What Exactly is a Product Strategy?
The product strategy is possibly the most important product management plan. But what exactly is it? Which information should it contain? Do you need a strategy for your product? How can you ensure that it is likely to result in a successful product and how do you keep it up to date? These are the questions I am going to answer in this article.
🎧 Listen to the audio version of this article on my product management podcast: https://www.romanpichler.com/podcast/what-is-a-product-strategy/
What Information Should a Product Strategy Provide?
I like to think of the product strategy as a high-level plan that helps you realise your vision and that answers the following four questions:
- Who is the product for? Who are the users and, if appropriate, who are the customers?
- Why would people want to use and buy it? What specific problem does it address, or which tangible benefit does it offer?
- What kind of product is it and what makes it stand out? How does it differ from competing offerings? Why would people choose it over alternatives?
- What are the business goals? Which benefits does the product create for the company developing and providing it?
To make these recommendations more concrete, let’s look at an example. Say that I want to develop a product that helps people eat more healthily. To create a strategy, I might choose middle aged men with busy jobs and an unhealthy lifestyle as the target users. The benefit the product should create for this user group might be to reduce the risk of developing type-2 diabetes. The product might be a mobile app, and its standout features might include measure and record sugar levels in food, analyse eating habits and make individualised recommendations, and seamlessly integrate with leading smart scales. The business benefits, finally, might be to create a new revenue stream, diversify the business, or develop the company brand.
To capture the product strategy, you can use my product vision board. It’s a tool I have developed specifically to help people describe the vision and strategy of their products. You can download the product vision board from my website and by clicking on the image below. If you want to learn more about the tool, then read my article The Product Vision Board or watch my video Introduction to the Product Vision Board.
How Does the Strategy Relate to the Vision and Roadmap?
Another approach to define the product strategy is to explore how it relates to other product plans. To do this, let’s take a look at my product strategy framework shown below.
As the image above shows, the product strategy sits between the vision and the product roadmap in my model. To put it differently, it states how you intend to realise the vision and thereby make the product successful, and it provides the necessary input to create an actionable product roadmap. The roadmap, in turn, provides the context to discover the right product details and capture them in the product backlog. You can learn more about the framework by reading the article My Product Strategy Model.
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/what-is-a-product-strategy/
Learn More
To learn more about creating an effective product strategy and making the right strategic decisions, attend my product strategy and roadmap training course and read my book Strategize.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/what-is-a-product-strategy/
