What is product strategy?
My role as Product Strategist at Sanctuary Computer is a bit more nuanced than the traditional “PM” role: I help define the strategy of the products we design and develop for our clients. It’s a pretty unique role, largely because we offer product strategy as its own offering, which is rare for small studios to do (usually product strategy is part of a larger product design offering).
Since I started this role in August 2019, I’ve subconsciously been wrapping my head around my own point of view on what product strategy is. This essay is an attempt at putting into words what’s been swirling around in my head.
It’s broken down into three parts:
What is product strategy?
How it’s different from product vision, a detailed plan, brand strategy, UX, and product management.
What it takes to have a good product strategy.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
What is product strategy?
Product strategy is the act of articulating how we can reach our ideal outcomes given our current constraints.
For designers and developers, I say that product strategy ensures that what’s on our backlog is absolutely worth our time and focus.
Product strategy is not...
1. A product vision.
A vision is the future we’re trying to create, while strategy is what we’re doing to make that vision real.
Take Netflix, for example. Their vision in 2007:
“Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to filmmakers, and helping content creators around the world to find a global audience.”
Their strategy in 2007: Deciding to kill their internet-connected hardware device Project Griffin because it would prevent them from partnering with other hardware devices. This ultimately didn’t accelerate them towards their vision of becoming the best global entertainment distribution service.
Vision informs strategy, but the two are different.
2. A detailed plan.
That’s just a plan. Melissa Perri, author of Escaping the Build Trap, puts it well:
“Too often, people think of their product strategy as a document made up of a stakeholder’s wish list of features and detailed information on how those wishes should be accomplished. And they’re peppered with a ton of buzzwords like platform or innovation.”
3. Brand strategy.
Brand strategy articulates how our brand will be successful in the market. Product strategy is about how our product will be successful. However, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Part of a successful product strategy is having a successful brand strategy—at the end of the day, they’re both serving the same user.
4. User experience design.
There’s certainly overlap between UX and Product Strategy, but also a key difference. Product strategy defines our ideal user outcomes and articulates how we get there, while UX focuses on the experience users go through to get these outcomes. Product strategy informs UX, but this doesn’t mean the PM should think of the strategy on their own. Both PMs and UX designers should define the strategy.
Credits to Noah Levin for publishing this! Of course, the venn diagram can vary depending on context.
5. Product management (but it is part of it).
While product strategy isn’t exactly product management, I’d say it’s the first part of product management. Typically, product managers focus on how the product will be built and how efficient the work is going. They don’t examine why we need to build the product in the first place.
I think good product managers obsess the why more than they do the how. Good product managers start with the strategy—what is the bet we’re making and why?—before getting into the nitty gritty details of how we’ll build it. After the team builds it, they revisit their strategy to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change moving forward.
What makes a good product strategy good?
It embraces complexity yet gives us some level of certainty.
It tells us what we’re not doing.
It helps teams make decisions autonomously.
1. A good product strategy embraces complexity yet gives us some level of certainty
Most strategies fall into the trap of believing their plan is 100% infallible.
Finding the ultimate formula for success is impossible. Products, the market, people, and networks of people are all complex systems. And complexity science tells us that we can’t predict what happens in complex systems because there are infinite variables and infinite connections between variables. No one can predict the weather or traffic with 100% accuracy.
Despite the impossibility of being 100% certain, we need some idea of how we get to where we’re going. We can’t just throw things against the wall and see what sticks. We want to know roughly what the weather is so that we know to put on a sweater or not, or roughly how long it’ll take to drive from San Diego to LA. We need some idea of how the upsides are greater than the downsides.
A good product strategy isn’t predicated on 100% certainty, but it also isn’t aimless.
2. A good product strategy tells us what we’re not doing
I’ve noticed how easy it is for clients to want to add new features or serve more than one persona. This is a problem because it obscures the focus of the product, therefore hindering their business from achieving the outcomes it wants to achieve.
Great products do one thing well. To do one thing well, teams benefit from a heuristic that helps them say no to the million other ideas that will inevitably come up. If we prioritize ease of use, we are deprioritizing advanced user analytics. If we prioritize retention, we may are deprioritizing acquisition. We don’t have a product strategy if we’re not explicit about what we’re willing to trade off in the short-term.
3. A good product strategy helps teams at every level make good decisions
A former colleague of mine, Spencer Pitman, used to say:
“Leadership’s job isn’t oversight, it isn’t requirements building, it isn’t even really product direction. It’s to create tools for making good decisions at every level.”
To me, this is the biggest benefit of product strategy: it’s the tool to help teams make good decisions.
I think Melissa Perri puts it well in Escaping the Build Trap:
“Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.”
Creating the tools and safety to help teams make good decisions is work we often skip. It can feel like a waste of time because we’re not pushing pixels on Figma or writing code. However, without this safety, teams are dependent on leaders to make decisions, costing the team (and organization) precious time. Teams need the tools, context, and safety to make good decisions so that they can serve their customers while also meet the needs of the business.
You’ll know if you have one
A product strategy is about collectively figuring out what we can do to achieve the outcomes we want to achieve. It’s informed by our vision and helps teams set their product direction. It is different from brand strategy and UX. It balances certainty with complexity, forces us to say no, and empowers teams to make good decisions.
Ultimately, your intuition will tell you if your team/org has a real product strategy. Your team is aligned and amped up. Your leaders equip, empower, and get out of your way. Your organization is obsessed with experimentation, unafraid to pivot when assumptions are proven wrong.