The Art of Product Strategy
Simplifying decision making
What a hack is a product strategy?
Can anyone give a concise definition of it?
For many years, I tried to find a concise answer to this question. It took me a lot of time to understand its essence.
It’s not about how you set your approach but how it increases the odds of thriving.
Now comes the catch: Digital product management is anything but simple. The core of everything is hitting reality, learning, and adapting to what makes sense while ditching what distracts us. Easier said than done.
Product strategy done right simplifies decision-making. The strategy conveys:
The value created
Who to serve
What they care about
Success metrics
How to differentiate from the competition
A good strategy isn’t set in stone. It evolves as you learn from reality.
Shall we dig a bit deeper?
This is the premium episode of this month, and I want to do something slightly different:
Free members: High-level of good strategy and common traps
Premium members: Free access to my course How to Craft a Product Strategy that Works
Let’s get into it.
Product Strategy Fundamentals
You will have multiple ways of implementing your product strategy. I don’t believe there’s the right one, but I do believe there is something we want to answer.
Why → Clarity on the purpose
Who → Target audience
What → Product dynamics
How → Your value proposition
When → Milestones to measure success
Answering the above is what matters most. How you do it isn’t the most relevant part. Yet, I noticed many teams struggling with it. Here’s how I do it:
Let me give you some more clarity.
1. Product Vision
A Product vision is customer-centric, memorable, audacious, and achievable.
Once you have a meaningful product vision, you can challenge roadmap items whenever they are unrelated to the vision. You can also question feature requests that don’t help you get closer to your vision.
Get your free template to simplify crafting your vision.
Read my Product Vision 101 for more insights.
2. Lean Canvas
The Lean Canvas clarifies the most relevant aspects behind your business idea.
It also facilitates making decisions on the business fundamentals, iterating, learning, and adapting.
Yet, getting all the blocks together can be time-consuming. You need to align with your audience, the problem you choose to solve, your unique selling proposition, etc. Such decisions require many considerations. Yet, a well-crafted Lean Canvas will help you accelerate decision-making.
Here’s a free template for you :)
You can also read this post for more insights.
3. Value Curve
The result of creating a Value Curve creates alignment on key differentiation aspects.
This technique is from the Blue Ocean strategy. It has four aspects in comparison to your competition:
Eliminate → Define what your product doesn’t offer
Reduce → Select a few product attributes to give less emphasis
Raise → Define the features you want to increase the value
Create → Start doing something unavailable in the market
You may wonder how to start with the value curve. No worries, I get you covered with another free template.
4. Roadmap
Connecting the future with the present is the job of a meaningful product roadmap.
The roadmap becomes the glue between the future and now. Yet, that can quickly become a blessing or a curse. Prescriptive roadmaps will trap teams. The key lies in directions and not instructions. You can achieve that in multiple ways.
My favorite template is my adaption of the Now, Next, Later by Janna Bastow.
Who’s Responsible for the Product Strategy?
Let me break something to you.
The Product Manager is unlikely to be responsible for the product strategy. Yet, the PM is responsible for bringing it to life.
Often, the strategy is set by someone with strong decision-making power—ideally, a Product Lead, Head of Product, VP of Product, CPO, or equivalent. That depends a lot on your company’s setup.
What I see is the following:
Leadership sets the strategy
Product managers confront it with reality
Leadership and product managers adapt the strategy
It’s a collaborative game
The core aspect isn’t who sets the strategy but how you deal with it. A few key points:
Strategy must evolve according to your situation
Learning speed is your unfair advantage (Running Lean approach by Ash Maurya)
Discovery and Delivery enable strategy validation and adaption
How to Craft a Product Strategy that Works
Enough of theory; time to get hands-on.
One of the core aspects of product strategy is learning speed. The faster you confront reality, the quicker you can adapt to what works. Yet, the more you speculate, the more you commit to a plan and lack evidence that it works.
As humans, the more we invest in something, the more we’re willing to invest in it.
Crafting a product strategy for days or weeks will make you believe the plan “must” be correct. That won’t help you. Sooner than you imagine, deploying the plan becomes the goal, which is not the intent of a sound product strategy.
Let me give you good news: you can break free from that. I can help you with that.
Get my book: I broke down everything I wish I had known about product management, equipping you to face reality while doing what matters, not what distracts you.
Watch my strategy course: I put everything I know about strategy in a three-hour video-paced course, to which ALL PREMIUM subscribers are about to get free access.
If you’re wondering about becoming a premium subscriber to access the course. Here’s what you will get from the course:
Understand what good and bad product strategy look like
Learn how to craft a product strategy that works
Clarity on different types of business model
Proven methods to test and adapt your product strategy fast enough
Real-world examples
3 hours of self-paced course
10+ templates
20+ additional resources
Crafting a Strategy that Reduces the Odds of Failure
Today, I’m trying something different because I value your premium subscription. Instead of writing a detailed article, I’m giving you free access to my Product Strategy course (Cost 79 USD).
This course has received great resonance from product people. It’s all about helping you do what matters most while almost everyone distracts you from it.
Are you ready for that?