My Simple Approach to Setting Your Product Strategy
This is written for my personal consumption but was inspired by Lenny’s newsletter on Strategy and I decided to share mine.
This is written for my personal consumption but was inspired by Lenny’s newsletter on Strategy and I decided to share mine.
First, product strategy does not sit in a silo. It should align with your company’s business strategy, which is the duty of the stakeholders or executives to have put together.
Without a business strategy to act as a guide, you are liable to make the mistake of creating a product strategy based on the product vision you defined that falls outside the overall company’s strategy.
Typically, not cast in stone, your product strategy sits at the mission, vision, STRATEGY, goals, roadmap and task. Having a clear product strategy is what helps you move beyond satisfying your customers to delighting them. (Cc Gibson Biddle, former VP/CPO Netflix — on Product Strategy)
I like the way Hubspot put it; “Your product strategy is the roadmap that’s used to develop your product or feature.” It’s a high-level thing.
What is Product Market Fit? And you can find it in your product as a creator
To help us understand how to craft all the other elements before we get to strategy, we should attempt to answer these questions:
What is the need? — problem to be solved
You do not want to build a solution and start looking for a problem to solve. That’s unnecessary hard work you don’t want for yourself.
You can frame it however you like so as to get to the problem faster. There are many frameworks you can employ for this purpose. For E.g. what job does your customer want to get done?
What is the market? — target customers
Not knowing your target customer might lead you to create a product that is not well-defined. First, it shows you probably didn’t spend enough time in the problem stage. Your product cannot solve all of the universe's problems.
Your target customer is that person that is likely to buy your product.
And if you find out that the user and the person paying are different, then you should tailor your product to the need of the person paying.
What is our business goal? Metrics to be measured by
How will you measure the progress and success of your product? As they say, what doesn’t get measured cannot be improved. You can start by setting up a north star metric by which your product success will be measured. Learn more about the North Star metric from this article by Gibson Biddle.
Product Growth Strategy: Driving product adoption with a ‘Highway’
You might have to dabble between lagging and leading metrics and know what you’re dealing with.
What will be the features?
To be clear, you don’t want to be a feature factory. That being said, you don’t want to starve your customers of the necessary features that can help them get their jobs done efficiently.
Your features, first, should not be nice to have. It should be solving a definite need for your customers. It should enable your customer to move from frustration to delightfulness.
Talking to your customers to know what they want is good until they tell you they want a ‘faster horse’. Want to delight your customers? Know what feature is needed and deliver it before they realize that they need it.
What is our differentiator? Positioning
Don’t leave this for later — when the product is done or the feature is shipped. I always like doing this before a single line of code is written by the engineers. It forces you to prioritize in a way that aligns with your product vision.
Product positioning presents the benefits of your product to a particular target audience. “Simply put, it is how your customers will remember you when it is time to get their jobs done. It’s a strategic exercise that defines where your product or service fits in the marketplace and why it is better than alternative solutions.” — Aha!
Going back to knowing who your target customer is — what they need, and how your product can help them to solve their problems. This is one reason you should engage your product marketer from the get-go and in all discussions.
How do we achieve this in a margin-enhanced customer-satisfying way?
No matter how nice you are and how much you love your customer, you still want to remain in business. And to remain in business means that you’re generating revenue.
So, the question here is how you want to deliver the product to your customer so they will experience premium delight using your product and price it enough that will be beneficial to your company.
Also, if your pricing forces them to check out or try the alternatives (competitors), they won’t get the same experience.
This is my (unspoken) product strategy.
More from me ICYMI:
PS: This article was first published on Medium.
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