Unlocking Success with Product Strategy Framework
Explore the core components of effective product strategy and reveal how the perfect template can unlock extraordinary success in your product management journey.
The Pre-Work: Knowledge is Power
Before diving into the framework, it’s crucial to ensure you are well-informed about your company’s mid and long-term strategies. This knowledge will be the cornerstone of your product strategy and roadmap.
Involve all key participants, especially the Product Trio, consisting of the Product Manager, Product Designer, and Engineer Lead, who will be responsible for ensuring the accuracy of this critical information.
Building Your Product Strategy
Step 01 — Company Goal
This is where it all starts. A company goal is an overarching objective that guides a business’s activities and defines what it aims to achieve. For example:
- Improve retention rate by 20% in a year
- Achieve 10 million engaged users in Latin America by 2024
Step 02 — Product Strategy
Product strategy is the blueprint for how your product will contribute to your company’s larger strategy. The Reforge methodology, which includes Feature Work, Growth Work, Scaling Work, and Product Market Fit Expansion, can be your guide. It ensures that your product aligns with your broader company goals and user expectations.
Definitions:
- Feature Work — Creating and capturing value by extending a product’s functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.
- Growth Work — Creating and capturing value by accelerating adoption and usage by the existing market.
- Scaling Work — Focusing on bottlenecks to ensure the team can continue to move forward and take on new levels of feature, growth, and product market fit expansion work.
- Product Market Fit Expansion — Increasing the ceiling on product market fit in a non-incremental way by expanding into an adjacent market, adjacent product, or both.
Examples of initiatives based on a Banking App
- Feature Work: Personalized home page based on user behavior
- Growth Work — Member gets member program
- Scaling Work — Turn the application accessible and multi-language
- Product Market Fit Expansion — Enable account creation in another country
Focusing on Initiatives
Step 3 — Product Goal
A product goal is a clear and specific objective set by a product team to achieve within a defined timeframe. It serves as a guiding target that aligns with the company’s broader strategy and outlines the desired outcome of the product or a specific feature. For instance:
- Achieve a 20% increase in active app users
- A 25% increase in customer trust ratings within the next fiscal year
Step 4 — Hypothesis
Your product hypothesis is a proposed solution for addressing a specific market problem, customer pain, or opportunity that was identified.
Example: “We believe that the introduction of artificial intelligence will attract new users seeking personalized financial guidance and assistance, ultimately increasing app adoption by 10%.”
Step 5 — Initiatives
Initiatives are the tangible deliverables that validate your hypothesis. For the hypothesis above, initiatives could include:
- Introducing a virtual advisor for investments;
- Creating personalized alerts to remind users to pay bills;
- Establishing a feedback mechanism within the app.
Step 6 — Main Bets
These initiatives have high confidence levels for implementation, often grounded in data, research, and market insights. In our example, a main bet might be the introduction of a virtual advisor for investments.
Develop a Product Roadmap
The framework discussed in this article enables product managers to develop a roadmap that reflects the full spectrum of your company’s goals and aligns with the needs of your users.
It brings together insights from the entire team and ensures that every initiative contributes to the success of the product.
Prioritization — Time to make choices
This framework facilitates the prioritization process, which is the heart of your product strategy. It focuses resources on valuable initiatives, aligns the product roadmap with your company’s goals, and caters to customer needs. I recommend gathering research and data insights and engaging product managers and designers to build this template collaboratively.
Effective decision-making in each quarter is crucial, particularly regarding expectations alignment and product strategy. These choices significantly influence the product’s evolution, resource allocation, and alignment with business objectives and customer needs.
To achieve a consistent and flexible plan of initiatives, product managers and stakeholders need to align the strategy, goals, and hypotheses. This ensures a shared vision, facilitating adjustments as needed throughout the quarter.
In conclusion
Elevating your product strategy and stakeholder management with a bottom-up approach can set your product on a path to success. By incorporating the insights of your entire team and ensuring that your roadmap aligns with your company’s vision, you can create a winning product that resonates with your users and stakeholders alike.
