The Persistent Pragmatic: Don’t know where to begin with strategy? A better framework to get you started!

Hello and welcome to The Persistent Pragmatic where we discuss all things Product Management, Product Marketing, and the Pragmatic Marketing Framework.

Today’s topic is Strategy.

I was, as any product manager worth her salt should be, lurking in the forums on roadmap.com and the topic of how one builds a product strategy came up.

The person asking the question cited the old Vision> Goals> RoadMap> Backlog framework.

I have two problems with this approach.

Firstly, as a method for defining strategy, it excludes the most import thing: your current state.

Having a vision is great but if you want to build a strategy you need to figure out where you are now. Where you are now, or your current state, is the foundation upon which any strategy needs to be built and will drive many of the decisions you need to make to achieve your goals.

For example if you have a vision of yourself on the beach in Hawaii that is great. Your goal is to get to that beach. If you live next door to that beach your strategy for getting there will be totally different than if you live in Penetanguishene Ontario.

Problem number two: A vision is not a strategy and neither are goals. It always amazes me how often these two things are mistaken for having a strategy.

A vision is a (sometimes delusional) statement that gets uttered at team meetings in an attempt to boost moral or give people the impression that being in business isn’t just about being profitable.

I am not saying to not have a vision, but a vision without action (ie a strategy) doesn’t boost anyone’s moral and doesn’t make businesses profitable.

Goals, ladies and gentlemen, are not a strategy. Achieved goals are the outcome of a good strategy and let you know your strategy is working. Unachieved goals are the product of a poor strategy or being in denial about exactly how many calories are in a box of Oreos.

What is good about having a vision and goals is that it forces a business to be explicit about where it wants to go. Just like knowing where you are now, a successful strategy is impossible without knowing where you want to go.

Whether you live in old Kona Town or Penetanguishene, if you leave your house without knowing you want to go to get to Magic Sands Beach, you may end up in some very strange places. (I’m looking at you Wanekewaning).

There is a much better framework for approaching strategy. But first it will be useful to define what a strategy is and what a strategy is not.

What is a strategy

The longer I have been a product professional the more surprised I am at how misunderstood and misapplied the term strategy is. And also how rare strategy and strategic thinking are.

A strategy is a plan you make for getting from A to B. Or from one state to another. This is why data, and knowing your current state is so important.

A is your current state and B is your goal. Everything in between that is strategy.

Let’s say, for example, your company says that it wants to grow revenue by 10% over the next 2 years. This could be defined as a goal.

Awesome, you are already a step ahead in that the company you work for has a goal. Many don’t.

Well, how do you, as a product manager, contribute to that goal?

How does your product contribute now? Do you know how much your product brings in and what percentage that is of overall turnover?

If you don’t know, how are you going to put a plan in place to grow it? In fact, how do you know how much you will need to grow it by? You can’t even put your own goal in place without understanding your current state.

What markets are you in and how much of those markets have you penetrated? If you have 70% penetration in your chosen markets you are going to have to look at opening up to other markets or exploiting assets for alternative revenue streams. That could mean feature function enhancements but also a shedload of research.

If you are only at 10% then you have scope to expand revenue in your current market and your strategy could be a plan for reaching new buyers in an existing domain and trying to figure out why they aren’t buying from you now. But you really need to know why they aren’t buying before you can put a plan in place to fix that.

Goals are the WHAT. Your strategy is the HOW. Visions are… kind of pointless(?).

It Isn’t Your Roadmap or Backlog

We’ve already determined that a vision and goals aren’t a strategy, but it may surprise you to learn that neither are your roadmap and backlog. Your roadmap and backlog are part of your strategy or an outcome of it. They aren’t the strategy itself.

In the case of the roadmap, yes it is literally a representation of getting from A to B, but what is on that roadmap is as much an outcome of strategy as it is a strategy in itself.

Taking the example above of a 10% market penetration, you can’t build a roadmap to boost that until you come up with a way of figuring out why you are only at 10% . Maybe you don’t understand the market problems well enough or you don’t know how to talk to your buyers. Maybe your pre-sales process isn’t working and you need to fix it which has nothing to do with a feature/function roadmap.

Visions are Long Term, Strategies are Short Term

Yes I know this is counter-intuitive.

Isn’t a short term strategy just an excuse for being tactical?

Nope.

Look at it this way: you can identify a current state that is problematic, decide on what a better state would be, and put a plan in place to get there. That is thinking strategically regardless of how long it could take you to get from one state to another.

Thinking tactically is putting a plan in place to solve a problem that does not necessarily end up in a better or more desired state. The problem may be immediately solved but there is no consideration as to whether it is permanently solved or solved in the best way.

The way I like to think of Vision vs Strategy is that visions represent the Utopian and ideal state. Now if you live in a Dystopia and want to get to Utopia, the task of transforming the one into the other is far to gigantic to create an effective strategy for. It would take years and in business we don’t have years any more. We have quarters.

By all means keep your vision in mind when building a strategy but set yourself realistic goals. A strategy is a plan for achieving a goal. Not realising a vision. If you are starting out in Penetanguishene and want to get to that beach in Hawaii, the first thing you need to do, once you understand where you are and how much money you have, is get to an international airport. Focus on how you are going to do that in the context of your current state and constraints. And then look at the next stage of the journey.

Going back to the 10% revenue growth problem. Maybe you have figured out that you do still have scope to expand in your current market and you can’t because you only have one pre-sales person to support opportunities.

Your vision, as any good product manager’s vision should be, is a whole army of talented, trained, and awesome pre-sales people. But that is a pretty big ask when your pre-sales function is mired in tactical support.

So how do you get, not to Utopia, but to a place just a little bit better than where you are now? You would be surprised at how much work that alone can be. Trying to put a strategy in place to get to Utopia will totally tank. It will simply take too long.

You need a strategy that will incrementally and continually deliver value in the form of something just a bit better than it was before.

A very long term strategy delivers no value and you might find that half way to Utopia your destination changes. Or your definition of Utopia changes. Because, in the technology game, things can change really quickly all the frikkin’ time!

A Better Way

The vision>goals>roadmap>backlog is not a framework for building a strategy. It is a framework for building a backlog. And not a very good one.

Just as an aside a better backlog building framework would be: problem>requirement>roadmap>backlog. And maybe we can talk about this another day.

Anyways…

If you want to build a strategy, the following is a much better path that will give you a much better strategic outcome:

Current State>Goals> Prioritise>Strategy

First of all, where are you now. What is the current state of your business or product.

A great way to assess your current state is with the Pragmatic Marketing Framework gap analysis. The framework is 37 activities that a business needs running to be successful in delivering products and to be a market leading organisation.

If you would like to know more about having an assessment and what a Pragmatic Product Professional can do for you please get in touch on the old twitter or linkedin.

Now you know where you are and why, where do you want to get to? Set those goals.

Assess the difference between where you are now and what your goals are. If your goal is 20% market penetration in a year and you are currently at 2%, don’t create a strategy to get from 2% to 20% in 12 months.

If the reason you are at 2% is because your pre-sales function can’t scale, your goal needs to be to scale your pre-sales function. Not grow penetration by 18%.

Set yourself the goal of automating and optimising that function. Maybe that is by creating canned demos or automating certain aspects of the sales process. Start small. Not with Utopia. How can you make the current situation just a bit better in a relatively short amount of time. Get it from 2% to 7%.

Once you are there, your strategy might have to change to get you the rest of the way. Or, even better, you may be able to change the penetration goal to 30% because of everything you learned by getting to 7%.

Once you have goals you will need to make sure that all of your stakeholders agree on what they are, why you have chosen them, and in what order they need to be achieved. And also what you are going to need in order to get there.

Create a plan to get from your current state to your first goal.

Ta Da!

You have just built your first strategy.

Disclaimer

OK so we kind of went from prioritizing your goals to strategy created and sort of glossed over the actual strategy creation.

Your strategy, like you, is a beautiful and unique snowflake and very specific to how your organisation operates, your goals, and your current state. This is why it is better to think shorter term or to break down big goals into smaller ones. Identify a problem or a gap and find a way to make it just a bit better or just a bit narrower in a short amount of time and then reassess your new current state.

This is one mistake I see made quite often and it is just as bad as not having any strategy at all: having a strategy that is too ambitious and complex and long term. Keep it simple, keep it focused, and keep it value driven. The longer a strategy takes to deliver an outcome, the less value a business or product derives from it.

The Take Away

Don’t worry if you have never had to “do strategy” before.

Strategy can be hard. Very hard. Accept this and dive right in. If you are coming to product management from a more tactical function like development or marketing execution it may take some time. In reactive businesses many people simply are not used to thinking in this way and it can be an uncomfortable shift.

That’s why it is better to have strategies that deliver value incrementally. If you get it wrong, it takes no time at all to see this and reassess your strategy.

Try using the Current State>Goals>Prioritise>Strategy framework to figure out HOW you are going to get from A to B (not A to Z!).

And take heart! Like any skill, strategy is something you can learn and practice. It doesn’t get any easier, you just get better at it.