Product Practice #317

From Product Strategy to OKRs

READ ON

HERBIG.CO

PUBLISHED

Apr 12, 2024

READING TIME

<1 min

Dear Reader,

This week, I conducted a webinar that turned into a mini-workshop with airfocus (Disclaimer: I'm an Angel Investor in them).

In it, I used a made-up mock case to work with the audience through making Product Strategy choices within the constraints of a Company Strategy and how to turn these into possible quarterly KRs.

Without further ado, here's the full recording, including chapter markers (my favorite section starts at 16:55) and subtitles:

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Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

New Product Strategy Workshop Dates!

I'm hosting my beloved 1-day Product Strategy Workshop on November 14 in Cologne, Germany. You should join - People always leave these with the right practical tools for their everyday work.

GET THE TICKETS!

Content I found Practical This Week

Avoid the 5 Deadly Sins of Product Strategy

At BobCo, Alicia and her leadership team spent more than three months crafting a strategy and found a lot of success over the first six months. That said, the second half of the year saw a huge drop in efficacy as feature usage dropped. At the end of the year, Alicia and her team did a retrospective, and when they made a timeline of events, they soon realized they never adjusted the strategy based on competitive data. As a result, their competitor picked up on the staleness and took market share as a result.

Read it here

‘Niching’ Down

We’ve all heard the saying, “if you try to please everyone, you please no one.” This is especially true for startups and new products. Focus and being able to find a niche can be a huge unlock for products. Square started as a POS (Point of Sale) device, Lululemon started as yoga clothing for women, and Amazon started as an online book store. Each of these companies are now valued in the billions (trillions in Amazon’s case), which goes to show that we should never be too afraid to ‘niche down’. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a common pattern of success for early-stage companies and products.

Read it here

ResortPass Product Strategy and Roadmap Example

This deck is pretty high-level, which served the purpose for the moment in time but is definitely lacking a next level of detail. The prototypes in the end are also very "vision-y" and not necessarily researched or vetted with customers. I wanted to be clearer around the metrics, but our ability to measure is not so great right now. In most companies I'd have shown clear opportunity sizing next to each piece of proposed work. In a larger org I'd likely include owners as well, but our product team is small so everyone knows who owns the "hotels" roadmap, for example. The deck is really designed to be accompanied by the talk track - so things like Q1 objectives were more a victory lap and look backward than they were important to our go-forward plan.

Read it here