Product Strategy

Everywhere! Users themselves, colleagues, market research, competitors, randomly in the shower. Generally, I like to consider each idea seriously and work through a few questions to help decide if they are worth building: 1. What, fundamentally is the problem this idea is meant to solve? How worth it is solving that problem vs. others I know about? Does solving this problem create opportunities or risks in any form that I should think about? 2. Is this a problem I need to solve now, in 6 months, in 2 years, etc.? What's the risk of just putting it off? 3. Has this idea been ...

This is a two-part question. Let me first articulate how I like coming up with ideas for new opportunities, followed by how I like to make decisions about what to build. Hopefully, you don’t mind that I’m thinking about “opportunities” because it might not always be a feature that’s the right solution. I should start by saying that there isn’t one right approach to coming up with ideas. In my experience, I’ve had success ensuring that there are: 1. Insights from the four lenses: Customer, Business, Market, Technology 2. Effective methods to facilitate ideation At the core, you have to ...

Lots of balancing! Balancing effectively summarizes the job of a PM. Jokes aside... Balancing user requests v. optimal design I pay much closer attention to the user's pain (vs. the user's request). Abstracting the problems we’re trying to solve creates room for the team to take in further context (per the four lenses mentioned above) and come up with creative, innovative solutions that can also be validated and iterated on along the way. I also know I am not a design expert. I have been so fortunate to have had excellent UX partners to work with. Balancing work life with personal...

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...

In my previous answer, re: finding the right opportunities + making decisions - I mentioned four lenses (Customer, Business, Market, and Technology) as key components of coming up with ideas and making decisions. The best advice I have to offer is to be intentional about spending time developing your muscles in those areas. It can be as simple as picking a product or service in your day-to-day life and thinking through what inputs might have contributed to the experience you’re having as a user. Additionally, a lot of product strategy is about being able to identify the opportunity that ...

Our mission as a team is to clarify & accelerate the product roadmap. For us, clarification means a couple things: 1. Do we know what we aspire to invest in over the next quarter, half year, or FY? 2. Have we clarified our decision / prioritization framework of what causes an initiative to be above or below the line for what we will commit to? 3. Do we have a shared understanding of the tradeoffs that will occur as a result of our decisions, and are we ok with the outcomes of the tradeoffs? On the acceleration front, one helpful lens we've found has been: 1. What are orga...

Success metrics and voice of the customer. Ideally, at the time of defining a product strategy, you’ve also invested time in thinking about specific Goals that are important to measure progress against it. The goals should be time bound and specific and may include product usage, customer satisfaction, and financial performance. Several product organizations (including HubSpot, Google, Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Airbnb) like using the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework. Metrics are important, but at the end of the day, the best true north is the voice of your customer. If your...

My top-3 favorites purely from a product perspective: * Google Photos, for very delightful and practical uses of AI * Huckleberry, for attempting to solve the problems of new parents in a tech-first way * Tesla, for the beautiful combo of hardware and software to create an overall rich user experience (not factoring in leadership, political, health, or climate impact)

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...

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. 

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...

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...

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...

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...