What are your biggest product vision and strategy challenges?

This is often omitted, but it becomes increasingly important as you are asked to prioritize requirements in a roadmap, without an actual plan towards which to work. Without alignment, decisions on what to prioritize become subjective, and often a priority bidding war in which stakeholder hierarchy sets the course for your product will follow.

I found this one useful. The challenge lies in coordinating with multiple departments and aligning them together for the common goals. People come with their own perspectives and understanding of the market and until a common unifying global communication prevails, the direction of product management would scatter. Leadership also plays an important role in channelising the resources towards the common company goals.

Aligning with company goals shouldn't be perceived as a challenge. Instead, it should be embraced as a valuable guide, a beacon illuminating the path forward. These goals serve as a compass, ensuring that you're moving in the right direction. They provide a clear frame of reference against which you can consistently check your progress and make necessary adjustments.

I think it is very important to: - Identify your Organization objective - Identify the ICP for which your product is a market fit - Align your product vision according to point 1 and 2

Working for a company that has, on paper, their big-picture goals is a win. If you have this situation, it's important to deeply understand these goals, understand what work is happening to support these goals and understand how to root the changes you are building to these goals. The most important part is making sure the measurements you have planned for each can cleanly tie back and tell this story.

Prioritizing the right features will cease to be a challenge once you've successfully tackled challenge number one - aligning with company goals. As soon as you gain clarity on where you need to go, a deep understanding of the direction to take, and a well-defined objective, prioritizing features becomes significantly easier.

Your product strategy should act as a framework of which you and your team use to prioritize the backlog. The strategy itself should not be a list of prioritized features. Feature prioritization is accomplished as part of roadmap development which will be the next step after your product strategy is finalized.

In a world where resources are constrained, it is extremely critical to optimize the best use of resources to deliver efficiency and impact. The job of a product manager is to prioritize the right features so that the business gets the maximum return on investment.

Focus is the key to prioritising the correct features. It means choosing the most impactful things to work on, not the most urgent or the most requested. Many leaders fall into the trap of doing too much and losing sight of their product strategy and vision. They need to reset their understanding of what focus really means in a product organization. It means saying no to the things that are not critical, and yes to the things that are consistent with your objectives and value proposition. I have a lot of personal experience with this and the best remediation for this is to play a game with an exercise like "buy-a-feature" or something similar, if everything is important, nothing is.

That's accurate as a concept, but too abstract to use in real practice as a product manager. Prioritization is the most complex product challenge, so it's better to add some tips to start with: Try RICE (for Reach Impact Confidence and Ease) method - it's will not solve your prioritization issue but will help to find right mindset to think about it. How much customers will be impacted if you solve this particular problem and why they will use your solution? What impact will your solution bring? It's completely new area or you an expert here (confidence)? What resources do you need to design this feature?

The earlier you begin testing your hypotheses, the better. You don't even need to build an MVP and invest time in its development. Instead, you can start validating your assumptions through user interviews, inquiring about their problems, or presenting them with design mockups or clickable prototypes. These methods allow you to gather valuable insights and feedback without the need for a fully functional product. If you already have a website and want to test sales, consider creating a fake page with a "Buy" button and track the number of clicks it receives. This approach enables you to gauge interest and assess the potential demand for your product or service before committing significant resources to its development.

Validating assumptions is harder for product people who are also domain experts. As domain experts, we assume we know all the user's problems and how to solve them. As a result, we are less likely to go back to users to get their insight on our assumptions, which leads to missing the mark. Validating our assumptions with users and being committed to learning to major key.

A good product manager has a good gut instinct but is also able to validate those instincts and tell stories with data. There are loads of ways to do this! Feasibility testing checks if the product is even possible with your current skills, budget or technology - crucial! Usability testing is also important. You've had a great idea, you've opportunity mapped it and built it before anyone else has but if it's unusable it's useless to everyone. Test with users, often. In my early product days we would get a lot of coloured cardboard and build out our experiences with paper whilst talking over ideas to showcase flows and experiences quickly in an interactive way to hold the attention of stakeholders and users.

Validating product assumptions cultivates objectivity and harmonizes vision and execution. My role as a founder has taught me the intricacies of detaching from beloved ideas. Employing iterative practices empowers agile product adaptations. Unsubstantiated assumptions can drain resources and obscure the bigger picture. Employing techniques such as user interviews, surveys, prototypes, and A/B testing enriches decision-making. The iterative mindset expedites adjustments, minimizing waste. Recognizing market trends and prior experiences averts misguided solutions. While wary of buzzword-heavy labels, embracing a "lean and agile" methodology accelerates progress while prioritizing user alignment.

To be opiniated is a fallacy that any product manager needs to avoid falling into. The role of a product manager is to build something that makes customer's life simple and the company more profitable. So, it is important to look at product usage data, perform A/B tests, collect customer feedback and so on. Real products should solve problems in reality and not be just hypothesis.

It’s not enough to change your own perspective when the environment changes. Business is a team sport. You have to bring others along, or you will not be able to move the organization. This is much easier if you have established strong relationships with other departments and built your own credibility through excellent work.

Adapting product vision and strategy to changing market conditions is a pivotal challenge. My experience of pivoting based on evolving customer dynamics highlights the necessity of flexibility. Not adapting could lead to market irrelevance or missed opportunities. Vigilant monitoring of market signals, active participation in relevant arenas, and data-driven analysis are key. Involving stakeholders and leveraging frameworks like SWOT, PEST, and Porter's Five Forces enhances strategic adaptation. This proactive approach ensures alignment with the ever-shifting landscape and strengthens the product's competitive edge.

We live in times that are changing every moment and keeping up with the pace helps us stay relevant. Resilience and adaptability helps us evolve as product managers and build products of the future. Being fast to change helps build the most relevant products for the customers that they would love. If any product becomes obsolete, customers will just move on to competitors and anyone who is not adaptable to market conditions will lose the game.

Based on my experience, SWOT and PEST tools manifest their true utility when they transcend mere analysis and actively catalyze innovative opportunity ideation, thereby effectively addressing consumer or public imperatives. Then they become prescriptive elements of change.

I think this is so personal and yet so recent for many founders and leaders with the C19 stay at home orders and the recent push to return back to work. A large part of it is staying in tune with the market so you can bend with it. In all organisations there are going to be occasions when a large change happens or someone disrupts your market. What's important is to have agility to pivot, release competitive features and to understand what your audience want from you specifically, even within a new paradigm.

Communicating the vision and strategy is a struggle for me because I dislike public speaking. Yes, I said the quiet part out loud. However, I am learning the art of comfortable communication (CC). CC is about conveying information, ideas, and your vision in a way that feels natural and confident, even if you have some initial discomfort. Two key aspects of CC are self-awareness and preparation. I am learning to understand my own communication style (this is key), my strengths, and weaknesses. I know the areas where I feel uncomfortable and I work on improving them. Once that is set, I prepare ahead of time the materials needed to deliver the product vision and strategy. Taking these steps helps me boost my confidence and reduce anxiety.

Here are three tips on how to communicate your strategy internally: 1. Find internal advocates and ensure they are empowered to communicate your vision in their circles when you are not around 2. Repeat your vision frequently to ensure it reaches the right audience 3. Provide a landing page where your vision is written down and refer to it

The biggest challenge here is that the vision, strategy, roadmaps, feature launch plans all start looking the same . While leading a product team, it is critical to draw a line between each of them, so that responsibilities are clearly passed down.

This is critical as in the famous words of John Doerr “we need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” People work better when they truly understand why they are doing what they are doing and how it is adding value.

However you choose to communicate, make sure you are translating to your audience and understanding the difference between vision, strategy and tactics. I really love this excerpt from SVPG: "Whatever the goal is, your strategy is how you’re planning to go about accomplishing that goal. Strategy doesn’t cover the details; those are the tactics we’ll use to achieve the goal. Strategy is the overall approach, and the rationale for that approach." Once you've nailed what you're communicating, spend every opportunity to refine the craft of communicating. There are very few circumstances in life where I have regretted studying human interaction and better ways to communicate with others to be inclusive as possible.

Aligning diverse cross-functional stakeholders with a unified product vision can pose a significant challenge, especially to newer PMs in large organizations. The solution is nuanced communication tailored to the needs and concerns of different job families. With engineering, center discussions around reducing technical debt and increasing dev velocity. With marketing, underscore market differentiation and customer engagement. This tailored approach illuminates the benefits, aligning teams with the overarching vision while cultivating collaboration, which is essential for the seamless execution of the product strategy. Bridging the divide across functions transforms vision into actionable and collaborative strides toward product success.

By systematically validating assumptions, you reduce the risk of making decisions based on inaccurate or outdated information. This iterative process ensures that your product decisions are grounded in reality, leading to more successful outcomes and a stronger product strategy.

For me and likely for you unless you work at a FANG org is that product theory rarely matches up with the real world. Business literature has a habit of loosely talking about specific sets of circumstances and never about the consequences of the varying factors in the real world. How do you deal with a founder with anger issues? How do you work with a leader who doesn't have leadership experience? How can you work with teams who don't know how to work together - the list goes on. This is why I love product though - your experiences make you a unique flavour of product person and taking every day with a good attitude, a learning mindset and hopefully some wins will propel your career to bringing stability and measured wins to others.

Simply put it, the biggest challenge on both product vision and strategy is, you used to navigate by the stars, but now the stars are dancing.

If you are a new product manager for an existing product in a mature phase, then coming up with a product vision and strategy would be even more challenging due to many factors: - Protecting product’s current position and focusing on customer retention. - Where to focus on new growth and revenue opportunities ? - Conservative mindset of stakeholders who wants to play a defensive game without investing too much on building new features. - Identifying your influencers, distractors and key business sponsors and create an effective communication plan and take them through the journey. - If there exists product portfolio then how the new product vision and strategy fits within the current product portfolio and the broader company’s vision.