Product Strategy

Yes. At some point, you want to have a set of key workflows and key personas nailed as a part of the vision canvas. And using low code or UX mocks etc. - you want to test the validity of the hypothesis to the next granular level. Always be testing, always be validating, always be pivoting and making small tweaks to your plan based on the feedback and data you receive.

Product visions should always be customer-focused. I'm not sure that you need to actually show your vision statement to users to get their feedback, but your vision should be informed by the user problems and product goals that your team hopes to solve over the next few years. In order to do that, you need to know your users intimately, and that often requires customer research and reviewing product data. 

* Product Vision is similar to a compass for explorers! Product Vision sets the North Star for the product teams and ensures that the Product Principles, Values & Strategy aligns with the Vision on a daily basis * Its easy for Product teams to devolve into a mess of features or play catch-up to competitors, etc without a singular vision thats bigger than the team's daily activities. Sony Ericcson, Nokia & Blackberry (smartphones), Bolt (electic cars) or Yahoo (Consumer & AdTech) are examples of firms that lost sight of their vision

Great product visions rally a team around a set of clear and concise goals. That vision represents the team's focus and can be a helpful tool when the team needs to make a decision or is starting to be misaligned.  In college, I had a marketing professor who was known by a simple tagline: "Lose your focus. Lose your shirt." No matter how much experience you have building products, it's so easy to get distracted and start to solving problems without proper validation. As Product Managers, it's our job to make sure our teams stay focused on the problems we are trying to solve. I've found t...

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...

In my experience, I've found the best way to successfully pivot your product vision is to make sure your stakeholders are clear on the why, when, and how. Part of bringing a vision to life is rallying your team and getting your stakeholders excited about what's to come. In my last three roles, I've been hired to lead product teams that have recently gone through a lot of turnover. The designers and engineers appear to be skeptical of product, demoralized, and disconnected from the rest of the organization. Often times, it's my job to build trust and give the team a vision to rally behind. ...

* Hybrid products are exponentially harder to build than pure software products. Software can be updated via the cloud, at any time and with any frequency but hardware cannot * The form factor, the physical functionality, etc of a hybrid product need way more thought, user testing and context than the software. For instance, the physical components of the Tesla 3, the sensors, cameras, etc are paramount compared to the Maps, Apple Carplay integration or self-driving updates that can be done through the cloud  * Context, background and living with the problem are the key...

I think the biggest difference between crafting software vs. hybrid product vision statements comes down to scale. It's much faster to build, test, and learn with software product than products that touch hardware. With software, you can scale your product and customer base very quickly, whereas, hardware can take months, or even years to iterate and drive value.  Over the course of my career, I've worked on mobile, web, and hybrid (mobile + hardware) products. A few years ago, I worked at Hudl Sports where I led product for Hudl Replay -- a video analysis tool for professional sports te...

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 right space. So, for example, you could be bullish on video as an explosive growth area for content and creativity and marketing, and you could be bullish on cloud as a universal enabler for key digital transformations across industries and domains, and you could be bullish on AI/ML as the key...

A product vision statement is a short, concise, and aspirational set of goals for your product. As a Product Manager, you will need to develop a deep understanding of your company, customers, compeititors, and teammates. Research will depend entirely on your level of understanding of these areas.  For the past 2 years, I led the Confluence Content Experience team at Atlassian. My team owned the creating and publishing workflow and our product vision statement looked like this: Our goal is to help creators feel confident creating and publishing more types of content on Confluence. For ...

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)