How to Create a Winning Product Strategy

“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.” — Lee Bolman

In this week's edition I wanted to do something different than usual. Instead of just writing my own breakdown of how to create product strategies, I also wanted to get more eyes on what I thought was a great piece of content on the subject.

Nitin Julka is a Director of Product Management at LinkedIn, and recently wrote a LinkedIn article that gives one of the best breakdowns I have read on product strategy. It is much more in-depth than I will be diving, and Nitin is more experienced in product than I am, so I highly encourage you all to give it a read.

Since his article is on the lengthier side (~30 min excluding references), I am going to stick with a higher level format for my newsletter. Think of this newsletter as the SparkNotes on product strategy and his article as more of a detailed playbook for when you are ready to go out and execute on your own product strategy.

I post a lot outside of this newsletter. FOLLOW my account to see more updates!

Understand what a product strategy is

Strategy, in general, is difficult to define. If you go to Google images and search the term, you will encounter a wide range of objects that are all supposed to represent it somehow:

You will even hear different definitions touted by highly successful business executives depending on who you ask. My advice is to listen and take them all into account, because they all are probably right to some degree.

Based on years of listening I've come up with the following abstract definition:

A product strategy is the plan for how your product will win in the market

The emphasis on this definition belongs on the words 'plan' and 'win'. Without having a clear and compelling plan, it is impossible to claim that you are being in strategic in what you are building. Similarly, it is nearly impossible to imagine achieving a win without being strategic. These 3 words are inherently linked to each other.

Personally, I've always found abstract definitions of strategy to be somewhat difficult to grasp. Strategy feels like something that needs to be boiled down into its component parts in order to be better understood.

While I was working on the product strategy for the Mint relaunch a few years back, Intuit SVP of Design Kurt Walecki, forwarded me an HBR article called Can You Say What Your Strategy Is? I still leverage this article to this day, because it gives the best tangible definition of what a strategy is.

The key is in the 3 part breakdown that I have posted below:

So to put it in more tangible terms, a product strategy really boils down to your: Objective, Scope, and Advantage. To learn more about what each of these aspects mean I recommend also reading the HBR article.

Understand what a product strategy is at your company

Now just because you think you have a good understanding of what a product strategy is generally, does not mean it perfectly aligns to how your company approaches it.

For instance, I got into a debate with a coworker my first year at LinkedIn, over what a product strategy is. I regurgitated what I learned at Intuit and pointed him to the HBR article.

What I quickly came to learn was that LinkedIn did in fact have a slightly different view on product strategy than Intuit. LinkedIn's strategy is very much influenced by Jeff Weiner's Vision to Values approach. Intuit had something similar (Jeff sits on their board after all), but again there were differences in approach.

The biggest difference was around the artifacts each company used to present product strategies. Intuit executives in our consumer group tended to be much more driven by visuals/designs so we created slide decks and storyboards.

At LinkedIn, we use a format similar to Amazon, in that PMs are expected to produce 2-4 page written documents. We start every product strategy review with a 5 min silent reading period for people to brush up on the material.

It's also important to figure out which sections you need to include in a product strategy artifact. At LinkedIn, it's a requirement to include strong product principles. At Intuit, we didn't lean as hard on product principles, but it was a sin not to include member quotes and user stories.

Understanding the nuances of how your company puts together and presents product strategy is crucial to your success.

Do your homework

One thing that was exactly the same between Intuit and LinkedIn, was that winning product strategies (and in turn winning product strategy reviews) were determined far in advance.

As Nitin points out in his article, you need to do a lot of work ahead of time before you can even begin to formulate a product strategy.

I generally focus on gathering 3 primary types of information before I begin putting together a product strategy:

Quantitative: Assuming you aren't starting a company from scratch, there should be plenty of historical data available. See how members are using your product. Look over old reports and dashboards on how existing features are performing. Eventually you will be able to distill your research into a few key data points/insights to guide your thinking.

Qualitative: Talk to as many users as possible, and learn as much as you can about each one of them. What are the biggest pain points and needs in their lives? How do they use your product today? If they could wave a magic wand, what feature would they have created?

Domain: Learn as much as you can about your domain. Read whitepapers, books and whatever else you can get your hands on. Essentially become a subject matter expert in the space.

Note that gathering the information for these 3 buckets can have a lead time of 1-2 months, so it's important you carve out time.

A solid rule of thumb is to try to have an idea of when your next major product strategy review is at least a quarter in advance. This will allow you to begin laying the ground work early rather than trying to jam it all into a short time frame.

Focus on problems not solutions

My favorite line from Nitin's article was when he said the following: 

I think of strategy as mostly problem discovery rather than solutioning. Once a problem is crisply defined, then solving it is more straightforward.

This statement hits one of the core aspects to strategy right on the head. The reality is that you have some leeway to get solutions wrong, but you can't get the problem wrong.

Think of it from the perspective of darts. As long as you have a clearly defined problem (aka bullseye) then it's just a matter of throwing enough darts (tests/features) at it until you hit. However, if you don't clearly define the problem, it's almost as if you have turned your back to the dart board and are throwing at the wall on the other side of the room. It doesn't matter how many darts you throw, you'll never hit a bullseye.

Determine your audience and win them over ahead of time

It's important to engage your key stakeholders early and often. When your product strategy is at the early inception phase, get eyes on it and make sure the key hypothesis and product principles are directionally sound. This should be months before the actual strategy review while you are still doing your research.

Once you get into the home stretch (1-2 weeks before review) you want to begin circulating the "finalized" strategy artifact to key stakeholders ahead of time. This serves 2 main purposes:

1. You allow key stakeholders to feel a sense of ownership over the strategy. This will make it much more likely that they will support it moving forward.

2. It surfaces any major disagreements or gaps ahead of time, which otherwise may have derailed an entire product strategy review.

This gets back to my earlier point about winning product strategy reviews usually being determined before you walk into the room. At the end of the day you need buy-in from the right stakeholders, especially at a large company.

You've already done all of the hard work, just bring them with you on the journey so you can officially get to the starting line and begin to execute!

Reacting to this article and sharing this newsletter helps other current and prospective PMs join our community!