenging for customers transitioning from other products to your platform. Such a situation can be catastrophic for your product, where you end up dealing with constant escalations, and as a result, you might start developing products for individual customers, leading to a diluted vision and roadmap, resulting in firefighting on all fronts.

The exercise of calculating the Product Readiness Score can be done easily. You would list all the features you want to build in the product, which should be a combination of both your vision/roadmap and the competitive analysis you might have conducted, along with whether each feature is available in your product or not. In the end, you would simply calculate the percentage of features that are available in your product. Suppose you’re building a food ordering app; your product readiness exercise might look something like this:

Feature Available?
1. The user is able to log in. Yes
2. The user is able to add an address to their profile. Yes
3. The user is able to search for restaurants. No
4. The user is able to order food. Yes
Product Readiness Score 75%

Product Stages Based on Product Readiness Score:

1. Early Stage Product

  • Score: If your Product Readiness Score is less than 75%.
  • Focus:
    • Consider your product to be in the early stage.
    • Have a few definition partners (ideally not more than three) who can provide feedback on the development work you’re doing.
    • Align these definition partners with the co-development of the product to prevent escalations and minimize the need for leadership intervention.
    • Communicate any pivots during product development candidly with the definition partners.
    • Be hyper-focused on customer feedback and the evolving landscape of your industry, as this stage provides ample opportunity to pivot the product with lower costs.
    • Use this stage to test your hypotheses with customers to ensure product-market fit.
  • Goals:
    • Create a minimum viable product that solves the customer’s business use cases.

2. Mid-Stage Product

  • Score: If your Product Readiness Score is between 75% and 90%.
  • Focus:
    • Successfully develop most (if not all) features needed for customer onboarding (minimum viable product).
    • You’re on the right path to becoming competitive in the market.
    • Provide a decent product to your definition partners.
    • Balance development priorities with implementation escalations.
    • Focus on reducing technical debt to support growth and maintain performance.
  • Goals:
    • Make your product easy to configure to minimize “time-to-value” for customers.
    • Enhance product usability to reduce the need for extensive training for customers and implementation teams.

3. Mature Product

  • Score: If your Product Readiness Score is more than 90%.
  • Focus:
    • You have a successful product that can be scaled to multiple customers simultaneously.
    • Minimal intervention should be required during product implementations.
    • Reduce the additional product and development resources assigned to the product during the previous stage and shift focus to other products.
  • Goals:
    • Analyze support tickets and customer requirements to close any remaining gaps and achieve ~100% of the Product Readiness Score.
    • Increase the TAM of the product by introducing innovative features.
    • Consider moving the product back to the Early Stage Product category if disruptive innovations are introduced, to incorporate increased TAM and new features.