AMA: Dovetail Product, Srinivas Krishnamurti on Product Strategy

I would contend that this starts with getting your exec team involved early in the strategy discussions so they have an opportunity to have their say and put some skin in the game. When the strategy is finally documented, it won't be your strategy but the collective effort of the leadership team and it should never be a surprise to anyone on the leadership team. Broadly speaking, people tend to get on board with stuff they worked on so you want to engage the leadership team (individually, initially) early and often.

There are many stakeholders that need to buy-in to your strategy - your exec team, your cross-functional peers, your cross-functional product teams and just as importantly, your GTM teams - mktg, sales, CS. I would also contend that getting initial buy-in is half the problem and but keeping the strategy front and center in day-to-day decisions is extremely hard and this is where more companies go wrong. They spend the time to develop the strategy, get buy-in, etc. but don't spend the time constantly repeating it and reporting against key milestones/deliverables to keep the strategy front and center for everyone. The worst thing that could happen is for you to develop a thoughtful strategy, get buy-in but people forget about it. Please don't let that happen. In general, you want to be as inclusive as possible by involving different stakeholders early in the process. Every group should feel like they have had their say and are able to provide feedback along the way.

The balance changes based on the context of the business so as a first step, product leaders need to be fully in-tune with the business. For example, if churn is high, you should invest more to fix the leaky bucket. Similarly, if churn is low, you should invest more in building differentiators and innovating to create better moats. I've used the 30-30-30 rule as a starting point: * 30% of your investment towards driving growth, * 30% towards keeping customers happy and * 30% towards debt, whether it be tech, design, process or people. It is important to note that this is the starting point; you should tweak these percentages based on the context of your business. For example, if your product is early (pre-PMF), you shouldn't worry about tech debt and instead focus all your effort on keeping current customers happen and thinking about ways to grow the number of new customers. Or, if you have a lot of churn, perhaps you don't invest as much in driving growth (new customers) until you fix the churn issue.

New ideas can come from anywhere and I would contend that you want to create an org culture where this is true. Your sales team has daily conversations with prospects and depending on why you win/lose, you may get requests/ideas for new features to win more. Similarly, your CS team has daily conversations with your existing customers and depending on how your customers are using your product, you may get requests/ideas for new features to either drive expansion or reduce churn. Sometimes your product teams can see technology evolutions driving new feature ideas. My rule for product managers is that you have to spend 20-25% of your time talking to customers (aka continuous discovery) and when you spend that amount of time interacting with customers, you will develop deeper empathy for their problems, which then becomes the foundation for new ideas. I often encourage PMs to sit in on sales calls or onboarding calls or QBRs because those are all opportunities to learn beyond just basic problem or solution validation. The mistake I see PMs make is that they only talk to customers to validate a problem or solution they have in mind so they lose an opportunity to learn about other problems.

I would encourage you to refrain from overly focusing on your competitors. You can drive yourself and your team crazy tracking all the new features your competitors are shipping but that doesn't mean you ignore them either. I will give you one example from my startup journey. We had a few competitors with one that we saw in most deals. We won our fair share as they did too but they started winning more when they shipped a new feature and this went on for a few months. We looked at the new feature and thought it wasn't a great (ie no one would use it) which was validated by some customers who churned off that competitor and came to us. But when we asked for feedback after losing a deal, the prospect would mention this feature and it didn't matter if their users would use the feature as the buyers loved the feature. We eventually added this feature and did the bare minimum to claim we had it and never lost another deal for this reason. You want to lose less and win more. Losing less (to competitors) requires you to understand what your competitors are doing better than you and taking those off the table. Winning more requires you to understand what you are doing better than your competitors so you can highlight that more in your marketing. You will know if your plan is working or not by analyzing win/loss reasons. More than anything else, you should practice continuous discovery and develop deep empathy for your customers. I would spend more time on this than worrying about competitors.