AMA: GitLab Director of Product Management, Jacqueline Porter on Product Strategy

The one thing that stays the same is ... is change (and maybe customers want to buy things)! In particularly volatile and fast-moving industries, strategies must be proportionately flexible and responsive. I have found implementing a strategy based on the following key questions helps guide you in being able to adequately formulate the next steps in the roadmap, services, and approach: 1. What personas/segments/industries are currently being actively targeted and served well by the existing solutions in the landscape? (This is a space to consider competitive saturation) 2. What personas/segments/industries with similar jobs/tasks to 1 are not being targeted and served? (This is your potential opening for adjacency, where you could be the first mover) 3. What problems will you solve for underserved spaces in #2? 4. How are you going to solve them (product differentiation, services, etc) 5. When do you expect to accomplish these goals for this product? These 5 questions help you line out the competitive position, market position, the problem space, and how you intend to approach it rapidly.

Validation is a great signal that your product strategy is headed in the right direction before you start building against it. My favorite methods for validation include: 1. Conducting surveys on the themes of the strategy to see how much people resonate with it 2. Validating the strategy with internal audiences 3. Interviewing existing customers where I will show them the strategy in pieces and ask their thoughts for feedback 4. Going to Kubecon/other industry events and discussing the strategy with people in booths 5. Conducting a formal UXR study to validate the strategy in the form of Kano study

Cadence for evaluating strategy is often set by the business. I have been at companies that will redo their company strategy every 3-4 years, and then as a result product strategy is reevaluated every 3 years in suit. I I traditionally plan strategy using 1,3,5, and 10-year product strategy horizons. * 1-year strategies are very tactical and get iterated on continuously * 3 years are revisited 2-3 years * 5-year strategies are revised every 5 years * 10-year strategies are sometimes only created once and often I have exited the company (IPO, sold the company, or got a new job before I could fulfill that strategy cadence) Revisiting the strategy looks a lot like rewriting it I conduct competitive analysis, and research, and often completely rewrite the strategy with new inputs and targets.

These don't have to be mutually exclusive. In many of the companies I worked in the install base actually were former users of old products and had some legacy tools still existing in pockets of their organization. It is critical to thoroughly understand your customer and deep dive into what will win your market. Often those don't have to compete or take away from each other. Some examples can be: 1. Critical workflows for managing specific tasks in the platform - usability 2. Improving integrations with ecosystem tools - expanding compatibility with customer tools and new logo acquisition 3. Improve onboarding experience and reduce CAC - improves set up experience for existing and new customers - while also standing out from the competition

Whether you are using CUJs or JTBDS or PRDs the entire purpose of these artifacts is for product leaders to better understand the goals of the end user with tools in the market. Ultimately, without a targeted understanding you will end up building something that won't add value or won't be purchased by your target market - which is the worst case scenario.