Product Strategy is SIMPLE, why the fuss?
Product Strategy is both the most fun and most frustrating thing you will do - but it's not mystical in any way.
I see a lot of fuss about Product Strategy, sometime treated with almost mystical reverence. In military circuits there’s an old saying that “Amateurs talk Strategy; Professionals talk Logistics.” With a slight variation this fits the world of product management, as a reminder that setting strategy isn’t the hard bit, but there’s a lot of execution details. Conversely (and maybe perversely), sometimes there’s an over-focus on planning and mistaking it for the whole strategy. This article aims to put the theory of modern strategic thinking plainly, in a way that will help you understand all those crazy frameworks out there and evaluate what you actually need.
What is Strategy?
Quite simply, strategy is the answer to three questions:
Where are we?
Where do we need to be?
How do we get there?
This applies to battlefields, business, and product management. Unless this is somehow your first encounter with the wonderful world of Product, you should immediately recognise these elements.
Where we are is all that market and user research, the data analytics, the distinctive capabilities of your company, etc.
The bit about “where we need to be” is the vision, the result you are striving towards.
As for how to get there, just swing a dead cat on LinkedIn and you’ll hit any number of methodologies that promise to be The One.
It’s important to understand, though, that you need all three elements. Far too many ‘strategists’ focus on the how, which is why strategy is often mistaken for planning. It’s not. The how is adaptive, constantly responding to changes observed in the world, but you have to be really clear on where you’re going. Stubborn On Vision And Flexible On Details and all that.
Furthermore, we as human tend to want to simplify, to seek a silver bullet, which can cause harm when talking strategy and mistaking a ‘framework’ or a plan to truly understanding vision and adaptability. Whether it’s chasing ALL THE DATA (analysis paralysis) to understand your current position, or the ONE TRUE FRAMEWORK (silver bullet) to choose the next step — they are cognitive biases or other blockers that aren’t serving you; it’s the wrong focus.
You will note that while the current position constantly changes and therefore your next step towards the goal needs to change, the vision is stable. There is a constant element of reflection, learning, and selection. This doesn’t mean that the strategy is changing — in fact it can be quite stable, even when you allow for pivots. Strategy is inherently an adaptive process, unlike tactics. Stephen Bungay’s article 5 Myths About Strategy published on Harvard Business Review covers more of those misconceptions.
Complex vs Complicated
has written an excellent column over on The Beautiful Mess (a column I strongly suggest you subscribe to!), titled "Fixing Messy Problems". In it he goes into detail about selecting the right strategy for products (more on this later), but he also refers to a problem he terms “Gap Thinking” — the how do we get from here to there.It’s the only point of contention I have with his otherwise excellent article. There’s a good reason why this ‘gap thinking’ lies at the base of so many strategies. The problem lies in not understanding the nature of the problem, and selecting the wrong tool.
In this case, to simplify John’s article: Complicated problems can be broken down into individual components, and each can be addressed separately. Complex problem suffer from many interconnected problems, and can be affected from outside by pushing on levers. Product Strategy is inherently about humans (both developers and consumers), and is therefore complex.
To me, that isn’t a criticism on the ‘gap thinking’ — on proper strategic thinking — but on thinking that you can solve human behaviour issues by reducing the approach to regulated steps. That’s almost a Taylorist view, the same that saw Waterfall methods used. And we now know that these just don’t work. Hopefully this gives you more context on why they don’t.
Strategy vs Execution
The second common misunderstanding is “Strategic Planning”. At the start I mentioned that “Amateurs talk Strategy; Professionals talk Logistics”. When it comes to battlefields, that has been an observation for millennia — the general who can’t supply their army, loses.
When it comes to business, Logistics is often replaced with Execution. People talk about how execution matters (and it certainly does!), but in the search to replicate and grow execution they fall into the complicated vs complex trap and try to build detailed plans and templates that can be followed repeatedly.
But simply put: a strategy isn’t a plan. In a way, those concepts are at odds. If you have 10 minutes, I suggest you watch this video of Roger Martin talking about business strategy:
For small companies with a single product or portfolio (eg a SaaS platform), there’s a big overlap between business and product strategies. And in both cases a detailed plan (whether a Gantt chart or a ‘roadmap’) is just not effective.
So what is (effective) strategy?
Stephen Bungay famously described strategy as “a framework for decision making”.
Think about it for a minute, and you’ll see how it all ties together. You have the “strategic intent”, the goal you are trying to achieve (where we want to be). You have a set of people in the field, and you give them a framework — freedoms and constraints, principles and guidelines — to make their own decisions in reaching that goal. They are then not micro-managed, but given freedom to pursue that part of the vision as long as they stay within the guidelines. So another important dimension is Principles over Process.
John Cutler, having observed hundreds of product teams during his tenure at Amplitude, has expressed his observations on a podcast episode with
: a distinguishing factor for high-performing teams is the ability to make quick decisions. (Lenny's podcast is another resource I highly recommend).So reality matches theory. Give people a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve, give them the tools and information to measure where they are, and most importantly empower them to make decisions and move quickly towards that goal. Easy, right?
To be explicit, vision comes at several levels. You have the 10+ vision of how the world looks like when the company achieved it’s mission, and you have a 1-year vision as the next product step (and probably one or two in between — think of the Horizons 1, 2, 3 model). Working to the 10 year vision will probably lack enough focus, and without focus teams won’t concentrate efforts and much energy will be lost without effect. So you need to be very explicit about what’s the next phase you’re working on, to be able to reject distractions.
Empowerment here means a set of principles that guide the team’s decision-making process, and then to support those decisions. Examples of principles: we prioritise good UX per function over many function; or, prioritise growth over revenue. Examples of a guardrails: we must never store personal information; or, build everything API-first; or page responsiveness can never exceed 1 second. Other freedoms & constraints could be time, budget, choices in technology, or even access to certain customers (eg 1% of those who self-selected interest in ‘advanced features’). But once given, encourage the team to gather data and then make decisions. If things didn’t work out, it’s learning and improvement time, not assigning blame. (Remember to optimise to be wrong, because product development is a complex problem, and needs an adaptive approach to discover what works).
You’ll observe that this list of principles and guidelines is actually shorter and stabler than what you probably think of strategy. Simplicity (and strategy) perhaps isn’t easy, but it’s more elegant.
This is where the modern frameworks focus on, even if they don’t put the theory behind it explicitly. It’s the drive to drop plans (huge road-maps) in favour of outcomes. You need a team that has the skills and capabilities (cross-functional), understands where it’s going, and is empowered to move there fast. Whether it’s OKRs, or Marty Cagan’s Empowered, or Mellisa Perri’s Product Kata, or… The ideas behind them are the same, are based on the same theory and real-world observation. They can succeed or fail depending on whether the theory of strategy is understood and utilised, or whether the organisation is just trying to parrot something people read on the net (ahem).
Effective strategy is therefore:
A shared vision, over-communicated as strategic intents
Constant user & market access
Principles, guidelines, freedoms, constrains, and tools to enable rapid ‘in-the-field’ decisions
The Fun and Frustrations of Product Strategy
The subtitle referred to product strategy as both the most fun and most frustrating thing you’ll do. I hope by now you understand it’s not mystical or arcane, it’s about having a clear vision and a framework for decision-making that will progress you quickly.
So where’s the fun and frustration? Well, people, naturally 😄 Building the vision is tremendously gratifying, and you have in your head this picture of a perfect world. In fact, the best visions are described viscerally — coming from the point of view of the user or customer where their problem was solved, when things are “just easy”.
The frustration comes from having this vision in perfection in your head, and having constantly explain it, compromise on the steps to get there, digress and refocus, explain it again but in a different way, lather, rinse, and repeat.
So here are my generally-applicable tips:
Use storytelling to build your vision
See my previous column on the subject of creative writing. Get into that user’s head, and imagine when things ‘just work’. Write it in various lengths — a catchphrase, a page, a long narrative. If you have the budget, do those nifty animation videos where a hand draws and writes and a narrator talks to explain. If you don’t have the budget, do it yourself anyway — draw bad stick figures, use PowerPoint slides to create a video, and record yourself mumbling through. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to get the point across.Over-communicate your vision
Again with the creative writing, with analogies and metaphors, with bad videos of wonky stick figures. But keep at it and keep exploring what works, until you can’t hear it any more — and then repeat it again. As an author, I learnt to pitch emotions just a little over the top, because by the time the reader reads them they’ve lost something in translation and come in just right. As a product communicator, I learnt that you can never repeat the message enough, because it takes time for people to digest and align with it.Bias for action
If you’re in a leadership position, set your team with freedoms and constraints, and let them go. Help them make decisions by understanding the data to collect and the time-frame by when a decision is made. But make sure the team itself makes the decisions when the time comes, and moves on without fear.
If you’re “just” the product manager, show some leadership, make the call, be subversive if you need to, but keep things moving. Yes, you may occasionally get into situations of choosing wrong and be on the receiving end of an “uncomfortable conversation.” Be aware of potential impacts, but generally speaking, your bias for action will progress things for the better and will be noticed and appreciated by your leadership.
So we can see that setting the strategy — the vision and principles and steps to get there — isn’t hard. Executing it is something else entirely. From choosing the right actions to pushing back on distractions, execution is messy and requires continually aligning people, gathering data and feedback, and generally working hard on cross-communications while other people do all the work 😉
That’s it for now (I sat down to write a short post, I swear…). I hope you found it insightful and helpful! If you did…