Product Strategy: Create, Experiment, and Go Big

Let's do a fast run through the basics of product vision, objectives, and strategy. We'll also talk about company strategy vs. product strategy and portfolio strategy vs. product strategy.

We'll look at five steps to create, experiment, and act on a product strategy. We'll also talk about why teams sometimes (often) don't do a strategy, and why it is important.

The first step of a strategy is to define our goals by crafting a product vision and objectives. We'll give three examples for companies like Envoy, Blue Radix, and Nauto.

Let's practice creating a product vision and objectives. We'll use a dog walking service like Rover or Wag! as our (fun) example.

Let's go back to our question about empowered product teams, and "are we done?" We'll talk about local maximums and global maximums, and the need for a product strategy.

We'll look at the company Rippling and a gig worker benefits program as an example. We are trying to find privileged insights that our competitors don't have to power an impactful product strategy.

Customer interviews are our best and richest source of strategic insight.

Product analytics give us quantitative data across all our customers. We pair this with our customer interviews - product analytics telling us more of the "what" and customer interviews telling us more of the "why." Both are important to seek out strategic insights.

We want insights for markets that matter. To get these insights, we have two central questions: how big are our markets and how fast are they growing?

When we create product strategies, we are looking for substantial markets where we can be better than all competing alternatives at meeting our customers' needs. To do this, we start by analyzing our competitors.

When we are crafting product strategies, we want a broad view on our markets - technology trends, regulatory trends, environmental trends, etc. A PESTEL tool can help.

We find our best strategic options when there is alignment between where we want to go (our vision and objectives), market opportunities, and our unique capabilities. To understand us, we answer the question "What are we exceptionally good at?"

Let's practice finding insight to guide our strategic options. We'll use the application Kids Note as our example.

We'll go back to our example of a company like Rippling, and whether we should do an immediate pilot with a company that hires gig workers.

We'll look at the company Blue Radix and ask the question, "How do we find and prioritize our best options?"

We'll talk about how to seek new opportunities - and face our toughest challenges - as we search for our best strategic options.

A strategic options tree is a great way to focus and compare our different ideas - and a nice communication tool as well.

We can detail our options using a strategy narrative, and then compare them versus each other - helping us prioritize them. Narratives are widely used at Amazon.

Good product strategy means we say a few "yes's" and lots of "no's" - and a value-effort matrix can help us make these choices.

In this practice activity, we'll create a strategic options tree and a value-effort matrix for a company like Nauto. We'll then recommend one "no" option and two "yes" options.

Good strategies are hypotheses about what will work in the market - our best educated judgment. We need to test our ideas (next section!).

How do we build consensus and support for our strategies? We'll pose this question with a company like Nauto.

Our strategic options are our best educated judgment, but they are just hypotheses. We need to validate these through experiments, testing, and refinement.

One helpful tool to act and track a strategy is a "strategy cascade." We start with our top-level product vision and objectives and cascade these down to strategic focus areas and quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results).

Strategic roadmaps help us sequence our major steps, and they help us build support for our strategic direction. There are lots of styles of strategic roadmaps - here we'll use a "cupcakes to wedding cakes" format.

Development buckets are a powerful tool to focus product/engineering teams on our big impact strategic priorities.

Our best product strategies will fail if we don't have the consensus and support of the managers and executives around us. We'll look at 5 rules of the road for building this support.

Let's practice building consensus and support for our product strategy, using a company like Nauto as our example.

We'll wrap-up our section in this quick lecture.

Let's talk through 7 big take-aways from the course - 7 big themes to guide our product strategy and go big.

Congratulations for completing the course. I hope your product strategies are all excellent and impactful!