Product Practice #310

How to connect Company and Product Strategy

READ ON

HERBIG.CO

PUBLISHED

Feb 23, 2024

READING TIME

3 min & 59 sec

Dear Reader,

In essence, Product Strategy is a decision-making layer that often sits between company strategy and feature strategy. The ability to enable product teams to make decisions based upon this Product Strategy depends on the two fits it has to have:

1. Product/Company Fit

2. Feature/Product Fit

Trying to find these fits by holding monolithic strategy expressions close to each other is a lost cause. It's never how the entire Product Vision Board fits into the Business Model Canvas. These fits can occur between specific parts of these layers. This is why thinking in product strategy patterns and components makes it easier to find these connections.

Product/Company Fit describes the degree to which the product contributes to the company's priorities. Some of the most quoted strategy books and resources out there provide advice that is geared toward the company level and is not universally applicable to product teams in the same form.

For example, Slack's (hypothetical) integrations Product Team can't just decide to start serving the jobs of a new audience like gamers, when the rest of the company is focused on b2b workplace productivity (see also Ravi Mehta's excellent strategy comparison. The team would fail to establish recognition in this space due to a lack of marketing support and other parts of the product (i.e., billing or integrations) not supporting that shift as well.

Feature/Product Fit, coined by Casey Winters, describes the extent to which a feature can improve retention, engagement, and/or monetization for the core product. Essentially describing the degree to which a feature’s adoption metrics contribute to the priority of the overall product for the next 6-18 months.

In the case of the Slack example, a feature like a Quickbooks integration would not be in line with the product’s (and the company’s) audience choice around UX Squads. Yes, it’s an integration the integrations product team could take care of, but its usage metrics don’t support the product strategy. A Figma integration, on the other hand, would very much be in line with the choices made on the Product Strategy level.

HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Pick individual components within your Company Strategy you can use to set a more distinct focus on your product strategy level.
Remember that you don’t have to re-interpret each component. Some can be reused as is (regional presence, fundamental distribution models, pricing, or technology choices).
Check your current feature priorities for Feature/Product Fit. What are the core success metrics of your Product Strategy? And will its drivers be significantly influenced by the feature’s adoption and/or monetization metrics? When in doubt, use KPI trees to create this alignment.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

PS.: With many people being impacted by layoffs at the moment, I wanted to share two job opportunities that I came across this week - both at inspiring companies and the opportunity to work with exceptional product leaders:

Senior Product Manager Interventions at SoSafe

Senior Product Manager at Wunderflats

Join me in Hamburg at Product at Heart!

I couldn't be more excited about stepping on stage at this year's Product at Heart Conference. Join me to listen to incredible folks like Melissa Perri, Kate Leto, and many more. In addition, make sure to check out the workshop and leadership forum options as well.

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Content I found Practical This Week

New product strategy map at LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Our team at LinkedIn was trying to create a new product for sales professionals (essentially product expansion). Before we dove into building, we wanted to pressure test our assumptions around our product strategy (documented below). Some of these beliefs came from things we knew from users of “regular’ LinkedIn, and some came from early user research; however, we had varying levels of conviction in them.

Read it here

Product Strategy Depends on Company Strategy

From the product side, we’re stuck. Stymied. If we’re going down-market, usability and simplicity and self-onboarding and immediate gratification are top priority. If up-market, then customization and security certifications and F100 success stories and dozens of integrations are top priority. If into new International markets, then language/currency support and local legal restrictions and a support staff responding during local business hours might be top priority. Etc. We can’t build a sensible product strategy in a vacuum.

Read it here

GitLab's Product Strategy

GitLab has two flywheel strategies that reinforce each other: our open core flywheel and our development spend flywheel. A flywheel strategy is defined as one that has positive feedback loops that build momentum, increasing the payoff of incremental effort. You can visualize how the flywheels work in congruence via the diagram below. The KPI and responsibilities table lists the relevant indicator and department for every part of the flywheel. In the open core flywheel, more features drive more users which in turn drive more revenue and more contributions which lead to more users.

Read it here