What is your end-to-end process for crafting a product strategy and what do you include in order to be successful?

If your company doesn't currently have a formal product strategy, developing one is a crucial step towards ensuring that your product development efforts are aligned with your business goals. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a product strategy:

1. Define Your Vision and Goals

• Vision: Start by defining a clear, inspiring vision for what you want your product to achieve in the long term. This should align with your company’s overall mission.

• Goals: Set specific, measurable goals that support this vision. These should be achievable and clearly communicate what success looks like for your product.

2. Understand Your Market and Customers

• Market Research: Conduct thorough market research to understand industry trends, competitor strengths and weaknesses, and potential opportunities or threats.

• Customer Insights: Gather deep insights into your customers' needs, behaviors, and preferences. Techniques like surveys, interviews, and user testing can be invaluable here.

3. Identify the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)

• Determine the core tasks that your customers need to accomplish. Understanding these will guide what features and improvements your product should focus on.

4. Develop Product Roadmaps

• Roadmapping: Create a product roadmap that outlines the key features and milestones planned for your product. This should detail what will be developed, why it’s important, and approximate timelines.

5. Align with Stakeholders

• Engage with key stakeholders across your organization to align expectations and gather diverse insights. This includes leadership, marketing, sales, customer support, and the development teams.

6. Set Up Metrics for Success

• Define how you will measure the success of your product strategy. Common metrics include user engagement, customer satisfaction, market share, and revenue growth.

7. Iterate Based on Feedback

• Implement a process for continuous feedback and learning. This should involve regular reviews of your strategy based on performance data and direct feedback from users.

8. Communicate the Strategy

• Ensure that everyone involved understands the product strategy. Regular communication and updates will help keep all team members aligned and motivated.

9. Review and Adapt

• Regularly review your product strategy to ensure it remains relevant and effective. Adapt it based on changing market conditions, customer needs, and business priorities.

Developing a product strategy is not a one-time activity but a continuous process that evolves with your business and the market.

There are three steps I typically use when developing a strategy for a new product:

1. Identify vision and goals: Start by defining the core problem your product aims to address in the market. What need are you fulfilling for users? Who is your ideal customer and what are their pain points? Next write out your vision, goals, success metrics, and vision. This will motivate your team and hold yourself accountable.

2. Understand the market: Once you've identified the "why", conduct research to understand the "what". Look at competitors strengths and weakness, research current and emerging industry trends, and conduct customer interviews, surveys, etc to gather insights into your target audience.

3. Build your roadmap: Once you understand the "what", now you must figure out the "how". Use a prioritization framework like RICE or Kano to identify and prioritize individual features to build. Make sure you keep these solutions relatively narrow to ensure you aren't overengineering a solution. Start with a minimum viable product ("MVP") so you can gather feedback and insights before iterating.

Creating a successful strategy involves several key steps

1. Market research + Customer and competitors insights
2. Start defining Goals and Objective
3. Develop positioning - Value props --> how you will differentiate
4. Build and execution plan - short term and long term
5. Define what success will look like and how we will track it
6. Stakeholder alignment- identify, engage and align with key stakeholders throughout the process.
7. Continuously track metrics and refine the strategy as needed.


I know these are basic.. but that is what you need. Find roadblocks and misalignment and creatively solve those to make progress

I have observed that the word strategy can be intimidating as well as misunderstood. In its simplest form, product strategy is a process of defining what your options are, and then selecting which option has the greatest chance of success. The most important step is getting REALLY clear on what your options are - which requires a deep factbase that includes market research, customer research, and product insights. 

The process that I use is a simple 4 step process that you can apply to most strategic decisions you need to make within a business: (1) Build your factbase (2) Define your options (3) Determine which option is best supported by the factbase (4) Make your decision & socialize. When I run this process at BILL, it usually takes between 6-12 weeks depending on the depth of factbase that we need. You should be spending the majority of your time working on your research so you can have a solid factbase as the foundation for data driven decision making. 

Here is an example approach you can apply to your own product strategy.

• Kickoff: Hold a strategy kickoff so everyone knows you are starting the process - include key stakeholders and walk them through the scope of the strategy and the process you will use to develop it. Let everyone know how and when they can contribute or get updates during the process. 

• Key Questions: Build a list of your hypotheses and key questions to answer. This will help you understand what you need to learn with your factbase development. 

• Factbase Development: Start your factbase development. The depth of the factbase will depend on the scope of the strategy - I always include market research (market trends, TAM & SAM sizing, competitive analysis), customer research (both qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys - across current and prospective customers), product insights (this is only necessary if you already have a product live - it includes all your product analytics like conversion, activation, engagement, retention, known feedback, etc.)

• Define Optionality: Once you are 50-75% through your factbase, start defining the options you see emerging. Your options should be distinctly different directions you could take. As defined, they should be mutually exclusive options, even if you do decide to take elements from each in your final decision. I usually do 4-5 options. Option definition should include: 

  • 3 year look back vision - this can be a statement or visual of where that strategy lands you in 3 years 

  • Target customer

  • Target “jobs to be done” 

  • Core value prop for the customer

  • Business/market opportunity 

  • Competitive advantage (why you have the right to win in the market)

  • Strategic focus areas (key things this strategy requires you build) 

• Select an Option: As you continue to finish your factbase, start mapping the research to the options that you have. As you finish your factbase, you should start seeing one option have more supporting evidence than the others. 

• Write up your Strategy & Socialize: Once you have selected which option you want to pursue, write up your case. Use your research as the supporting evidence to defend your strategy decision. Socialize with key stakeholders.