Unlocking Momentum with Product Strategy

Using a fresh approach to getting unstuck

Sep 10, 2024

It's a chicken-or-egg moment for your product. You recognize that you've hit a pivotal time for your product. Your product isn't performing well or a new competitive challenge exists.

Now that you've recognized a new strategy is needed and your stakeholders want a new strategy what do you do? Staring at a blank screen or reading articles on strategy frameworks isn't helping unstick your creative juices.

A Book on Product Strategy

When you are at this point, you need something to break through the current situation and focus on formulating a strategy that works. This is where Product Strategy and Roadmapping by Steven Haines comes in handy.

This short book provides techniques to get cross-functional ideas flowing. It helps you work through what to do and why.

Let's dive into three steps from the book that can get you unstuck from updating your strategy:

Set the business baseline
Take a product snapshot
Summarize the opportunities

Setting the Business Baseline

The first step is to report on the current business situation. Looking at your recent business history sets the context for why the strategy is changing.

There are three key parts to setting the business baseline:

The market perspective: the history of your product's market and keys to growth
Competitive directions: what the market share leaders are doing in your product space
Your product's business relative to the market and competitors

The business baseline is your understanding of the market, competitors, and your product relative to the market and competitors. Your insights will prompt conversations about potential directions.

This is an easier starting point than sitting down to write a strategy. Reporting on the market conditions is a good place to start.

Below is an example of the initial business baseline:

Push yourself to take a stand and summarize at a high level. You will get good feedback!

As you get feedback on the Market Baseline, work on your product snapshot.

Your Product Snapshot

The purpose of the product snapshot is to summarize how your product has been doing for the past 1-2 years. If you are working on a new product, then you can look at a closely related product to complement the low amount of data on your product.

Article on tracking your product financials.

In this section, you take a fresh look at the customer segmentation. You might want to segment by the type of customer and/or the use case of your product.

To find meaningful insights, you might need to review order by order. This isn't scalable but sometimes you need to bury yourself in details to find a fresh point of view.

Below is an example of product-level performance by revenue and margin segment by segment.

You will get a lot of feedback on this fresh look at revenue and margin. Your product team will be surprised at the growth rates of the different customer segments.

Next, you need to report on the opportunities based on the market and your product trajectory.

Summarize the Opportunities

At this point, your market baseline and product snapshot have highlighted many directions that your product can take. As you have reviewed this material, you probably gathered suggested opportunities.

The final piece to unstick your strategy thinking is summarizing the opportunities ahead. You have reviewed market data and customer data with your stakeholders and product team.

Take a step back and summarize the opportunities. The opportunities typically come from:

Market growth: the growth rate of your segment and the advice from market analysts
Customer demand: what is resonating with current and potential customers
Product innovations: new revenue opportunities resulting from engineering
Systems and infrastructure improvements: cost reductions that could help product margin

A good format to show the business opportunity is to:

Take the related market opportunity
Extract a segment that relates to the opportunity
Extract out your target market share

This approach can work on a grouping of opportunities also.

By now you have a group of stakeholders and product team members who are working together on your strategy. You are no longer stuck on defining your strategy!

Now with your team, you are set to define where you want to go.

The slide template in this post is available to paid subscribers on the Resources page.

Conclusion - Unlock Momentum with Your Product Strategy

Whether it's for a single feature, an entire product, or a comprehensive portfolio, every strategy challenge requires a decisive push from a product manager to transform ideas into a strategic plan. The pathway to overcoming these challenges involves three critical steps:

Set the Business Baseline: Assess the current business situation by reviewing market trends, competitors, and your product's position in the market.
Take a Product Snapshot: Evaluate the product's recent performance, including customer segmentation and use cases.
Summarize the Opportunities: Consolidate and identify potential opportunities.

Engaging with stakeholders and your product team through these steps gets insights and gives momentum to chart a strategic direction for your product.

Product Strategy and Roadmapping by Steven Haines outlines this structured approach in its first half, while the latter half dives into shaping and managing your strategy effectively.

Embrace these steps, and you won't just set the direction—you'll be the compass that guides your product through the tumultuous seas of the market to the harbor of success.