5 Reasons You Don’t Have A Product Strategy
& Why It’s Essential You Have One
In this informative & fun-filled 4-part series, I will identify:
1. What product strategy is
2. 5 pre-requisites for product strategy (the focus of this article)
3. Why not having one is essential to product success
4. How to actually craft a product strategy in practice
Warning: This article has a lot of funny & unfunny memes included
Many a Product Manager or Founder will read this & think,
“Strategy. Yeah. We’ve got one of those. We’ve got a few of them in fact, so what’s the big deal?” 😌
Usually at this point, I’ll start doing a bit of this in my head 👈
Why?
Because, out of 100 companies in I have either worked with or interacted with in my time as a founder & product consultant in Berlin, London, Sao Paulo & Lisbon, you know how many actually had a clear, compelling product strategy?
One.
Yes, you read that right: One.
Most product people have a plan, not a product strategy.
Yet if you do put this process into practice to actually craft a compelling product strategy, you will dramatically improve your chances of product success & become one of the rare few product leaders who build high-value, impactful products.
I used this process to bootstrap my business, Prod MBA, from zero to six figures in 10 months. Other companies, such as Superhuman, have applied this with far greater success.
But first, what is a product strategy?
A product strategy is a framework for making decisions.
It is a way of focusing an organisation — or specific team — on one or two things that really matter, then ignoring everything else.
Rather than building something generic & copy every feature that the competition has, it means deliberate about what you will work on — and what you will not work on.
For example, take my business, Prod MBA.
We focus on delivering “hands-on, actionable learning”.
This is what we promise potential customers.
It is what we deliver to them.
And because we deliver this highly valuable thing to our customers, they then refer other customers to us.
If something will not help us deliver “hands-on, actionable learning”, we won’t do it.
Similar with Superhuman, an email application.
Superhuman just focuses on serving busy tech executives.
Those busy tech executives spend 2–3 hours per day on email.
What does Superhuman therefore focus on?
Building a “lightning fast email service”.
That’s it.
And, because they deliver on their promise, they successfully charge $30 per user, out-compete Gmail in this niche & have a waiting list of over 750,000 people.
So, what is a product strategy?
It is, in essence, a framework for saying,
“We are going to focus on this point of value, not these other things”.
It’s as simple as that.
In theory, at least…
In practice, however, you need the following 5 pre-requisites as part of your team culture when actually crafting & implementing a product strategy…
1. Forgetting That Everything Comes With A Cost
Almost every management team I have worked with is very good at adding things to a roadmap.
What they aren’t so good at is taking things away.
Even in a large organisation with big, well-funded teams, there are always resource restraints.
Which dictates an obvious, but usually overlooked, point:
That we cannot do everything.
And that, if we choose to work on one thing, it necessarily means we are not going to be working on some other thing.
That there is an “opportunity cost” in picking that one thing, and not another thing.
Yet, as in product, as in life, we tend to simply ignore this basic law of physics and try to cram more and more features in.
Therefore, when approaching product strategy, be realistic:
If you look at all the different ways that all the different solutions in your problem space approach that problem, that you will not out-compete all of them. That you will not be able to — nor should you — copy all of them.
That, instead, you focus in on one point of unique value that your customer cares about and make sure you deliver on that one thing.
One tip: Place a clear monetary value on each point of value you are looking at focusing on, as this can clarify the risk — and opportunity — you are looking at focusing on. See next week’s article for more on this.
2. Inability to Focus
The biggest challenge here — and a potential blocker — is working with a leadership team who simply refuse to focus their efforts on one or two things.
I’ve sat with founders to push them to define a product strategy, yet a few hours later they’ll be asking the team to work on something completely unrelated.
Why? Fear of missing out on other opportunities, self-doubt, simply not understanding the importance of focus.
Whatever the reason — or combination of reasons — it is very difficult to get a busy, stressed, unaligned leadership team to focus on defining — and committing to — a shared product strategy.
Furthermore, even if you get a team to focus on one specific point of value, such as “hands-on learning”, it is really hard to keep people focused on that one thing.
Naturally, teams will come up with shiny, new ideas & try to squeeze them in.
Or they feel they’re already delivering lots of that value to the customer, so feel it’s time to add something else to the mix.
Your role is to simply keep repeating the same customer stories, the same point of value and the results that your focus has delivered so far.
Yes, further down the line, you may want to stack more value, but it will likely take you far longer than you realise to reach a point of Product-Market Fit, where your customers are so happy with your product they are referring their friends to it.
3. Small Risks Seem Bigger Than the Real Risks
A big part of the reason leaders do not commit to a product strategy is that it seems like a big risk.
Because, if we are going to target just one specific group of customers with one specific point of value, it feels like we are closing the door to the broader market.
Also,
“What if that thing we think of as valuable, really isn’t, and we’ve put all of our eggs in the wrong basket?”
“Or what if we can’t deliver on our promise?”
These kinds of questions make it seem a safer option to build something generic with lots of perceived value and lots of features in order to attract as broad a group as possible.
Yet that is exactly how you end up with a generic product that serves no-one in particular.
And it’s a sure path to product failure.
4. Being Strategic Requires a Huge Mindset Shift
There’s a lot of talk about “being Agile” or “following the Lean Startup methodology”, yet I rarely see genuine lean teams operating with agility in practice.
They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk.
Why?
Because to genuinely be lean means to accept complete uncertainty.
It means we must say to ourselves, openly, “Only 10–20% of our experiments will likely deliver a positive outcome for our customers and for our business — at best”.
Which means that we scrap long-term planning & roadmaps.
We scrap lots of meetings.
And promises to investors.
And, instead, we focus on building genuinely empowered, autonomous product teams who realise the gravity of their situation: That they will only have a few attempts to get the product right before they run out of cash.
This approach therefore requires a huge mindset shift:
From thinking outcomes are certain, to accepting that everything is uncertain and extremely risky.
This shift comes with a psychological burden — a constant vigilance over whether a decision is the right one & a permanent state of worry — that many people are simply unwilling (perhaps, rightfully) to accept.
They therefore blind themselves to the reality of things like the need to focus, opportunity cost & the need to be strategic & make those tough decisions about where to focus limited resources.
5. Beware the Illusion of Alignment
The final prerequisite is to be constantly aware that, even when we may seem aligned around the product strategy itself, we are probably not.
Person A may interpret, for example, “hands-on learning” in one way.
Person B will interpret it in another.
This means that, in practice, we may have different teams — or even players within the same team — sending out different messaging, building disparate features & generally confusing the value proposition for our customer.
The same is true for the concept of product strategy itself.
I’ve run workshops and 1x1s with leaders where I’ve hammered the point home in as clear, simple terms as possible.
Yet they come out the meeting agreeing with everything you say, but demonstrating through actions that they clearly still see product strategy as equating planning (i.e. roadmaps, competitive analysis, building all the features possible, etc.).
Your role, therefore, as the person driving product strategy is to repeat, repeat, repeat.
What product strategy is.
Why it is so important.
What results you have gathered so far to demonstrate its importance.
And that one thing your customer really cares about that your product is focused on delivering.
Addressing these cultural trends is a prerequisite for actually making use of a product strategy in practice.
Because the mindset shift, the tough decisions, the constant repetition.
These things are not easy.
Yet they form the foundation of any successful in actually crafting a product strategy, aligning a team around one — and validating that product strategy in the real world.
And, once that foundation is in place, we can start to look out how we actually approach product strategy in practice in the next article of this series…
