Demystifying Strategy

Strategy is a loaded term for a product manager. It has an aura of mysticism (the sacred strategy!) and is perceived as the domain of product executives that have honed this skill for decades.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Having a strategy is simply having a plan. You can start small. A back of the napkin set of steps is a strategy. Every product manager should have one as it is the foundation of the work that we do every day.

Photo by Anastasia Petrova on Unsplash

Let me tell you how you can create one — it’s not that hard.

Before we start, let’s ask why you need a strategy in the first place. I believe it helps in two fundamental areas:

1. Alignment — It gives you and your team a common goal. Engineers and PMs have to make lots of small decisions every day. Having a common strategy helps this decision-making and goes a long way towards creating a bigger impact. In other words, making sure we’re all rowing in the same direction.
2. Sense of purpose — when I first became a product manager I asked my engineering team what they need most from me — they said a sense of direction, of what they should be working on, and why. And fundamentally we all want to feel like the work that we do contributes to a bigger goal, don’t we?

Let’s jump straight into it. Your strategy should be a document with a few important, well thought out chapters:

1. Executive summary — don’t skip this. Not only will it ensure that more people understand your plan but also confirms that you can describe it in a few simple phrases. If you can’t do that, you don’t really have a crisp enough plan yet.
2. Problem Statement — a clear definition of what you’re trying to solve, centered on your customer’s needs.
3. Assumptions about market dynamics, technology trends, etc. These need to be validated constantly.
4. Key goals — Create well-defined and easy-to-measure goals that indicate if you’re on the right track. This can be sometimes coupled with point 5 below.
5. Definition of success — While goals need to be precise and measurable the definition of success needs to be inspirational. Close your eyes and imagine what success looks like then write that down. You need to have a powerful success story. It helps a lot with motivation.
6. Solution — the actual plan of how you’re going to solve the problems stated above. This can have multiple phases of execution and each phase can have a mini roadmap that further details the next steps. This can be further refined in other tools like the one you use for your backlog.

Where does this strategy document fits into the PM toolkit? Typically a good product manager has 1) a product vision 2) a product strategy 3) an immediate roadmap.

The vision or long-term goal should not change over a long period of time. The strategy can be more restricted, covering 6 months at a minimum but typically spans 1–2 years. Finally, the roadmap should be the concrete set of immediate next steps you’ll do over the next 3–6 months to execute the strategy.

Within the framework above most of your time will not be spent on creating the initial strategy — it will be spent on ensuring that the team understands and follows it as well as constantly refining it as new data comes in.

A strategy that has decent chances of success should be the reflection of the things that make any PM a great PM — a deep understanding of your customer problems, a good understanding of the market, of what’s technologically possible, and of the immediate reality of your team (e.g. what are they currently struggling with?). I’m assuming you have all that — if not, start there.

Now that you know what you need to create, here are some recommendations on how to go about actually creating it;

1. Brainstorming with the PM team — go wide, ask big questions.
2. With this input, create the first draft. You need to own the initial document while expecting that it will contain things that will drastically change.
3. Review and continue brainstorming with the PM team
4. Expand to include engineering and marketing teams, have them review the document. I found that setting 1.5h-2h meetings dedicated to this helps.

It should be a two-week process, potentially a bit longer depending on the project's importance and the number of people you want to involve. Having a strategy offsite can also be very beneficial to reducing the timeframe even more.

It’s important to stop once it’s good enough. Don’t forget that it’s just a plan and it will probably need to change as new data comes in. Don’t spend months on creating the perfect version, it doesn’t exist.

That’s it. Your strategy is done — now you need to ensure all your stakeholders from product, engineering, marketing, and sales know about it and help you achieve it. Chances are you will need to create additional documents to further popularize the strategy. A small, focused set of slides typically help - but don’t re-create the initial document.

Most importantly, continue to pay attention to your assumptions and your execution. Is the strategy really working? Did you create the right phases of execution? Is the market fundamentally changing or staying the same? The best strategy can quickly be obsolete if you don’t pay attention to this.

To conclude — it’s very important to be prepared and have a plan. Realize that the plan is not the reality and should never be mistaken for one. But it helps align and motivate your team to achieve greatness. And as the saying goes, luck favors the well prepared.