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Product Strategy
Product Strategy
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
What I've enjoyed about being in tech is entire industry lifecycles happen
within a few years because the pace of innovation is so fast: you can identify
new customer problems, build innovative solutions, and scale entire businesses
that transform a given market – all within a year or two. This is that much more
true of the creator economy right now, where mobile phone-based tools transform
content creation and disruptive innovations in distribution & monetization of
creative work converge at precisely this moment.
We're doing everything we can to be nimble, learn fast, and focus on creat...more
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
I think of this in two ways best conveyed through a sports metaphor: learning
new plays I can add to my playbook, and building reps so that I can figure out
what the right play is for a given scenario.
For the first, I enjoy reading about strategy – lots of Stratechery, various
strategy books, stories of people navigating hard choices with clear tradeoffs,
etc.
For the second, nothing beats live reps: getting to make decisions on the field
and getting things wrong and learning from your successes & especially your
failures, ideally with good coaching & mentorship. I did plenty of that a...more
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
We leave it to each team to figure out what helps them balance flexibility with clarity to achieve their maximum speed of execution.
We do our best to have a common language around goals, strategy & measuring progress, but largely leave it to teams to figure out how best to build & ship given their own goals, strategies & roadmap.
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
I generally don't believe in investing in differentiation for differentiation's
sake – if the feature doesn't solve a core customer need then I'd have a hard
time prioritizing it over a feature that does simply for the purpose of checking
a box on a table unless there's a strong belief (preferably: clear evidence)
that it will drive a purchasing decision, and that is the right priority for the
business at the time.
That said, the place where I could see this being a key driver of strategy is if
you're looking to enter a new market or serve a new segment. In this case,
differentiators may h...more
2 answers
Product Strategy & Operations Lead at Airtable
Love the spirit of this question, and will broaden it a bit to "how do you
balance market needs with the vision your company may have?"
Prior to shifting to Product Strategy & Ops, I was hired as the 2nd Account
Executive at Airtable. I found this experience so valuable because I had a front
row seat to literally thousands of customer perspectives on what our product
needed to evolve. One of the biggest lessons I took away from that experience
was how to think about the balance between providing what people ask for, vs
providing something they never would have conceived of--let's call it t...more
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
If your execs are pushing your product in a different direction from your
customer & market input, try to understand why that is. They may be trying to
pivot the business, or they may have a vision for where the market is going that
doesn't quite map to where the market currently is. Or there may be a
miscommunication or misunderstanding about what the market needs.
In each case, do your best to figure out why you're pointed in different
directions, and drive alignment on those inputs so that the product strategy can
be grounded in a set of hypotheses everyone is committed to testing even...more
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
A product that is working well for its users will show strong user retention
metrics and very positive qualitative feedback from users. If you're retaining
the vast majority of your current userbase with some signs of user-driven growth
or upsell activity, your core product is probably on solid ground. From here,
figure out where in your funnel you're underperforming: are you having a hard
time acquiring traffic or in converting traffic to signups or customers? As you
analyze each stage, you'll see a varying set of problems & potential diagnoses
emerge.
On the other hand, if you're seeing...more
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
This sounds to me like your sales team doesn't believe the target market is big enough and/or the right market. It's hard to believe in a product strategy unless you agree on who it's for, so the first thing I'd do here is to get everyone aligned on who you're building for & why, and then articulate why your strategy is the best way to win in that market.
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
The only stakeholder that must have buy-in for your product strategy is the one accountable for the results of your org or area. That may be a C-level exec or VP or GM or a discipline lead. Once they believe in the strategy as the best path to hit their goals for the business, what remains is largely a communication challenge.
Keep in mind that getting alignment with your primary stakeholder may require you to get the approval of multiple other stakeholders along the way. For my thoughts on how to do that, see the first question on the list.
1 answer
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
I generally believe product strategies should be evaluated more frequently the
earlier a product is in its lifecycle. A zero-to-one team I worked closely with
found the right pace to be testing a new direction & goals every month or so,
whereas a scaled team I led had sufficient visibility to establish a high-level
strategy that lasted well past a year.
At Patreon, we aim to set strategies & goals that cover 6 months or so for each
team. In tech, unless you're working on a platform or infra initiative that is
largely independent of evolution in user need, I'd generally recommend somewhere...more
2 answers
Product Strategy & Operations Lead at Airtable
This is a natural question and I would specify the question a bit to say "how do
we validate that our product strategy is the right one for us?"
Might seem like a small delineation, but the truth is, no one strategy is right
for every company or product. What works amazingly for one company could yield
paltry results for another.
For that reason, I'd say the best starting place to determine whether you're
developing a strategy that is right for your situation is
1. To be clear on the first principles you're designing around
2. Try your hardest to maintain an environment of intellectu...more
Product Lead, Member Experience at Patreon
First, define "right" by establishing clear goals – is it product-market fit? Is
it growing an existing product to a certain milestone? These will help you
determine the right form of validation to apply to each stage.
For products that haven't yet achieved market fit, early & rapid customer
feedback cycles are the best form of validation I've seen – push your target
users to tell you over & over again in surveys & interviews that what you're
building is something they must have, ideally by getting them to sign up or even
pay you before you've even built it.
Once you have a clear sense ...more