The Product Manager leads a cross functional team to build products and services that delight customers and create shareholder value. As a Product Manager, one of the first steps is to understand the market, customers, competitive landscape and formulate a product strategy to ensure a viable product and business.

1. 10 Steps to create an effective Product
Strategy
Anita Rao
2015

2.  The Product Manager leads a cross functional team to
build products and services that delight customers
and create shareholder value. As a Product Manager,
one of the first steps is to understand the market,
customers, competitive landscape and formulate a
product strategy to ensure a viable product and
business.
Introduction

3. 1. Mission – The mission of
the product should
express its core purpose.
This should be powerful
enough to rally the
product teams (Product
Management,
Development and Quality
Engineering).

4. 2. Vision – The vision of
the product is the
desired future state.
This could be about two
to three years out.

5. 3. Understand the customer – Complete a
customer segmentation study. A mind
map is a useful tool for analysis. Who are
your customers? What kinds of attributes
are similar in your customer base? Can you
put them in categories? What problems
do they currently have? Why do they buy
your product? Does your product solve
their current pain? Are there any future
problems you can identify in this analysis?
What capabilities in your product trigger
buying decisions? Any future product
ideas?

6. 4. Market Analysis – A thorough
understanding of your current
product and its capabilities is
required as you understand the
market. Doing a SWOT analysis will
benefit. Look at your competition.
Never forget “in house”
development of capabilities as a
competition. Be objective. Do a
competitive analysis. Go down
memory lane and study the past
trends in the space. What can you
predict in the future?

7. 5. Financial Analysis – You want to be
in business to make a profit. Establish
sound fiscal planning and reviews
during the product life cycle. Forecast
revenue projections a couple of years
out. Break them out by quarter.
Include revenue by geos and
partners. Calculate gross margins and
product profitability by phase of the
product. Take into account any
environmental factors that could
impact revenue.

8. 6. Marketing Mix – Address the
product launch plan. How do you
plan to market your product?
How will you create the demand
for the product? Through which
partners? In which geos? What is
the optimal product price and
discounting strategy? Adjust this
by phase of the product. For new
product introductions, there
could be some early bird pricing.

9. 7. Business Performance – Quarterly
Business Performance reviews are
good to evaluate your product
adoption and issues with customers.
Examine service and support data
and recommend any additional
features or enhancements for the
product. Can some of these be
addressed with additional training
and documentation to increase
customer satisfaction? Explore for
“Key Moments of Truth”
opportunities.

10. 8. Roadmap – A two to
three year roadmap is a
useful tool to communicate
with customers,
stakeholders and partners.

11. 9. A looking glass into the future
– Stay current on shifts and
trends in your market, customers
and competition. Look for
adjacent opportunities to provide
an “end to end” solution that
addresses customer’s problems.
This could include potential M&A
opportunities and
recommendations. Present these
ideas and opportunities.

12. 10. Measure. Learn. Adapt. –
Ensure that you have the right
KPIs to measure business
performance. Learn from it.
Analyze data gathered in the
process to guide product
decisions in the future. Try to
ensure that data used for
analysis is accessible,
auditable, automated to
guarantee sound decisions.

13. Twitter : @anitaprao
Blog : http://anitarao.com/
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Thank You