How to Know if Your Product Strategy Has Worked
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READING TIME
4 min & 16 sec
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βDear es,β
Your Strategy can be perfectly thought-out, based on well-researched insights, co-created by Individual Contributors and Leadership, and contain sustainable advantages over alternatives. But if nobody understands it and you can't integrate it into teams' decision-making processes, the value of Product Strategy will remain locked.
The degree to which Product Strategy is executable depends on many factors like your teamβs abilities, organizational structures, and more. But the two aspects I want to focus on in this essay are the following:
An executable format: Can you translate the messy work of choosing and connecting components into formats that resonate? As mentioned in the Just Enough Strategy chapter, don't treat canvases or statement structures like the defining guardrails for your strategy. See them as simplified windows into what you're trying to say.
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βThe measurability of execution: By nature, your product strategy will make and connect qualitative statements about what you will and will not do. While this is the first step towards enabling teams to say no, you must further remove subjectivity from these choices. One of the most effective ways to do that is to translate choices into measurable indicators of progress and success.
For measuring the execution of Analytico's Product Strategy choices, the key question is: "Twelve months from now, which three metrics would tell us that this Strategy choice has worked?"
For a Strategy choice like expanding their market to upstart mobile-first eCommerce shops in the US, their metrics need to go beyond "Total Revenue" or "Number of Clients." These are reactive KPIs, but not proactive measures of strategic progress.
Instead, they would use metrics like
- Number of new US clients with 30 days of continuous incoming data
- % of renewed first-time US customers
- Volume of tracked native app events from the US App Store
Translating your strategy into metrics will feel particularly easy if you approach your strategy creation from the βAtomicβ perspective I discussed before; you assembled and connected strategy components to form the overarching strategy patterns.
Here's where you can find the first two parts of this mini-series on the valuable attributes of Product Strategy:
βPart 1: How to Stop Saying Yes to Everything in Your Product Strategyβ
βPart 2: How to Build a Product Strategy That Fits Your Companyβs Focusβ
HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE
- Avoid Evergreen Metrics. If you can plug a metric into any quarter or year, it won't help you measure strategic progress.
- Try to predict the future. Pick metrics that you would proudly present at the next summer party as indicators that your strategy has worked. And then set the right ambition level.
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Keep the formats simple. Donβt let the format hold you back from doing the work. Writing out your Product Strategy in simple bullets answering the key questions can be enough to bring choices across.
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Thank you for Practicing Product,
βTimβ
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I'm excited to bring my beloved in-person workshops back to Berlin in January 2025. You can choose between 1-day workshops on Product Strategy, Product OKRs, or Product Discovery OR get the full 3-day experience for you or your team.
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As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.
I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.
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