Product strategy — What is it ? Why build one ? (part-2)
This article is about why you should build a product strategy.
As Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Introduction
This is a simple product strategy eye opener article. My main focus is why spend time to build strategy that can influence building a roadmap and help taking decisions. This is not a recipe to build product strategy but rather an article to give you a sense what kind of work needs to be done and how product strategy can influence your decisions as product manager and your whole organization.
Definition
A simple definition for business strategy is
“A plan that helps a company achieve its goals utilizing available resource”
Or
Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities (HBR)
Why you should build one ?
While you are building your product and you have hundreds of features ideas and other hundreds from internal stakeholders and another from different customers. Imagine that each feature is a brick that you are trying to incorporate in your product.
Your job as product is to prioritize building features and align with different stakeholders and satisfy your customers. Maybe you choose to satisfy your biggest clients or an internal stakeholder with the most power inside your organization.
After 6 months of piling features you found that you a wall of bricks but you are not satisfied with the output because
- Market changed
- Customer needs changed
- Your competitors are building something new that attracts customers and you now you need to start from the beginning.
Of course you are not going to have the opportunity to do that.
Product strategy is not a to do list but it drives building your to do list and deciding what you are not going to do more than it drives what you are going to do. If you don’t have a product strategy, you can end up building the right features but without reach your goals.
Unfortunately, many product teams skip the strategy-drafting stage and jump right into listing themes and epics on their roadmap. Without a product strategy to guide these decisions, the team may prioritize the wrong items and find themselves misusing its limited time and resources. When you start with a strategy, you have a clearer picture of what you hope to accomplish with your product and translate it into a more strategically sound product roadmap.
(source: https://www.productplan.com/glossary/product-strategy/)
Finally
A product strategy should be
- A guide for you and your organization to select projects to work on and projects no to work on
- Help prioritize projects & features
- Flexible enough to be able to adapt to market changes and competitors moves
Next:
I will be discussing an approach to build product strategy.
