Treat your Product Strategy
like a Product

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​Dear Reader,​

It’s easy to lose track of the actual purpose of strategy work, especially between the noise of Product Strategy frameworks and how a “good” strategy should look according to Twitter or LinkedIn. Product Teams should work forward from the value for the recipient, not backward from the defaults of others.

Instead of treating practices like Product Strategy as a tick-box exercise, treat it like a product: Understand for whom you’re trying to create what value and design your process and output accordingly, with early validation in mind.

Start with your Audience. Product Strategy should lead to work that produces “outward-facing” products, but it’s supposed to be consumed by internal audiences. Typically, that’s a) stakeholders and leadership, b) other departments, and c) the members of your product team.

What’s the job of your Strategy work? The Strategy aims to serve a different job for each of these audiences. For leadership it’s about being able to trust the direction and decisions of the team and horizontal and vertical coherence within the company. For your team, however, it’s about having clear, reliable, yet flexible decision-making guardrails for prioritization.

How to distribute Strategy? Again, this will depend on the audience. A one-pager or concise .ppt might best match their consumption patterns for leadership. Translating your choices into an agreed canvas-like structure between departments helps the information flow. And within your team, you need to find a shape that’s easy to comprehend, with optional deep dives to back up your choices and translate them into goals to measure your progress.

How to derisk Strategy Creation? Test the assumptions about your strategy as soon as you realize they are only assumptions. One assumption might be the coherence with the company's direction. This might require periodic strategy check-ins with leadership. Another assumption could be the coherence and comprehensibility of your efforts. Sharing synthesized strategy statements and conclusions with your team on an ongoing basis helps to mitigate the “big bang confusion” or “grand reveal rejection.”

There are more questions to consider when creating your Product Strategy to succeed in your target market. However, acknowledging these overlaps can help you go from filling out a template to creating a valuable artifact.

That's (almost) all, Reader. If you enjoyed today's issue, please do reply (it helps with deliverability). If you didn't, you can unsubscribe here.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

Need to practice strategy hands-on?

My self-paced Path to Product Strategy Course enables you to form, execute, and measure the progress of coherent Product Strategy Choices based on structure and evidence.

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Who is Tim Herbig?

As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the progress of their evidence-informed decisions.

I identify and share the patterns among better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.