Turn Your Feature List into a Product Strategy

How to do it, why it’s OK to do it, and a bit about what to do with it when you have it

Sari Harrison
Agile Insider

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Vision, strategy, goals, and roadmaps: These are things that we are “supposed” to have. But in my experience, and from talking to a lot of PMs in the valley and around the world, it’s not always the case that they even exist.

Default (typically unspoken) strategies generally fall along the lines of “make as much money as possible” or “get as many users as possible” or “get users using the product as much as possible” or some combination of the three. These aren’t strategies. A strategy is specific to what you are doing. If it would apply to any other company, then it’s not one.

I think this situation is dangerous on multiple levels. It’s likely that no one is really steering the ship, which means it’s going to be hard to get people aligned on anything.

And when that is all the “strategy” you have, you can get into a situation where you are asked to justify features by promising impact on one of those things.

No one knows how a given feature will impact revenue or usage.

Pretending you know is very tempting in this situation. People can and will game it…

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Sari Harrison
Agile Insider

Product management leader (Apple, Microsoft) | Mentor | Lifelong Learner