Initiating the Process with a Miro Board

I usually kick off by establishing a Miro Board as my foundational reference point. From this board, I can create presentations and roadmap visualizations based on the collected insights.

This method allows me to get started efficiently without the burden of overcomplicating presentation templates or elaborate roadmaps. By taking a high-level view, I can formulate a product strategy in a matter of days instead of months.

Step #1: Determine Your Product Moats

The initial step involves recognizing the 3Ps of your Product Strategy: Positive-Sum, Product Powers, and Profit Models. These factors represent your product's competitive moats. We have elaborated on the 3Ps in our previous post about Product Strategy Mindset.

To uncover your competitive Moats, organize a workshop with your team and stakeholders for brainstorming sessions.

Invite your Tech Lead, Designer, Decision Maker, and any relevant subject matter experts. A diverse group contributes invaluable perspectives.

Write the 3Ps on a whiteboard and pose these three questions to the team:

1. What distinguishes us from the market? What aspects do our customers appreciate? (Adopting a Positive-Sum competition mindset)
2. What elements will take our competitors 3-5 years to replicate? (Focusing on Product Powers)
3. Which business models allow us to achieve profits exceeding industry standards? (Exploring Profitability)

Document both the Current State and the Future State of your product or product portfolio on your Miro Board.

Step #2: Collect Your Product Signals

After pinpointing your product moats, the subsequent step involves establishing your Product Signals.

The three signals to monitor are: Market, Customer, and Business Signals.

Your Product Signals help mitigate three types of product risks: Market risk, value risk, and viability risk.

Start by focusing on Market Signals. If the market conditions are not favorable, it may be unwise to proceed.

Research the following five aspects and incorporate them into your Miro board:

1. The market size for your product
2. Market competition
3. Market growth
4. Technology dependencies
5. Regulatory / Stakeholder approvals

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts here; you will need to engage in traditional research and data collection.

These insights can be gathered from: - Google searches, ChatGPT, SEM tools, market research websites, competitor sites, shareholder presentations, government statistics, or industry portals.

Once you’ve gathered Market Signals, focus on Customer Signals. These signals reveal which customer needs must be addressed to generate market value.

To refine your Customer Signals, balance quantitative and qualitative research. Here are some areas to consider:

1. Customer needs / gains / pains
2. Customer switching costs
3. Customer buying power

These insights can be collected through: - Customer interviews, surveys, NPS feedback, A/B testing, customer service insights, or web analytics.

Lastly, to ensure you’re delivering business value, research the following aspects:

1. Business objectives
2. Long-term drivers
3. Strategic focus areas
4. Vision / Mission statements

These insights can come from: Revenue forecasts, OKRs, CEO vision presentations, investor or board presentations, departmental strategies, or strategy presentations from leadership teams.

Compile all your Product Signals onto an online whiteboard. As you update the board, your Product Intuition will gradually enhance.

Step #3: Align with Your Company Goals

Once you have gathered your Product Signals, it’s time to identify a key company metric to focus on.

Company goals act as guidelines to prioritize product and feature development.

Here’s a structured approach to help you get started:

1. Schedule one-on-one meetings with senior stakeholders (Heads/VPs of Product, GMs, and other leadership).
2. During these meetings, inquire about their high-level goals for the year. Inform them that you will document and prioritize these with the broader leadership teams in the upcoming weeks.
3. If necessary, utilize OKRs and the S.M.A.R.T goals framework to extract these objectives.
4. When stakeholders propose product ideas, clarify the goals and metrics the product solution would meet.
5. Encourage your leadership team to stack-rank these goals.
6. Focus on the most critical objectives for the current quarter and defer less urgent ones for later.

Concentrate on one or two key objectives, but don't worry if you can't achieve them in your first attempt. Some organizations require several tries to find their focus. Stay persistent and keep refining your approach.

Step #4: Identify Your Product Bets & Set Metrics

The next phase is to pinpoint the Product Bets that hold the greatest potential for achieving company goals and to establish metrics to monitor progress.

Coming up with product ideas is complex, and I will address that separately. At a high level, revisit your Product Signals for inspiration.

Once you’ve generated some product ideas, track and prioritize them by creating an Ideas Backlog. This backlog is simply a spreadsheet containing all your product ideas along with various criteria for prioritization.

Here is the Ideas Backlog template for you to use as a starting point.

Numerous prioritization tools and frameworks exist, but I prefer a straightforward Scorecard Prioritization approach.

Start by adding these columns:

1. Priority, Initiative or Product Name, Tactical or Strategic Bet
2. Impact on customers, based on feedback and research
3. Short to medium-term company goals and long-term business drivers
4. Your confidence level as a percentage, which should increase as you gain more knowledge about the feature/product
5. Value detractors like Effort and Market Competition
6. Lastly, include your “Reasons to Believe” and any additional columns that provide context for your prioritization. Be cautious about the number of columns to avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Each column serves as a rationale for why you are developing this Product or Feature.

After establishing your priorities, the next step is to set up metrics for each strategic bet. These metrics will ensure you are on track to meeting your business objectives.

Ask yourself these three questions:

1. “If we are on the right path toward achieving this strategy, what customer behavior do we want to influence?”
2. “If customer behavior has changed, what user metrics would we expect to see shift?” This serves as your leading indicator.
3. “If we see that user metric change, what business metrics would we anticipate moving?” This becomes your lagging indicator.

Here are some tips for creating metrics:

• Begin with benchmarks from internal or external reports.
• Examine your competitors if they are publicly traded.
• Model out the forecasted impact of your product based on uptake and retention.
• You can have multiple metrics, but narrow them down to two: Leading and Lagging metrics.
• Achieving around 70% certainty is adequate, but be sure to update metrics as your product enters the market.

Once you’ve defined your priorities and associated metrics, the next step is to organize your features according to those metrics.

This might appear similar to a Product Roadmap, and that’s because a Roadmap is simply a representation of your product strategy. Strategy comes first, followed by the roadmap.

Step #5: Conclude with a Product Vision

With all your product bets and metrics established, you can summarize your Product Strategy with a Product Vision.

You might wonder why the Product Vision is created at the end of the process rather than at the beginning.

The reason is that the Product Vision encapsulates all the Product Signals, Company Goals, and Strategic Decisions made throughout the process.

Thus, it’s advisable to first grasp the context and then use that understanding to inform your Product Vision.

Your Product Vision serves as a tool for inspiration. It invites others to join you on this journey and acts as a guiding north star for meaningful work.

A Product Vision differs from a Company Vision. A Company Vision outlines the company's direction, while the Product Vision describes how it will help the company realize its vision.

In essence, the Company Vision is the input, and the Product Vision serves as the output.

Here’s a Product Vision Statement template I use to formulate a Product Vision:

> Our product helps <target customer> achieve <desired outcome>.

We will accomplish this by: - Expanding on <these strategic bets> - Exploring into <these strategic bets> - Enforcing our leadership in <these strategic bets>.

For example, using Blinkist as a template:

> Blinkist aids busy individuals seeking to read more non-fiction and gain knowledge in minutes instead of hours.

We will achieve this by: 1. Expanding the number of languages available in the app. 2. Exploring summaries of non-fiction podcasts and video content. 3. Enforcing our leadership in establishing authority in quality book summaries.

Once you formulate a Product Vision Statement, you can illustrate your product's future through videos, designs, and demos.

Here are some examples: - Apple Glass: Concept video - InVision Studio: YouTube - Space X: YouTube - Pico — Garden in your Palm: Kick Starter

In conclusion, here’s the five-step process for developing your product strategy:

1. Step #1: Determine your Product Moats
2. Step #2: Collect your Product Signals
3. Step #3: Align with your Company Goals
4. Step #4: Identify Product Bets and establish Metrics
5. Step #5: Conclude with a Product Vision

My Product Strategy Miro Board

To assist you in visualizing the process, I’ve put together all necessary steps in my Product Strategy Miro Board. Feel free to copy it and customize it to suit your needs.

After you create your Product Strategy, developing your Product Roadmap is a logical next step. The items on your roadmap are strategic bets, with timelines based on estimates and efforts. (I'll delve into this in my next post.)

If this is your first time reading this post, it’s crucial to grasp the three Product Strategy mindsets before formulating your product strategy.

Product strategy is 80% mindset and 20% execution. Without the right mindset, no tools or processes will lead to success. Check out the post linked below: