AMA: Zoom Head of Product Operations, Julie Lam on Product Strategy

Product strategy has to align with company, sales and engineering strategies. Start with the company strategy/mission, then define product pillars to support company mission. Once you have a draft of product strategy, vet that with Sales leaders to ensure your product strategy will help them achieve their revenue goals and vet with Eng leaders to ensure they have the capacity and resource to deliver against your product strategy (this might be an iterative process). Once you align with the cross-functional leaders, snapshot it for the year and iterative quarter over quarter based on business outcomes/changes.

In order to determine if it's a product strategy problem or GTM problem, you have to look at the data. If you have great pipeline but no adoption and usage, it is likely a GTM problem. So you need to think of ways to solve for engagement and adoption and ongoing usage of the product. If you don't see pipeline, then it is likely the product strategy is not landing in the market. So you will need to revisit your strategy with your sales and exec leadership teams.

Market trend is a key component of product strategy along with competitive analysis. In order to craft a successful product strategy, you need to understand your product strengths and where the strengths lie in the overall market and current trends. For example, mobile was a huge trend a few years ago so every company had some strategy to support omnichannels and devices. Most recently, it is all about AI.