When I was in 6th grade, I got a letter from the Tel-Aviv Municipality. Don’t get over-excited, all the 6-graders in Tel-Aviv got one. The letter informed me that there are two special middle schools operating in the city, and I could apply to either (or even both). One was the School of Environmental and Social Nature, and the other was the School of the Arts. I read the letter, and immediately felt I must get into the art school. It was such a strong feeling that I couldn’t ignore it. 

When I told my mother that I want to apply for the School of the Arts, she laughed. She said “you?! What are you going to do there?” You see, I was ‘the smart kid’, I was also a professional swimmer back then, but I had just resigned from my piano lessons, I wasn’t a great painter, so her surprise was not inappropriate. Since I kept feeling this strong appeal towards the School of the Arts, I read the letter again. I went to seek what is it that I could do there, and perhaps understand this sudden emotion that has struck me. I read the letter carefully, and then it became super clear: I wanted to apply for the Theater program. I wanted to become an actress.

I remember this moment as if it was yesterday. That’s where my affair with the acting world began. It felt like a supernatural force drew me to that world, a force that I couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) resist. It was strong enough to convince my mother to give it a shot, and I applied.

I didn’t pass that audition, though, and ended up in the default middle school I was assigned instead. But since that revelation – that this thing that I like so much is actually acting – I passed many other auditions, performed as part of the youth group of Israel’s National Theater, and in other groups as an adult. I studied part-time programs in the best theater schools in Israel, alongside some people who later became famous actors and comedians.

I love theater and acting so much. Although I decided on a different career path eventually (not easily, trust me), this is one thing that still fills my heart with joy. Standing barefoot on an empty stage transcends me to a different world. It’s a spiritual experience.

Over the years, I asked myself many times what would have happened had I not gotten that letter from the Tel-Aviv Municipality. At which point in time – if at all – would I have realized that I love acting? What I felt when I realized that was overwhelming excitement. I remember my heart pounding. I actually feel it now, too – more than 30 years after it happened – when I’m even just writing about it. So it was definitely a strong unmet need if I translate it to the product world. But I didn’t know I had it until someone suggested that I do something about it. I literally never thought about it that way before.

Sometimes, it happens with your customers as well. They might have a huge unmet need but never framed it as such even for themselves. That’s why the product pitch is so important and you shouldn’t rush right into the demo in a sales call. Sometimes – more frequently than you probably think – your customers need to hear you describing their world in order to understand themselves better.

Today I want to give you access to an amazing tool that helps you help your customers (and your company) understand what they need. We are going to talk about the beauty of Maturity Models.

Creating Clarity in a Complex World

A maturity model is a tool that I really like and use a lot with my consulting customers as they are creating their product strategy. The idea is to break down a domain – usually a customer segment or even your general potential market – into smaller, more specific, product-related segments. The maturity model spans across a range and its parts usually build one on top of the other.

I’ll use the story of one of the participants in the CPO Bootcamp to demonstrate the power of these models. As the VP Product of a growth-stage startup, this participant realized that while the company goals were to enter the enterprise market segment, this definition was still too broad and it entailed different needs of different types of companies. To help the company management discuss it more productively, she started segmenting all of their potential customers by company size: SMBs (up to 100 employees), mid-market (100-1,000 employees), Large (1,000 to 10,000 employees), and Extra-Large (10,000 employees and above). While this might sound super trivial, this framing alone created clarity and a common language for everyone to even start the discussion. She could then explain what are the different needs of each such segment, and how they view the world. Prior to using this tool, management didn’t get why are there different sub-segments within the enterprise segment. I mean, they did know that large and extra-large companies existed, but they needed this framework to dive a bit deeper into understanding that there are significant differences between the two.

This is a very simplistic maturity model, and often it is the one I start with since it creates at least a basic segmentation that everyone understands immediately. But your product pitch typically requires something a bit more sophisticated. Here are examples that I have used.

Maturity Model Examples

Maturity model based on company size, age, or lifecycle stage (e.g. startup vs. growth stage vs. corporate): this is usually a great starting point to even create the boundaries of the world you want to discuss. For example, with the CPO Bootcamp participant I mentioned above, the discussion management needed to have is to decide when are they are going after the Extra-Large segment – this year or next year. Once this year’s targets become clearer, one of the models below can be used to segment further within this year’s target market.

Maturity model based on the resource investment or knowledge that a company has around a certain problem: when I was the VP of Product at Twiggle, we worked on a new approach for e-commerce product search. We worked with the largest e-tailers in the world. They absolutely loved our solution. But when the time has come to pay for it, they didn’t want to. Not because they didn’t have the budget for it, it was actually quite the opposite: they wanted to do it themselves, and probably could. Amazon and a few other companies had so many resources invested in search (think thousands of engineers), that they could afford to build something similar to what we built in-house. It was a strategic investment for them. By creating a maturity model that segmented e-tailers by their level of investment in search, we could aim one tier lower, to the ones who had the problem but couldn’t afford to solve it on their own.

Maturity model based on the gap size: in other words, a model based on how severe the problem is for various companies. When I started at Twiggle, I went to do some customer discovery and met with Wix’s head of eCommerce at the time. When I described our solution, he started laughing. Wix’s customers were very small eCommerce shops, and search wasn’t a problem there. Think about someone who only sells hand watches. Search is not so complicated for them, and depending on the inventory it might not even be necessary at all (filtering by predefined criteria might be sufficient). This insight led me to create a model that explained when product search becomes too complex and a company would want to invest time and money in solving it. It had to do with the diversity of the inventory, its volume, the data quality they had, and other factors.

Maturity model based on the customer’s previous attempts to solve the problem: this is by far my favorite model, and usually combines insights from all the models mentioned above. I have used it for myself and for my customers many times. Unlike the previous models that help you mostly in framing things for yourself and helping you in focusing the company, this model can actually be part of your product pitch and help your customers understand themselves better. In this model, you outline a typical customer’s attempt to solve the problem you are solving. For product leaders who want to excel in their jobs, for example, the journey might look something like this: phase 1 – try to do it without help and realize it’s harder than they thought; phase 2 – read books and listen to podcasts; phase 3 – find an informal mentor in their community; and phase 4 – seek professional mentoring. 

How to Use Your Maturity Model

First of all, creating a maturity model helps you create clarity for yourself and others. In other words, it helps you think. When you create a maturity model for your product, it usually becomes clear which segments or phases in this model are the best fit for your company. Sometimes, there would be two different phases that could be relevant and you need to decide which is the right one for you, or are you going after both.

Note that by creating a maturity model you are actually creating a new language for everyone to speak as you are making your decision. For example, you can start discussing the different needs of customers at each stage, and understand (and get everyone to understand) if the same product can satisfy multiple stages or not. It often raises go-to-market questions and helps you show trade-offs between different approaches. 

Defining the stages in the model could also be a team effort. It’s a great way to leverage the insight that your customer-facing peers have, and engage them in the product strategy from the get-go. Once the stages are well defined, smarter decisions can be made and important questions arise more quickly.

But one of the most important ways to use your maturity model is not for internal alignment and discussion, but rather in front of your customers. Doing so helps you in multiple ways.

First, it helps your potential customers understand the world the same way you do. You created a common ground for a discussion and helped them organize their thoughts.

Then, it helps them identify themselves in your model. This goes a long way. They might now first understand that they have an unmet need like I did with my love of acting. But even if they did know that before, they now see that you fully understand them. They have found themselves in what you said, and they start trusting you.

This, in turn, opens up an opportunity to discuss their needs in depth. They have a framework to relate to as they speak, and they already trust you to share where they really are and what they think they need. This becomes a common revelation journey rather than a sales call.

Last but not least, when you share with your customers a model that you have created that analyzes their own world, it means that you know their world. As you present it, you can use framing such as “from our experience, a company goes through 4 phases in dealing with this problem, and here they are”. This implies, or even says so explicitly, that you have experience in this market. You have seen enough to run an analysis and provide insight. You might be someone I want to work with and learn from.

I often hear product leaders that are afraid of telling others what they already know. But as in my example above, you don’t always know enough even about yourself. Help your customers understand themselves better by sharing with them how you view their world. This will be of great value for them, and consequently for you as well.