Tips for Effective Product Strategy Reviews
The product strategy describes how you plan to achieve product success. It typically covers the product’s value proposition, market, stand-out features, and business goals. While a strategy is key to creating a winning product, it would be a mistake to blindly execute it and assume it will always stay valid. As your product develops and grows, and as the market and the technologies evolve, the product strategy has to change, too. You should therefore regularly review and adjust it. The following article will help you with this.
Hold Regular Product Strategy Reviews
A product strategy, like any other plan, is subject to change. How changeable your strategy is, depends on your product’s life cycle stage. As long as your product hasn’t reached product-market fit, the strategy is usually volatile. Contrast this with a mature product, which tends to have a more stable product strategy. But as the strategy will change, I recommend that you review and adjust it at least once per quarter — as a rule of thumb. Consider increasing the frequency for products that face a significant amount of uncertainty and decrease it for mature and declining products.
Make sure that you block the necessary time for product strategy reviews in your calendar. Don’t allow urgent issues, like a sales or support request, to cause you to neglect reviewing the product strategy. Strategy is about being proactive and seeing opportunities and threats early so you can carefully choose how to respond. If you neglect reviewing and adapting the product strategy, you might experience nasty surprises in the future, for example, a competitor might catch you off guard with a new killer feature.
Use Collaborative Workshops to Review and Adapt the Strategy
Collaborative workshops with the key stakeholders and development team members are a great way to jointly review and adjust the product strategy. For a commercial, revenue-generating product, the stakeholders might include a marketeer, sales rep, and member of the support group. Joint reviews offer the following benefits:
- Better decisions: They help you make better decisions by leveraging the collective knowledge and creativity of the stakeholders and development team. Additionally, they help you consider different viewpoints thereby reducing the risk of wrong and biased decisions.
- Improved alignment: They lead to a better understanding and stronger buy-in for any strategy changes.
- Increased commitment: They empower people and they increase their commitment and motivation to work on the product.
As deciding together can be challenging at times, I recommend that you do two things: First, ask your Scrum Master to facilitate the workshop. The individual should help people embrace a collaborative mindset; encourage everyone to fully participate and prevent individuals from dominating; ensure that the group has chosen a clear decision rule and guide everyone through the decision-making process. Having a dedicated facilitator allows you to fully contribute to the workshop. What’s more, it will reduce the likelihood that the HIPPO — the highest paid person’s opinion — wins rather than deciding what’s best for the product and feasible for the dev team and stakeholders.
Second, make sure that you actively listen to the workshop participants. Listen with an open mind and try to understand the individual’s underlying needs and interests. This will make people feel understood and it will increase their support of the strategy changes.
Look at Four Key Factors
In order to review the product strategy and assess its validity, take into account the following four factors:
- Performance: How your product doing based on its key performance indicators? Does the data show positive, flat, or negative trends? What conclusions can you draw from the analysis? What would make your product perform better?
- Trends: Are there any new technology, regulatory, or social developments that will affect your product? Do they offer an opportunity to innovate, add, remove, or enhance features, or create a brand-new product, for example, by unbundling a feature?
- Competition: Are your competitors launching new products or features? Are there new market entrants? Is your product still sufficiently differentiated?
- Company: Are there any significant changes in your company that affect the product strategy? For example, has the business strategy changed or have key people left?
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/tips-for-effective-product-strategy-reviews/
Learn More
You can learn more by attending my Product Strategy and Roadmap training course and reading my book Strategize.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/tips-for-effective-product-strategy-reviews/
