We interact with multiple products daily. From the ubiquitous toothbrush to the multitude of apps we use on our mobile phones daily, every one of these products has a team of product experts guided by a solid strategy.
Getting a product to the market requires multiple layers of collaboration and unwavering attention to detail. Envisioning and getting the customer experience on point, ensuring functionality is as intended and finally, that the right messages are being shared about the product with its customers and the larger market. At a tactical level, a product strategy is a living document that serves as a converging point for the whole organization and provides a clear direction for the team to focus their energies.
Breaking down product strategy
A Product strategy usually consists of three broad elements:
- Your Core: Product Vision, What do you want the product to deliver – Key features & Differentiators
- Business Reality: Your customer personas, Market size, scale and needs.
- Business Goals: What are tangible needle-pushing goals for your business? Can be broadly broken down into Initiatives – High-level strategic buckets/ themes of work that need to be focused on to achieve success and Goals – Each goal comes with a clearly defined business outcome & success metric. These feed into your tactical product roadmap with clear timelines and prioritization, showing a way forward to your team.
I will be sharing a detailed breakdown of critical elements of the product strategy and frameworks to build a winning product strategy for your business as a part of this series. For now, let’s look at an overview.
The Core
- Product Vision: A product vision differs slightly from a business vision but stems from the business vision. If the product is the business, both will serve the same purpose. In its best form, a vision should be a clearly articulated statement about the business’s long-term goals & objectives in a perfect scenario. It should capture very clearly the “why” for your business. Why – the product? Why – In the current market scenario? Why – You? Part inspirational and part guiding, it should be the guiding north star for the business. The best way to start drafting a product vision statement would be to ask yourself;
In the ideal world where your company has the best market scenario, both in terms of size and ideal customers, what problem statement will your product address and solve?
- Key Features & Differentiators: Great product strategies focus on the user problem they are solving or aim to solve. They have an unbridled focus on users and how everything they build adds value to their experience. Great features and differentiators have one thing in common; they have a clearly defined problem statement or a bunch of problem statements. Solving each major problem statement for the user with the product offering could be a key feature or a bunch of critical components. With a clear understanding of the market, you need to articulate why users should choose your product over competitors. Is it a critical feature that your competitors don’t have, or are you providing incrementally better value for your user or a combination of other factors? What distinguishing characteristic makes your product a better choice driving loyalty, sales and growth?
Business Reality
- Customer Personas: How much do you know about your target customers/ users? What are you aware of their demography, their professions, their financial status, their hobbies and consumer behaviour? A customer persona addresses these and creates a detailed profile of an ideal customer. It represents the segment of users that the business is targeting. They are ideally broken down into a primary persona and a couple of secondary segment profiles. It largely depends on the company as well. The idea is that this indicates who the business is targeting and, from a product perspective, the problems the product is trying to solve for the customer.
- Market Research: It is essential to understand the macro market environment you will release your product into. It also informs product managers’ decisions to build the ideal product for the users and the market. Though there are multiple methodologies and approaches to market research, market research will inform you on the ideal product concept you should aim for, the marketing, messaging and positioning for your product. It will capture your competition and their products and help you understand the potential size of your prospective customer base.
Business Goals
When it comes to Business Goals, numerous goals can affect multiple aspects of the business. However, driving specifically into those business goals that drive product and vice versa, they can broadly be broken down into two segments.
The first is broadly breaking down business objectives into themes or strategic focus areas that you need to focus on over a while. These are overarching themes gleaned from your product vision and/or market research. Usually, the focus for mid to long-term areas takes a couple of months or even a quarter to decide.
Once you clearly define your strategic focus areas, it is time to break them down into actionable goals for the team. These actionable goals are then added to a product roadmap to create a list of actionable items listed by priority to achieve your product vision. Each goal must have a definite business outcome and a success metric associated with it to measure the impact of that goal.
With these core components in place, here are four key things to building an effective product strategy:
- User. User. User.: Great product strategies have an obsessive focus on the user. From defining the perfect user persona, what they do, what they want, their behaviours and patterns and what problems they face. And how are you making life better for them with your product?
- Perspective: You must involve as many perspectives as possible while building your product strategy. Involving all stakeholder groups will help you understand what they are looking for in a product from their specific perspective and help you define a well-rounded and flexible strategy.
- Define USPs: A clear understanding of your product’s unique selling point should come from a product strategy exercise. This should then help address the product’s marketing plan and indicate how well the product will perform in the market.
- Keep it flexible: As I mentioned in the beginning, the product strategy should be a live document that can change from time to time. Business priorities shift from time to time, and external factors like changes in the market landscape, economic conditions and the introduction of new competing products might address your product strategy. Be open to taking a re-look at the strategy and changing it as required from time to time. The only constant is that the process addresses an executable plan for your product and business.
Product strategy is not usually concrete. Product teams must keep a finger on the pulse of the users and the market scenario and adapt their strategy to stay relevant. A strong product strategy will align teams, have great insight and prove to be a strong foundation on which a tactical product development plan can be built and executed.