Which stakeholders need to have buy-in for your product strategy, and how do you approach creating alignment?

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 ...Read More

There are many stakeholders that need to buy-in to your strategy - your exec team, your cross-functional peers, your cross-functional product teams and just as importantly, your GTM teams - mktg, sales, CS. I would also contend that getting initial buy-in is half the problem and but keeping the strategy front and center in day-to-day decisions is extremely hard and this is where more companies go wrong. They spend the time to develop the strategy, get buy-in, etc. but don't spend the time consta ...Read More

Stakeholder identification varies by the company size, culture, how decision making happens and types of the product (B2B vs B2C). But in general key stakeholders needing buy-in for your product strategy should include: Executive Leadership: Ensure alignment with company goals and secure support for strategic initiatives. Define the customer problem and the opportunity size. Sales and Marketing Teams: Collaborate to align the strategy with go-to-market plans and customer acquisition efforts. Pro ...Read More

This is a great question! Product strategy is only as good as those who believe in it and choose to follow it. First, product strategy is typically best when it is aligned with company and business mission/goals. So, I usually seek alignment from the executive group with my longer term strategy first. This is typically done by creating a pitch deck for my product strategy that follows a 5-6 slide format of: market pain point/user research, market size & serviceable market, competition, where ...Read More

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 ...Read More

TLDR: engineering leadership, your management chain, design, sales/customer success, and cross-functional product peers. Engineering leadership is first on purpose. This is the most important internal relationship a PM has. If your engineering counterpart doesn't believe in the strategy, execution will suffer regardless of how good your deck is. I involve engineering leads early, before the strategy is fully formed. Not to get sign-off, but to stress-test feasibility and surface constraints I mi ...Read More