A Meaty, Practical Post About Strategy In Action

Strategy is one of those hot topics in the bubble of product management discourse. There are enough books, blog posts, newsletter entries, frameworks, and LinkedIn musings on this topic to fill up a library.

Yet many people still seem to struggle with understanding the concept of strategy in business and how product strategy fits in.

Part of the reason why I think there is confusion is due to the number of ways strategy is explained, in particular product strategy. But then when I reflect on this reason and I find that, abstractly, these definitions all tend to converge on the same core meaning. Below are a few definitions that illustrate this convergence.

True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success. - Roger L. Martin

In other words, strategy is an articulation of what you are going to do (and not do) to win.

Overview of Organization Level Strategy

The two most fundamental strategic choices are deciding where to play and how to win. - Roger L. Martin

Before jumping in to business and product strategy, I think it is useful to highlight that where a company is in the business lifecycle has significant influence on its business and product strategy.

There are 4 main organization level strategies that describe the overall direction of a company:

• Growth Strategy: This strategy aims to increase market share or expand into new markets. It can involve market penetration, product development, market development, or diversification. This is where startups and scale-ups live.
• Stability Strategy: Focused on maintaining current operations and market position, this strategy emphasizes incremental improvements rather than aggressive expansion. This is the ‘pivotal moment’ in the chart where a scale-up has grown multiple ways and is reached maturity. They may have hit ceilings in some markets and with some of their products but revenue and cash flow are stable. In the stock market, these are called ‘value stocks.’
• Retrenchment Strategy: Involves reducing operations to cut costs and strengthen financial health. This might include downsizing or divesting non-core business units. This organization strategy is often found in mature and declining companies who are looking for quicks wins to show on their financial statements and to buy time to figure out what to do.
• Reinvention Strategy: This transformative approach involves significant changes to the business model or operations to adapt to new market conditions or consumer behavior. This organization strategy is usually employed within startups who grew too fast and can’t turn a profit.

Most tech startups and scale-ups are employing a growth strategy.

Overview of Business Strategy

Business-level strategies determine how a company competes in a specific market. They focus on positioning products or services to gain a competitive advantage. Michael Porter’s framework, Porter’s Generic Strategies, define 4 common strategies:

• Cost Leadership: Aim to be the lowest-cost producer in the industry.
• Differentiation: Offer unique products or services that customers value.
• Focus: Target a specific market segment, using either cost leadership or differentiation within that segment.

Most tech startups are typically competing with a differentiation-focus strategy.

Let’s Write Some Strategy Baby

Alright, we’ve done enough groundwork here to get to the meat of this post. This month’s entry is designed to show you a practical articulation of a what a synthesized company and product strategy might look like.

For the last 4 years I have worked in sports data and analytics. A lot of people ask me about what a company like this even does and so I feel like this is a perfect opportunity to share that information in the form of articulating the strategy of a fictional sports data and analytics scale-up called Victory Analytics.

FRAMEWORK ALERT: In this post I will be using Reforge’s ‘Strategy Stack’. I find it very easy to grasp and also it shares a similar structure to another popular framework from Roman Pichler. I highly recommend reading the entire Reforge post, however, I have included a few graphics here that illustrate the relationship of the different components in the framework.

Link to Reforge Strategy Stack write-up: https://www.reforge.com/blog/the-product-strategy-stack        

Victory Analytics Strategy Deck

Organization & Business Strategy

Organization Stage (and Strategy): Growth

Generic Business Strategy: Differentiation-Focus

Vision & Mission

We envision a world where every sports team, from grassroots to professional, can harness the power of data to reach their full potential. That’s why it is our mission to provide cutting-edge data analytics that empower teams to make winning decisions and foster player development.

Company Strategy (AKA How We Win)

How are we going to turn this ambitious vision into reality over the next 1 to 3 years? Let's break down our game plan (This should be revisited as conditions change!):

1. Data Collection Systems: We are creating partnerships with leagues and teams while developing proprietary technologies like wearables and data collection applications powered by machine learning and computer vision. It's all about gathering those meaningful data points that can provide value adding insights.
2. Advanced Analytics Platform: We are building sport-specific tooling that can help teams analyze performance, optimize tactics, and identify outstanding player performance for recruiting at every competition level.
3. Sports Coverage Expansion: Starting with American football, we will be systematically expanding to other major sports.
4. Tiered Product Offerings: From pro teams to grassroots and amateur clubs, we are creating scalable solutions for every level of play.
5. Strategic Partnerships: By collaborating with leagues and media companies to use our insights during broadcast presentations, we establish authority and top of mind presence in our industry.
6. Invest in Research and Development: We will be ahead of the sports science curve by dedicating R&D resources to help us continuously improve our metrics and insights.
7. Expand Globally: While we will start in the US with American football, we aim to expand our footprint into other sports and regions. We will establish regional offices in key sports markets worldwide and develop multilingual platforms and localized solutions.
8. Competitive Differentiation: We will continually monitor and analyze our competitors' offerings to ensure our solutions remain unique and superior. This includes:
9. Strategic Acquisitions: We will be open to acquiring smaller, innovative companies in our space to bolster our capabilities.

Product Strategy

What are we going to build? For whom? And in what order? This is what our product strategy aims to answer for the next 2 years. (This should be revisited as conditions change too!)

1. Develop Data Collection Tools
2. Develop a Unified Sports Analytics Platform
3. Expand and Enhance Football Analytics Suite
4. Launch Analytics Solutions for Two Additional Major Sports
5. Create Tiered Product Offerings
6. Develop a Player Development Suite
7. Establish an Open API and Developer Program

This product strategy directly supports our company strategy by expanding our sports coverage beyond football, creating tiered offerings for different levels of play, supporting player development, and laying the groundwork for global expansion.

It takes into account our current strengths in football analytics while pushing us to expand into new areas. The strategy is designed to be flexible enough to adapt to market feedback and technological advancements, while still providing a clear direction for our product development efforts over the next 1-2 years.

Product Strategy: What We Will Not Do

Part of a good strategy is identifying what we will not do. One of the directions we have decided not to go in at this time is providing stats for fans. To try to go after this market would requite an entirely different approach.

One-Year Product Roadmap

This roadmap outlines the sequence of our product development efforts over the next year, divided into Now, Next, and later. It's designed to implement our product strategy in a logical order that maximizes learning and compound value.

Now: Foundation and Football Enhancement

1. Start development of data collection apps
2. Begin development of the unified sports analytics platform
3. Enhance football analytics suite
4. Initiate the open API development

Next: Expansion and Tiered Offerings

1. Launch beta version of data collection apps
2. Continue unified platform development
3. Launch tiered product offerings for football
4. Begin development of basketball analytics module
5. Complete open API development

Later: New Sports + Focused Capabilities

1. Complete and launch unified sports analytics platform
2. Release basketball analytics module
3. Begin development of soccer analytics module
4. Start development of player development suite
5. Expand open API capabilities

Continuous Work

Throughout the year:

• Regularly gather and analyze user feedback
• Continuously refine and optimize existing features
• Monitor market trends and competitor activities
• Adjust roadmap as necessary based on learnings and market changes

This roadmap sequences our product strategy to build upon each achievement, starting with our core strength in football and gradually expanding to other sports and features. It prioritizes the development of our unified platform and core analytics capabilities, which will have a compounding effect on all subsequent developments.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we have taken a helicopter view of strategy from the perspective of Victory Analytics, a fictional sports data and analytics scale-up. We have defined how the stage and financial health of a company generally guides the overall method of how that company competes. From there, we walked through, in great detail, Victory’s articulation of its vision, why they exist (mission), and how they plan to win (company strategy). Finally, we connected the company strategy to the product strategy by detailing what products the company plans to compete with and in what order (roadmap) these initiatives will be brought to market.

To complete the stack, we’d want to turn our roadmap into goals that we can measure. But I’ll save that for a future post.

What I hope you take away from this exercise is:

• The difference between company strategy and product strategy
• The purpose of strategy to focus company efforts on bets to succeed
• What it looks like in written form

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