How do you balance strategy and tactics as a product manager?

To effectively define your product vision, concentrate on its core value, serving as a compass for your organization. For example, a vision like "Making remote work efficient and enjoyable" sets a clear direction. Align each feature and initiative with your vision and objectives. Transparent communication with your team, customers and stakeholders is crucial, as their feedback could prompt course corrections. Periodically revisit your vision and objectives, adapting them to market changes and technological advances. This disciplined approach ensures alignment with strategic goals, increasing the likelihood of product success.

Clearly defined product vision and objectives serve as a North Star for your team, helping to eliminate ambiguity and indecisiveness. They enable you to make tough decisions, especially when resources are limited. Consistently revisiting your product vision and objectives is crucial, especially in fast-changing industries. This ensures they remain relevant and actionable, allowing for timely adjustments to your strategy and tactics.

Within product management, defining your product vision and objectives is key. It's akin to planning a scenic Wisconsin drive: the vision is your Lake Superior destination, while the objectives are the checkpoints like the cheese shops and microbreweries. Without a compelling vision, you risk wandering aimlessly. Without clear objectives, you miss out on those delightful details that make the journey memorable. Just as a road trip is more than just getting from point A to B, a product is more than its features; it's the experience, the value. Aligning and communicating this vision and objectives with stakeholders is like ensuring all passengers are excited about the trip. It fosters collaboration and keeps everyone on the same route.

-Define a clear product vision. This vision serves as a guiding light, outlining the long-term goals and direction for your product. It helps you understand where you want your product to be in the future and what problem it aims to solve. -Objectives are specific, measurable goals that support your overall strategy. They provide focus and allow you to track progress towards achieving your vision. Now comes the delicate balance between strategy and tactics. While strategy provides the big picture view, tactics are necessary for executing that strategy effectively. Tactics involve making day-to-day decisions about features, user experience, marketing campaigns, pricing strategies, and more.

I've seen that the product roadmap and vision are crucial, but it's a delicate balance between strategy and tactics. To align strategy and tactics, begin by establishing clear and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) objectives. These objectives serve as your guiding stars, keeping you on course towards your long-term goals while informing your day-to-day tactical decisions. KPIs and the delivery triple constraints act as your compass, helping you gauge the success of your product. Regularly measure and assess these metrics to track your progress towards your strategic goals.

Adopting a well-known framework can accelerate stakeholder buy-in by leveraging established best practices. This makes it easier to get support for your initiatives. The framework should also be malleable enough to allow for customization. Every product has unique challenges, and the framework should be adaptable to meet those specific needs.

Roadmap is a tool, and framework is kind of a mental model. Frameworks are needed for sifting through information quickly and getting a sense of whether our assumptions were correct. For me KANO model and ANSOFF matrix are two frameworks that I look on while strategising. These provide an overarching guidance and context to the work that is being carried out. Application of these easy frameworks in real life is tough, but when we present it to management in such a manner it becomes far easier to get their approval. It also helps in providing a guiding point in decision making

To guide your product's strategic and tactical plans, you could adopt the OKR framework. Define aspirational Objectives, representing the 'why' behind your initiatives. Pair these with Key Results, specific, measurable outcomes set for a timeframe, to provide the 'what' and 'how.' For example, an Objective like "Boost customer engagement" may have Key Results like "15% longer session time in Q4" and "10% lower bounce rate in Q4." OKRs help focus on the value and impact of your deliverables, simplifying communication with stakeholders.

Frameworks are well-tested & researched set of guidelines, they are not something that will automatically deliver good results when you adopt them. Adoption of right framework depends on the stage of the product and team dynamics. A good question to ask yourself while deciding the framework is "Will this framework make it a no-brainer for my team to understand the value that we are trying to deliver?" If the answer is Yes, go for it! Remember, there is nothing "ideal" in product management. Every team and product is different and your job is to make it easier for the team to understand the long term plan so that they can refer to it again and again whenever they need questions answered before coming to you.

Developing a prioritization framework to assess and rank features, initiatives, and tasks is essential. Also, priorities must be reevaluated continuously based on changing conditions and environmental variables.

Early involvement of your team and stakeholders can preempt potential bottlenecks or roadblocks, streamlining the execution phase. Their input can provide different perspectives that you might have yet to consider. Regularly updating stakeholders with a current road map fosters transparency and trust. This is particularly important for managing expectations and ensuring that everyone's efforts are aligned.

Even brilliant transformation initiatives can fail without buy-in from key stakeholders. As leaders, we sometimes overlook stakeholders, assuming our ideas' inherent value will suffice. However, missing the right stakeholders can hinder vital insights. Even if you manage to insert all key insights and create a perfect roadmap, it may still fail if stakeholders aren't onboard and such issues can surface pretty late in the execution. Partial execution failures mean substantial losses in time and cost. To prevent this, involving key stakeholders and teams in your road map early in the process is crucial.

Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to create a product roadmap that outlines the high-level strategy (what) and tactical execution (how). You can use this roadmap to manage stakeholder's expectations.

One way of involving stakeholders is to ensure regularity of updates regarding progress against the promoted roadmap, however, an even better way is to show a live view of the Product teams' progress on any given project. Depending on what platform you use to track your projects, you could easily have a live dashboard showing % completion of a particular project on, say, a Sharepoint site accessible by all. This reduces the 'how far are we from launching ___' question, as well as letting others see where the bottlenecks are. Granted this won't work in the Product teams' favour in all organisations, but it can save time and build trust for all others.

Consider the concept of agile road mapping and break down your road map into smaller milestones. This concept aligns with the concept of agility in software development as it allows you to make adjustments efficiently and quickly while maintaining the view of the broader picture.

Product managers need supporting frameworks to complement their roadmap for customer experience improvements. A way to reduce roadmap churn is to maintain a customer journey map. To get started on your customer journey map, think about the major touchpoints between your customer and your product. Start with the happy path of the major users: 1. Pre-sale and awareness - how a potential customer learns about your product 2. Deciding to purchase - how customer interest turns into a purchase 3. Onboarding and activation of service - early product usage 4. Support and expansion - day-to-day product usage 4. Retention - renewal and termination decisions With this customer journey map you can summarize key initiatives in your roadmap.

What works well I've seen is having the first/next 2 Qrts static so we know resource requirements, with the remaining 2 Qrts being made flexible to ensure those customer input and feedback can be taken into account.

While flexibility is essential, excessive changes to the road map can lead to "feature creep" or team burnout. A balance must be struck to keep the team focused and productive. Setting up a "change control" process can help manage alterations to the road map. This formalizes how changes are proposed, evaluated, and implemented, adding a layer of rigor to the flexibility.

While flexibility is essential, leveraging data and performing data-backed analytics to inform strategic and tactical decisions is crucial.

Putting in time to structure your requirements, saves time communicating to stakeholders and product teams about roadmap outcomes. You can articulate the value of roadmap items and lead your product team to deliver features that your customers want. By structuring your requirements with the roadmap outcome in mind, you can adapt to changes as you go and efficiently lead your team to delivery success.

Reviewing and evaluating the roadmap outcomes is crucial for any product manager. It allows me to measure my performance, understand the impact of my decisions, and gain valuable insights for future product development.

Post-implementation reviews should focus on more than what went well or poorly. They should also examine the validity of the assumptions that guided your decisions, offering more profound insights into your strategic thinking. Don't overlook "soft" metrics like team satisfaction or customer testimonials. These qualitative factors often provide context that quantitative data alone can't offer, enriching your overall evaluation.

We must embrace agile development methodologies to consume user feedback and execute tactics iteratively and adaptively. It is also important to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the impact of tactics on overall strategy.

Agreed, also a product manager’s work should be a healthy balance of both strategic and tactical work. On one side, product managers need to be strategic thinkers, who decide on the future direction of the product. On the other side, daily tactical activities like prioritisation or enhancing the product features based on customer feedback is also the core of the product management role. To excel as a product manager, it's essential to find the right balance between strategic and tactical activities.

Creating a 3-horizon product strategy is vital because it provides a comprehensive view of immediate needs, mid-term opportunities, and long-term vision. The 3 horizons help teams align on what needs to be done now, what to prepare for, and where the product should be in the future. The product roadmap, while useful, is a subset of this strategy, focusing on the 'how' and 'when' of short-term initiatives. It is possible for the roadmap, in the absence of the overarching 3-horizon strategy, to become a list of activities that are unrelated to one another, without any meaning or purpose, which would lead to misplaced efforts and wasted resources.

It's a top down approach. Product vision and strategy beget the tactics. Therefore, a considerable amount of time and planning need to go in defining the product strategy.

Consider creating a "retro road map" highlighting past achievements, failures, and learnings. This historical context can be invaluable for new team members and stakeholders, offering insights into your product's evolutionary journey. Keep an eye on emerging technologies or methodologies that could impact your road mapping process. Being proactive in adopting new approaches can give you a competitive edge.