How do you know if your product strategy is successful?

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Product Strategy & Operations Lead, Airtable • February 17

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...

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Kara Gillis

Sr. Director of Product Management, Splunk

This is a tale as old as time. There are many ways to approach this. I have seen vendors heavily bid on the AdWords of their competitor names and promote alternative solutions (trials or marketing content). I have seen vendors who are challengers in mature markets create "Us vs. Them" web pages or blogs that outline the differences (according to the vendor publishing the info) what the major differences are. And, I have seen third-party research or analyst evaluations heavily promoted that rank vendors according to specific criteria (contracted by the vendor or annually conducted created...

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Wade G. Morgan

Product Strategy & Operations Lead, Airtable

Love this question as well, and I'll approach it from a couple different perspectives. First, I'd acknowledge that some markets are so big or fast growing that multiple amazingly successful winners can emerge. As of today, Apple is worth $2.8T and Microsoft is worth $2.25T. While I'm sure both companies wouldn't mind adding their other's market share to their portfolio, I also think any reasonable person would consider both outcomes desireable. This example is not to say there's not need to play defense if a market is large or fast growing enough. Quite the opposite, both companies needed ...

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Sandeep Rajan

Product Lead, Member Experience, 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...

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Lizzy Masotta

Senior Product Lead, Shopify | Formerly Salesforce, Google, Nest, Cisco Systems

A common mistake exec teams make is focusing on output and forgetting about outcomes. Product teams present roadmaps to execs and once they’ve shipped a thing, they tell them it’s complete and move onto the next. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what’s on your roadmap or what you’ve successfully shipped if you’re not moving the needle in the outcomes you care about. Questions to align on with your team to help you get there: 1. Do we have clearly defined desired outcomes for your team? 2. Do we have alignment on these outcomes with leadership / execs? 3. Do we have a way to ...

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Bhaskar Krishnan

Product Leadership, Meta | Formerly Stripe, Flipkart, Yahoo

* For any Product, the hierarcy, in terms of immediate to long-term is Execute -> Features -> Roadmap -> Strategy -> Vision * The focus for any product team should be to execute & launch and then working on the features & building on the roadmap from a bottoms-up perspective. They should also embark on a top-down appraoch of understanding the market landscape, the user problems they can solve profitably and setting the vision. The intersection of these approaches can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to a few years and depends on the stage of the firm, th...

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Sriram Iyer

GM / Head of Products and Partnerships, Adobe DVA, Adobe | Formerly Salesforce, Deloitte

Pretty much the same stencil that I used to answer the previous question. If you are pivoting, I'd assume that one or more of these elements below have changed. So I'd use this framework to re-examine the sweet spot that you need to land on to be effective and win this next time around. Some elements to consider - 1. Market - Market landscape, gaps, and market opportunities. You want to work on an impactful problem area. Key Geos you will play in. etc. 2. Key vectors - I also like to play at the intersection of 2-3 key growth vectors - so I know directionally I am betting in the righ...

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