Product Management: Building A Product Strategy

1. Product Management: Building a Product Strategy
By: Teg Grenager
Kelby Schwender
Dr. Plummer
BA 422W - Strategic Business Planning

2. Product Strategy Overview

3. What is product
strategy?
● “A product strategy is the set of choices a
company makes in order to achieve its
objectives. These are choices like which products
to develop, which market segments to focus on,
how to differentiate, how to price, how to
position, and message and so on.”
● A company must first understand their objectives
and then they can figure out their strategy

4. Why strategy is
important
● “Having the right skills is not enough to pursue a
strategy consistently. Charting a clear path is
important, but staying on it over time is a whole
other challenge. The real world is messy. It’s full
of pressures, temptations and distractions that
can easily steer you off your charted path.
Product leaders and product-minded people who
have both the required skill sets to develop a
strategy and the conviction to pursue it
vigorously, can have tremendous positive impact
on their organizations and teams.”

5. Tenets of a good
strategy
● “A good strategy takes into consideration market trends,
competitive dynamics, and other factors that may affect
your chances of success.”
● “A good product strategy can help align all the relevant
stakeholders around the best path to take. It can help avoid
counterproductive arguments and reduce friction. But to
achieve that, you must make sure that everyone
understands the strategy and agrees with it. The best way
to do that is to include others in the process of creating the
strategy. Consider many perspectives and involve others in
making important choices. If they feel part of the process
of defining the strategy, they are more likely to adopt it
and follow it later on. Unfortunately, making a product or
a company successful is not as easy as following onscreen
instructions. But a good product strategy that's widely
adopted and trusted across the company, can help chart a
clear path forward.”

6. The elevator pitch
framework
● “ The Elevator Pitch sentence structure is very
simple, almost too simple. It forces you to
express your strategy in only two sentences. It's a
fantastic tool. Here's how it works. You keep the
capitalized words intact and replace the
underlined lowercase ones with the core
elements of your strategy. Then you read the
whole thing out loud and see if it feels right. Is it
convincing? Do you believe it? If not, go back to
the drawing board and rethink it. Is it clunky or
too long? That means you probably put too many
things into it instead of making some tough
choices. So, go at it again. This framework can
work for products or services of any type or
scope.”

7. Filling In the Elevator Pitch Step by Step

8. Determine your target
customers
● Who are you building this/these product(s) for?
● “Target customer is the first blank spot in the
elevator pitch framework for a good reason.
Everything else flows from this first choice. Who
you build for is a critical decision that can make
or break your strategy.”
Remember that “products can’t be everything to everyone.”

9. Fill in customer need
● A customer’s need should be something that is
real
● “Customer needs may present itself as a problem
that needs solving, that is some sort of pain that
needs to be relieve. It may also be something that
benefits the customer, that creates gain. Usually
customer needs are tangible. They can be
observed and validated. Sometimes however
they may be hidden.”
● “Being clearly focused on both target customer
and need creates the opportunity to come up with
the perfect solution(s).”

10. Choose the market
category
● “Market category may seem straightforward, but
it can be quite tricky to identify. It’s really
important to consider this one carefully, because
it goes to the core of how customers are going to
think about your product.”
● Customers have to understand your it is that your
business is producing before they go and buy it.
● “Identifying the category and understand how
customers are going to make decisions about
your product, helps you design it in a smart way
that aligns with your customer needs and
perceptions.”
● Get your customers/potential customers involved
when choosing a market category.

11. Fill in the key benefit
● “The last blank in the first sentence of the
elevator pitch framework asks us to identify one
and only one key customer benefit.”
○ Customer benefit differs from product
feature
■ “Features are things that the product
can do. They may describe the specs
of the product, it’s capabilities.”
■ “Benefits are the value created by
the product for its user or what it
helps the user accomplish.”
● “Target customer selection, customer need, and
benefit match up well together to produce a
consistent strategy.”

12. Add competitors and
alternatives
● “The second sentence of the elevator pitch
framework is about competition and
differentiation.”
● It is important that businesses consider their
competitors and alternatives because “it figures
into the customer adoption decision.”
● “Having a clear sense of the options your target
customer may consider prepares you well to
come up with your specific approach for
differentiation.”

13. Determine the product
differentiation
● “The last blank in the elevator pitch framework
asks us to identify our single most important
differentiator.”
● The product differentiator is the one thing a
business would like the customer to consider as
unique to their product.
● Get your customers involved and take their
input, wants, and need into heavy consideration

14. How to Develop Product Strategy

15. Make strategy work
● “How you go about developing your strategy
matters a lot. It’s going to determine whether or
not you’ll be able to build the necessary support
for it across the organization. If you cannot build
broad support and generate strong momentum,
your plan will be dead on arrival. You seem
strategy development is a team sport, not an
individual one.”
● Business should: “identifying their key
stakeholders, cast a wide net, collect input from a
wide range of people with a variety of
perspectives, pay attention to others, examine as
many signals as possible, take others along for
the ride, let others help set the direction,
communicate, and once things come together
shift your focus from strategy to execution.”

16. How to identify key
stakeholders
● Stakeholders are the “key people involved in
improving the strategy, funding its
implementation, or executing it. This is of
course, in addition to any other folks with
relevant insight who should feed into the
process.”
● Businesses should start by writing down and
brainstorming who they think could/should
potentially work with them as they develop their
strategy.

17. How to collect and
organize input
● “Data followed by analysis that leads to decision
making drives action.”
● Businesses should: “begin by interviewing your
key stakeholders. Look up venture capital
investments in your space. Put your hands on
some market research. Examine financials to
determine the size of the market. Figure out your
addressable opportunity or what portion of the
market you could theoretically go after. Consider
future growth trends and how they create new
opportunity. Follow your competitors. Boil down
all your learnings to the most important things.
Review. All out key decisions. Define and
describe, execute.”

18. Build support for your
strategy
● “Building support for a strategy is essentially
about influencing others to move in a certain
direction. If you can make it happen, it will be
your crowning achievement.”
● “Evangelize.. To be enthusiastic about
something, and to attempt to share that
enthusiasm with others.”

19. You Have a Strategy, Now What?

20. Maintain your
strategy
● “ Develop a strategy, follow it, keep your eyes,
ears, and mind open, and adjust as needed. That's
how it works”

21. How to implement a
strategy
● “ It is suffice to say that product roadmap translates your strategic
choices into a sequence of product milestones aimed to gradually
achieve your business objectives. As you develop your roadmap,
use the strategy as a North star. Keep it fresh in your mind and
return to it when you need to make specific design, prioritization, or
go to market choices. The product road map is the rhythm section in
my orchestra analogy because the sequence of product milestones
puts a variety of coordinated activities in motion across the
company.”
● There are a few strategies that your company can do to help push
things in the right direction:
1. Ensure clarity around the strategy
2. Help generals and troops alike interpret the strategy and
apply it to their domains
3. Work with them to flush out how it affects their roles in day-
to-day actions
4. Report back frequently with a status and progress of product
development and alert them to upcoming milestones
5. Give them ample time to prepare
“The best conductors create unforgettable music by keeping an eye on the
big picture and inspiring others to be the best they can be individually and
as a group. Product leaders can be just as impactful if they're able to
transform strategy into action and inspire everyone to move forward in
perfect sync with a common purpose.”