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Let me start by briefly reminding you of what a product strategy is and why it matters. A product strategy is a cohesive set of choices that acts as a decision-making framework to achieve product success. To do so, it should answer the following questions:
An effective product strategy provides guardrails to make the right choices and decide what to build. It aligns stakeholders and development teams, and it enables you to set the right outcomes/OKRs and deliver the right features.
The reverse is also true: Without a clear strategy, product teams usually struggle to decide what features to build. In the worst case, they throw stuff against the wall and hope that something will stick, or they are driven by stakeholder requests, which risks creating a Frankenstein product—a product with a terrible value proposition and horrible user experience.
It’s not uncommon in my experience that the product strategy only exists in the mind of a senior manager, like the Head of Product or the CEO, or that it is tacitly known by the product team members. But a strategy that hasn’t been clearly articulated is difficult to work with, communicate, and evolve. In the worst case, people disagree about what it is, and misalignment occurs.
The first step, therefore, is to effectively state the current product strategy. To do this, choose a suitable tool, like my Product Vision Board shown in Figure 1.
I designed the Product Vision Board as a thinking and communications tool that helps you ask the right questions and capture important strategic product decisions. Its top section states the product vision, which describes the ultimate reason for offering the product. The bottom four sections describe the product strategy. The leftmost captures the target group, the users and customers of the product. The next section states the customer and user needs—the main problem the product addresses or the primary benefit it creates. The third section describes the product’s standout features. These are the capabilities that set it apart from competing offerings and encourage people to use it instead of alternatives. The last section finally shares the business goals, the business benefits the product offers, for example, generating revenue or reducing costs.
You can download the Product Vision Board together with a checklist that helps you successfully apply it from my website for free, and you can learn more about how to use it by watching the following video:
While it is very helpful for the person in charge of the product to clearly describe the current product strategy, it is even better to involve the key stakeholders and development team representatives and run a collaborative workshop.[1] This allows you to align people and ensure that everyone has the same understanding of what the strategy is.
To jointly capture the strategy, print out the Product Vision Board and bring adhesive notes for an on-site workshop, or use an electronic version for an online session. Many collaboration tools, including Miro and Lucid, offer their implementations of the Product Vision Board. Ask the workshop attendees to describe the vision, target group, needs, stand-out features, and business goals on separate notes. Next, invite people to share their views, starting with the vision. Once all notes have been read out and added to the board, summarise those that are similar. Then discuss any conflicting statements. Use data whenever possible to resolve issues. All workshop attendees should at least consent to the strategy and not object to its content to ensure strong enough buy-in and alignment.
Consider using a dedicated facilitator to moderate the workshop, for instance, the team coach or Scrum Master. This allows you, the person in charge of the product, to focus on shaping the product strategy instead of having to ensure that everybody is heard and nobody dominates.
Once you’ve captured the current product strategy, objectively assess it. Even if your product has been successful so far, this does not mean that its strategy will continue to be effective. To understand if it will help you achieve product success in the future, answer the questions below. Don’t rush this step, and make sure that your answers are backed up by data.
If the answer to the questions in 1 is yes and no to all other questions, the current product strategy will most likely help you achieve product success in the future. You might still want to adjust it, though, based on your newly gained insights. For example, you might introduce a new need, rework a stand-out feature (and possibly determine the need to adjust the tech stack), or change a business goal.
If the previous step has shown that your product can’t create the desired value or that it is significantly affected by new trends or changes in the competitive landscape, the business or portfolio strategy, you will have to replace the current strategy with a new one. To do so, take the following three actions.
Carry out Just-Enough Initial Research
In case there is a lot of uncertainty or change, you may have to conduct just enough market, competitor, and technology research to acquire the relevant knowledge that enables you to create a new product strategy, without having to resort to speculation or guesswork.
Formulate a New Product Strategy
Choose a new strategy that seems most promising based on your current knowledge. Follow the advice shared in step 1 to capture your initial decisions, and consider co-creating the strategy with key stakeholders and development team reps.
Correct and Refine the Strategy
While your new strategy might sound amazing, it would be wrong to assume that it is effective. The approach you have chosen might contain hidden assumptions and risks, or some of its statements might be vague. To avoid the danger of implementing a strategy that fails to achieve product success, you should systematically test, correct, and refine it.
A great way to do this is to follow the iterative, risk-driven approach shown in Figure 2.[2] Start by selecting the biggest risk contained in the strategy—the uncertainty that must be addressed now so that you don’t make the wrong decisions and take the product down the wrong path. Next, determine how to best address the risk, for example, by interviewing customers or by vibe coding a prototype. Then implement the measure and collect the relevant data. Finally, determine if and how the strategy has to be changed and apply the necessary corrections and refinements. You might have discovered, for instance, that a stand-out feature was not strong enough or that a business goal was unclear. Follow this process until no significant desirability, feasibility, viability, or ethicality risks are left.
Involve the key stakeholders and dev team reps in the strategizing work. This helps you leverage their knowledge, creates alignment, and builds buy-in, as I explain in more detail in the article Product Strategy Discovery.
With an effective product strategy in place, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you are done. After all, you now have a framework in place that helps you make the right product discovery and deliver decisions. But therein lies an issue: The product strategy captures a high-level approach; it establishes some broad guardrails. But it does not state clear, measurable, time-bound objectives.
I therefore recommend that you take a further step and derive an actionable, outcome-based product roadmap from your strategy. The roadmap should contain specific, quarterly product goals that show how the strategy will likely be implemented. A great tool for this is my GO Product Roadmap, which you can download for free with a handy checklist from my website, where more guidance on product roadmaps is also available. If you already have a product roadmap, then check if it is aligned with the strategy. If that’s the case, that’s great. Otherwise, rework it or replace it with a new outcome-based one.
If creating an entire product roadmap is too daunting, then don’t worry. Simply set a single, clear product goal for the next three months that is aligned with the strategy and gets you a step closer to meeting its needs and business goals. Then use the outcome to discover what features and UX the product should offer. Once you’ve met the goal, you may be able to look ahead further and build an outcome-based roadmap for the next nine to twelve months, as I explain in more detail in the article How to Get Started with Outcome-Based Product Roadmaps.
Involve the key stakeholders and development team representatives in setting the outcomes and building the roadmap. This not only aligns them. It allows you to draw on their knowledge and increases the chances that they will support the plan.
Finally, make sure that you regularly inspect and adapt the product strategy together with the product roadmap—at least once per quarter, as a rule of thumb.
This enables you to be proactive, take advantage of opportunities and counter threats early on, and quickly respond to relevant developments in the market, competitive landscape, and technology space.[3]
A great way to do this is to schedule quarterly collaborative workshops with the key stakeholders and development team reps, and to complement them with weekly strategizing work. The former allows you to realign people and look at bigger developments and trends. The latter enables you to quickly spot and respond to relevant developments. Figure 3 illustrates this approach, which I explain in more detail in the article Continuous Strategizing.
Creating an effective strategy for an existing product is a process that consists of five steps: Clearly describe the current product strategy; determine if it will achieve success moving forward; if that’s not the case, replace it with a new approach; and derive an actionable, outcome-based product roadmap to connect strategic decisions to product discovery and product delivery. Finally, regularly review the product strategy to respond to opportunities and threats early. As Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” Figure 4 visualises the five steps. You can download the graphic here.
[1] If you use extended product teams—something I encourage—the workshop attendees are the team members. See my article Building High-Performing Product Teams.
[2] The approach is loosely based on Eric Ries’ build-measure-learn cycle and described in more detail in my book Strategize, 2nd ed.
[3] As reviewing the strategy includes assessing its effectiveness, you essentially loop back to the second step and enter a new quarterly strategy cycle. This shows that strategizing is best understood as an iterative, ongoing process rather than a phase or stage. I explain this approach in more detail in the articles The Strategy Cycle and Continuous Strategizing.
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