What is your framework for strategy development for your products?

This is a multi-step, iterative process but I can speak it to from a large, diverse company perspective. Lean Startup concept. and the book Running Lean by Ash Mauraya is very helpful. You will want to validate qualitatively first then verify quantitatively later. Let's assume you are building Square's mobile payment hardware and software. The biggest risk to your product?  Lack of demand.  Be ruthless in coming up with a plan and then presenting it to customers quickly to validate.  First step is to identify a specific set of pain points to a specific set of customers. The more specific, the better. The complication is that there are many customers with various needs.  In the example, you need to hypothesize that customers could be: event-based food vendors, small business owners without offices, non-profits, municipalities and more.  And each of these have a specific problem that they need solving. I also employ the use of customer "personas", which describe how customers think, their goals, their constraints, where they shop, what media they look at, how much money they have, etc.  So when you do customer validation, you are checking both the appropriateness of your solution to their problem but also the persona itself, which will used for marketing, pricing, etc. later. Next, focus on your unique value proposition.  Unique can mean lower-priced but usually it provides a unique benefit that other competitors don't.  If you've found your pain point, specific customer, and unique value proposition - you are doing well. The next in order, are: -Define solution - features, benefits tied to pain points -Unfair advantage - what can't be copied or stolen from you when a bigger, better funded competitor enters this market -Revenue streams - amount and type of charge - asset sale, subscription, etc. -Cost structure -Path to customers For larger companies, executives are very focused on how this product/service fits into the larger portfolio of existing businesses?  Will this cannabilize existing businesses?  Is this an up-sell to current customers?  If it targets new customers, are we confident we can meet their needs? Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics are great for measuring quantitatively. Be warned that a good strategy, as defined by product-market fit, is probably more art than science.

You can try to use the 4-step Customer Development process suggested by Steve Blank - http://www.slideshare.net/venturehacks/customer-development-methodology-presentation. It made a big impression on me and changed my thinking about product development.