How to Build a Product Strategy That Fits Your Companyβs Focus
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READING TIME
3 min & 14 sec
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βDear es,β
Besides being decisive, another attribute that can determine the value of your Product Strategy is how layered it is.
The best way to think of the interplay between the Company and Product layers is the magnitude of overlap between each of them:
Is the audience you chose for your Product part of the prioritized audience by the company?
Is the distribution channel you want to leverage mastered by the company?
How can you make your offering stand out using the company's existing differentiators?
So, a critical attribute of a useful Product Strategy is its ability to fit into the Company Strategy and make coherent choices that inform the intentional delivery of Features.
Here's how our exemplary b2b SaaS company, Analytico, can make use of this:
As a company, Analytico had established the route of doing one thing really, really well ( web eCommerce tracking) through a fully integrated solution (as opposed to catering to more use cases through integrations). For the new predictive checkout optimization features, this meant not getting lost in all the possibilities of other checkouts: No tiered pricing or subscriptions.
While stakeholders suggested other checkouts that could be optimized, the product team could use the established company focus to narrow its perspective on audiences and problems worth solving. Among others, they prioritized GDPR compliance and the ease of use for integrating with web technologies like Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).
This way, they could reinforce the company's established strengths and increase the chances of succeeding for
Next week, we'll wrap up this miniseries by looking at how Analytico can ensure its Product Strategy is Executable.
HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE
- Which choices did your company make? Look for decisive choices around users, offerings, and differentiators.
- Can you play within the boundaries? Think about the decisions these choices help you skip. Can you target a more narrow segment or problem space to help the company succeed in the broader market they go after?
- Which elements help you succeed? Where can you reuse or leverage hard (e.g., technology) or soft (e.g., branding, positioning) choices for your product?
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Thank you for Practicing Product,
βTimβ
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No, this is not a Product strategy
Romuald, proudly: βOur strategy is to disrupt the high-end food product delivery market.βItβs a nice declaration, with one of the virtues of good strategies: itβs memorable. Unfortunately, itβs not a Product Strategy: itβs a pitch for Product Chef. Itβs hard to know exactly what success would look like for a βdisruptionβ... and just as difficult for the teams to adhere to this vague framework. A strategy is the framework that allows them to be autonomous: without clarity, they cannot exercise control.
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So we published the strategy internally and shared it around. And thatβs the end of it and we lived happily every after, right? Well, no, of course not. A strategy is only as good as the extent to which it influences practical, day-to-day planning and delivery. So even though we felt good (and to a big extent, relieved to be aligned on a bunch of stuff we needed to figure out), the next step was to turn the strategy into an actual plan.
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What did you think of this week's newsletter?
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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