Software Product Series: What is Product Strategy?

If you have not read my first blog, here is the link What is Product Vision?

Today, let us try to understand, What is Product Strategy? Strategy is all about how you are going to dominate the Market. How are you going to win the market with the product you are envisioning? Finding the product/market fit means a market that is loving your product and absolutely in need of it.

Oncer the product vision is set, it is stable but the strategy will be constantly revised, multiple iterations until you find the product/market fit & winning mantra.

The product/market fit is revised, when you enter a market with soft launch & early bird offerings, slowly you grow to a larger audience with different dimensions. The strategy is constantly revised as per the navigation of the product in the market. Your hypothesis of successful product evolves with various dimension as you navigate.

How do you express Product Strategy? You can write a business plan to demonstrate the product strategy with lot of optimism and predictions or you could write a product/market fit hypothesis which is a hypothesis, refined and iterated from failures and learnings after product is launched. The second approach I mentioned, let you experiment and learn from market & customer response rather elaborate planning, predictions and intuitions. We have used this approach in DocEngage to create minimum viable product and quick pivots to change dimensions and directions.

So you basically, you develop initial product/market fit hypothesis, use MVP, soft launches, customer response, experience, understanding the need in depth etc.. and validate those hypotheses defined earlier, revise them and iterate the strategy as many times as required.

You can write Product/Market Fit hypothesis using Jeff Bezos 6 pages narrative which requires a clear and deep thinking & understanding.

My Next Article is Who is Target Audience?

Asha Satapathy Co-Founder, DocEngage, Product Geek (Built 10 Software Products, Maintained over 50 products)