Simple Framework for Product Strategy

Product Strategy in simple words is a way for your product/team to win in the market and in-turn enable your company to achieve it's overall business strategy. Product strategy must be a part of company strategy/vision.

For example, if the company vision for Microsoft is “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.” , then the product vision of MS teams can be "To help the employees and organisations throughout the world to become more productive, cut meeting time and enable faster co-ordination" and strategy will be a function of this vision i.e. how MS can win in the market.

Following is a simple way to approach the product strategy (initial exercise/ data gathering)

1. Challenges

• Customer problems - Think about what are the main problems that your customers and users are facing, what is the intensity/ frequency of occurrence etc. Both quantitative and qualitative methods must be used to sharpen the confidence levels around problems and MVPs can be setup to validate the problem areas / level of urgency to solve the same.
• Competition/ Markets - Think about the collect intelligence around who are the set of competitors, what the competition is doing and what are the strengths and weaknesses for each one of them. Also think about the market as a whole. How fast is the market growing, what are the macro economic trends, are there any other markets (geography or complementary products) that the company can target to become more profitable.
• Internal/ Company - Think about the strengths and weaknesses of the company. What are the products/markets that it has excelled in the past and who are the key actors/ executives that the company has

2. Action

• Goal setting - Set goals for what the company can achieve via Product level interventions and also how are we planning to enable our users/customers
• Tasks, timelines and sub-tasks - Each sub-task must have a feasibility, effort analysis done (in partnership with the respective stakeholders). Timelines must be defined as a part of overall plan
• Prioritisation - Task effort vs impact exercise (using Reach, impact, confidence, effort) must be used to prioritise the actions
• Product, Tech and Design teams - What the teams are supposed to do and resource requirement for each of the sub-tasks

3. Expected Result

• Metrics - Success metrics, north star metrics and check metrics must be defined for the initiatives (overall level and at individual tasks level). Metrics must be tied back to the goals that we set earlier and also to the overall business metrics
• Projections - Analysis and calculations around the impact on acquisition, activation, usage, retention etc. with the time frame added as a dimension.

The final output/presentation must be a story which starts with the user problems and challenges that the company is currently facing, set of action items that we are going to take and the desired impact/ effect that we want to achieve (along with the timelines). Financial calculations and additional resource requirements must be added in appendix section of the presentation.

Also, always be prepared with the details around what (all) you have de-prioritised during this exercise (audience/stakeholders may want to get a sense of opportunity cost).

We must be mindful that Product strategy is not a one time exercise but it is a living document and continuous process. The above framework can be re-visited once every quarter, month or year (based on nature of business) to check if one (or more of the variables) have changed