Infinite Value
Fourteen Ways to Create Spinoff Products for Your Association
Summary
Associations are practical, solution-oriented organizations. We are action-oriented and ready to serve. This is both good and important. However, I’m writing this article, in part, to challenge this assumption. People don’t want more stuff. They want to be seen and they need specific help in solving their most pressing challenges.
In product development, we call this the problem space. The problem space is where our member’s cares, wants, needs, and struggles reside. Knowing this helps us get out of our “create more stuff” mindset and start thinking about a vibrant community in tune with member rhythms.
I lead the product community, a product development learning community designed specifically for associations. Let’s compare ideas and build something great.
What is Leverage?
In the product community, we preach community, cohorts, and pathways. Our sole focus isn’t creating new products, it’s understanding members so deeply that we design and implement indispensable value journeys to keep them engaged and forever connected.
To do so entails leverage: leveraging ideas, leveraging relationships, leveraging community, and leveraging choice to focus on what's most important to our member community.
Leverage is the strategic use of existing resources, relationships, knowledge, and capabilities to create enhanced or entirely new value for members with minimal additional investment. It is a cornerstone of community in which members don’t just consume content; they are active participants in maximizing impact while optimizing resource utilization. This concept works in several key ways:
Knowledge amplification: Taking existing industry data, research, or member insights and repackaging or combining them to create more valuable intelligence or solutions.
Network multiplication: Utilizing the collective power of membership to create opportunities that wouldn't exist for individual members alone.
Resource optimization: Finding ways to extend the utility of existing programs, content, or services by adapting them to serve additional purposes or audiences.
Strategic partnerships: Combining complementary strengths with other organizations to deliver enhanced offerings that neither could provide independently.
Technology enhancement: Using digital tools to scale personalized experiences or delivery automation that previously required significant human intervention.
Effective leverage means identifying these underutilized assets and finding creative ways to extract greater value from them. This might involve repurposing existing content across different formats, using member expertise to develop new educational offerings, or combining datasets to generate unique market insights that members couldn't access elsewhere.
The beauty of leverage is that it allows associations to innovate and deliver heightened value without proportionally increasing costs or workload, creating a sustainable approach to member value creation. The challenge, however, is investing in and embracing a focused strategy in which we refrain from being all things to all people and start focusing specifically on our member community’s wants, needs, and pain points.
Multiple Scale Paths
“There's more than one way to do things. There's always different points of views and styles of pitching.”
Tim Hudson
One powerful way to leverage our offerings is to embrace an ideation exercise to brainstorm and identify the myriad ways to tease out and scale our value. Again, it’s important to remember that successful products are member-centric, designed to solve specific member problems. Understanding this will help us understand their needs, wants, struggles, and pain points. Two ways of determining this is to (a) develop an empathy map or (b) to define an ideal member profile.
Once we have this grounding, we can think broadly and openly about how to meet these needs. In the product community, we call this multiple scale paths (see graphic labeled The Reach of a Product). Multiple scale paths is an ideation framework that helps associations tease out and explore new ways of delivering value to their membership.
I developed multiple scale paths for three reasons: (a) as a way of leveraging a finely tuned product portfolio, (b) as a way of scaling community and reaching new members, and (c) as a way of developing new focused value that meets members needs while simultaneously not breaking the bank. If we are intentional about understanding and engaging our community and use a product framework to organize and build value, we can become increasingly efficient, accurate, and relevant in the ways we create an association-wide value engine.
In multiple scale paths, I have identified fourteen different ways to leverage a program, product, service, or piece of content. That is, holistically conceived, properly designed, and sufficiently aligned, we can identify infinite possibilities to reach our members in new ways. This challenge is not to create a bloated portfolio, but to develop and build products that have a unique combination of likability, performance, focus and reach. Here are descriptions of the fourteen ways to scale a product:
Location – Frames the physical locations or geographic markets a product can be sold or delivered.
Package – Addresses the multiple ways a product can be packaged. This example includes: single product, as part of a bundle or pathway, or as part of a library. There are many more.
Market – Defines the discrete current audiences in which we can market a product. At a medical association, this can mean clinicians or advanced practice providers, physicians, industry, patients, or inter-professional teams. These are just the broad markets for a single association. Given a sufficiently defined value proposition and focus, we can leverage our products to markets far outside the bread and butter core market.
Specialty – Signifies market by area of speciality. In some ways, this is a narrow or niche market segment that has particular needs and could be marketed to as a discrete buyer. For instance, at an association that serves lung health, this can mean pulmonologists, critical care doctors, sleep medicine doctors, respiratory therapists, or tangent members of a healthcare team.
Buyer – Defines the market by the size and fidelity of the buyer. For instance, it’s possible to position, market, or sell a product to individuals, teams, divisions, institutions, or consortia. Each of these can be a target market.
Track – Defines a discrete market slice that transcends professional expertise by drawing focusing on how people engage and consume learning: topic-based, skills-based, problem-based, collaborative, pathway, or cohort.
Distribution Channel – Lays out all the channels that one can sell, market, or distribute a product. This can be a 3rd party reseller, sales agent, approved partner, or license.
Features – Frames the possible ways to define core and possible ways to extend the value of a particular product. Examples include: modular, facilitated, off shelf, live, tailored, interactive, broadcast, streamed, hands-on, or simulated.
Modality – Lists all the ways that a product can be delivered such as: in-person, online, hybrid, on-demand, or gamified. Similar to distribution channel and track.
Developmental – Frames products to beginner markets (101 content or programming) as well as advanced markets (401 content or programming) as well as anywhere in between (201, 301). Excellent for creating guided pathways or longitudinal learning journeys.
When Offered – Conveys when a product is offered: now or live, recorded, spaced, ongoing, or lifetime access.
Price – Helps position our value at different price points to reach new markets perhaps at a low-level entree point or the initial touchpoint of a value ladder.
Data – Frames, markets, and sells the data that is collected during the process of consuming a product, attending an event, or taking a course. Examples include analytics, outcomes, intelligence, or raw data.
Funder – Helps to position your value based on who is helping fund its development and implementation. For instance, a pharmaceutical company may fund programming to solve a particular problem in the cancer space. This is just one way to target a niche market or focus your programming to reach people outside your bread and butter membership.
Of course, identifying the myriad ways to scale a particular product is not the same thing as actually doing the work and achieving the results. It takes a product strategy and it takes an investment in value creation, new skills for staff, a bias for cross-functional collaboration, and the courage to work with volunteers in a focused and strategic way.
How It Works in Practice
“When you are having fun, and creating something you love, it shows in the product.”
Tom Ford
To use multiple scale paths in your association, I recommend the following:
Convene a group of staff engaged in value creation. Diverse lenses make for surprising builds and creative ideation.
Utilize a whiteboard. This can be software or a physical whiteboard.
Describe an ideal member. List this person’s problems to be solved, but also humanize the member by describing their traits, wants, needs, and rhythms. The person you describe is the focus of the exercise.
Choose an existing offering. Use a single, existing product line (publication, event, course, membership, etc.) and describe how it currently meets the ideal member’s needs.
Identify three paths for possible evolution. Using the multiple scale paths ideation framework, choose three paths from the list of fourteen.
Brainstorm! Starting individually, write as many variations of the existing offering on individual post-it notes. Start with the examples from the Reach of the Product graphic. At this stage, be creative, open, and nonjudgmental. Brainstorm as many as 25-30 ideas.
Discuss as a team. Using the whiteboard and the post-it notes start to debrief, discuss, and build on individual ideas. Start to group similar ideas into themes.
Vote and discuss. As a group, discuss which ideas are viable, feasible, and desirable.
One of my more popular articles is Ten Product Ideas. In it, I stress the importance of idea generation, leveraging energy, and using tools to envision new value for our membership. These products have been leveraged from existing value and can also be leveraged themselves to create additional spinoffs, new products, and endless engagement opportunities.
Remember, new products are often (and should be) created by leveraging underutilized value. In the product community, we utilize a competency-based product framework to build new products in groups of engaged, innovative peers. These are our differentiators and areas of focus:
Deep and ongoing knowledge of the membership community.
Integrated value creation in the conception, design, development, delivery, and performance.
Repeatable and reusable across your product portfolio.
Resulting in an engaged and healthy culture focused on durable engagement and longitudinal momentum.
A sole focus on growth, which drives new and diversified revenue.
If you are interested in association innovation, growing or diversifying your revenue, extending your engagement, or simply building new products in a high-impact, creative, and collaborative environment, we encourage you to check out the product community.
Our Clear Focus
“Design is optimism in action.”
Lucy Flores
This article is entitled “Infinite Value” not “Bombard Members with More Products”.
One of our biggest challenges is falling under the spell of creating things solely to create things. People don’t want more stuff, but they do want to be understood. They want their problems solved and they want to engage in communities of willing participants. Our members are hungry for learning, not one-way content. They are hungry for connection and finding novel ways of approaching and creating bridges in a world of increasing chaos.
Serving members means understanding members with clarity and empathy. Yes, we distribute content and host events, but we also create community. Using tools like multiple scale paths can help us build relationships and anticipate member needs. Experimenting with new value through prototyping, testing, and pilots gets us in the game of understanding our communities in ways that expose what works and contributes to serial connection.
I lead the product community; we are a learning community because we believe great relationships help us create the value our members want. Remember, product-led growth fuels connection. Join the product community and flip your destiny.
About the Author
James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the product community®. Jim is an engaging trainer and leading thinker in the worlds of associations, learning communities, and product development. Prior to starting the product community®, Jim served as Chief Learning Officer at both the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of College and University Planning. Please contact me for a conversation: james@productcommunity.us