WRITTEN BY DEVON O’ROURKE, FOUNDER & MANAGING PARTNER
A Marketecture (or Marchitecture) not only forms the foundation for how your products are packaged, marketed, and sold, they also provide the vision for how your products will evolve. Product teams can and should use Marketectures to plan roadmaps, with each launch representing a new building block. Despite its importance, there isn’t a standard, universal definition of what constitutes a Maketecutre. So let me have a go at it:
MARKETECTURE
mar·chi·tec·ture | \ ˈmär-kə-ˌtek-chər
A Marketecture is a non-technical representation of products, systems, services and how they interact and relate to one another. It is used to help unify the various components of a product or service into a digestible format. Additionally, it helps illustrate what is core functionality (baked in, necessary) vs add-on (flexible, additive). A Marketecture should make it easy for an audience to understand how products and/or services work together to orchestrate a solution to a problem.
How to build a (simple) Marketecture
Start by boiling down all of your products into 3-5 core buckets (core product areas) that encompass the full solution you offer. This will form the top of your Marketecture hierarchy.
Reflect on these core product areas and map out which play off of - or connect to - one another. Ideally, you define a linear progression from Product Area 1 to Product Area 2, etc.
From there, go through each product and feature within your offering and assign each to one of the core product areas.
Highlight which of these products and features are baked into your core offering (i.e. cannot be added or removed) and which are additive (generally, an upsell with an additional cost).
Showcase the Marketecture to internal stakeholders across Sales, Product, Customer Success, Professional Services, etc and with trusted external contacts to ensure it’s clearly understood. Iterate and refine as needed.
Finally, take this as an opportunity to ensure all of our product/feature names are clear and align with how they are positioned. Re-name as needed. (This is also an opportunity to build or revisit your packaging and pricing strategy, but we’ll touch on that later).
One of the best ways to go about building a Marketecture is to get key stakeholders in a room and conduct a workshop. Check out our approach.
Now that we have a shared understanding of what a Marketecture is and how to go about building one, let’s discuss its multiple benefits.
Bring internal alignment and enables customer-facing teams
Most technology solutions tend to be complicated to understand, particularly for non-technical audiences. Even technical folks often struggle to understand the macro view of how individual products and features fit together to form a solution. The more complex your product, the more important your Marketecture, and the exercise itself will be. Marketectures help internal teams come to a shared understanding of how these various pieces come together, which will translate into more effective and consistent communication to prospects and customers.
Provide the foundation for product roadmaps and external messaging
Product Managers don’t often get an opportunity to step up and out of their role and into a higher altitude to observe how their product(s) fit into a larger solution. Marketectures provide them with that opportunity. In doing so, Product teams can better align their roadmaps to enhance the core areas that support the entire solution, with each additional product launch building upon the Marketecture’s foundation.
Package and price your products and services more effectively
If you aren’t already selling solution-based packages, there is no better time to start than now. Using the Marketecture as a menu, select which products and features to include in a handful (usually three) distinct packages (Good, Better, Best format). Each package should have products and features from every core product area with incremental enhancements as you progress; doing so will help reinforce your solution narrative and highlight your product differentiators. Lastly, by bundling products together into packages (vs selling products ad hoc), you have the opportunity to instill confidence during the decision phase (give customers limited choices that align with their needs) to increase win rates and generate higher average sales price (ASP).