Practical product strategy

In my experience, the people who ask ‘What’s your product strategy?’ often struggle to articulate what a good answer would even look like. Ask them to describe the product strategy of Google, Coca-Cola or Ferrari and they are unable to answer, even though the products from these companies are generally well understood.

I define product strategy simply as the things in which we’ve chosen to invest, and our plan for delivering them. We need a model that documents those plans and communicates them effectively to stakeholders at all levels, internally and externally.

Modelling product strategy

Any model of product strategy has to be useful and easy to understand. Otherwise the organisation will reject it, alternative models will emerge organically, and your plans will disintegrate. But there is a lot of junk in product literature, and it’s easy to become obsessed with the correct tooling rather than focusing on getting valuable work done.

I find a three-tier model of Strategic Priorities → Product Initiatives → Product Roadmap a good starting framework for B2B software and systems providers, and it is straightforward to tailor to other types of business.

1. Strategic Priorities

The organisation must begin with some sense of purpose beyond winning and retaining business, with plainly stated business objectives. It also needs a sense of identity: the markets, customers and channels for which it will optimise itself.

Strategic Priorities set the tone for what matters over the long term, as high-level themes. You’ll need no more than half a dozen if you wish to maintain a well-defined identity.

‘Protect players from gambling harm and mitigate associated operator risk’ is a good example of a Strategic Priority.

2. Product Initiatives

Initiatives are the body of the strategy. They can be considered as responses to opportunities (commercial, new technology, innovation) and as responses to threats and weaknesses (competitive, industry, regulatory, technical).

Initiatives must stand up to scrutiny in the context of the Strategic Priorities. An otherwise solid initiative should be rejected if it doesn’t align, unless you wish to adapt your strategy. But beware: speculative product development can soon become the tail that wags the dog. The strategy is there to steer you away from the things you’ve chosen to sacrifice, as well as towards those in which you’ve chosen to invest.

Each initiative needs a written justification (why we’re doing it) and an objective (what it should accomplish). Initiatives vary in size, with most taking anywhere from 3 to 24 months.

An example aligned with our ‘Protect players’ priority would be ‘Enable players to easily understand their gaming activity over time’.

3. Product Roadmap

Roadmap is a very loose term, as there are different forms of roadmap for different purposes and audiences. In our model, the roadmap is simply the plan to deliver an initiative, usually by expanding and enhancing functionality or by addressing non-functional areas of the portfolio.

The roadmap is typically developed during product discovery, and it must be tight and achievable. The discipline to temper the findings from discovery, and to resist the temptation to go too far too soon in a frenzy of enthusiasm, is an important trait. YAGNI (‘you aren’t gonna need it’) is a very real maxim, and many a well-meaning product manager and developer has fallen victim to it.

Examples of roadmap items supporting the initiative above include ‘Self-service win/loss and time-played widgets in the membership app’ and ‘Pop-down alerts at the slot machine when play thresholds are reached’.

Putting it into practice

Depending on the size of your portfolio, you may deploy this three-tier model by product line. For most B2B businesses, though, a single strategy will suffice, with each product in the portfolio playing its part in delivering it, some more than others.

What’s important is not to get lost in these frameworks. Agonising over whether a deliverable is an initiative or a roadmap item is a waste of energy. You can correct course as you go, and just get on with it.