How to Stop Saying Yes to Everything in Your Product Strategy

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PUBLISHED

Sep 27, 2024

READING TIME

3 min & 35 sec

Dear Reader,

Three weeks ago, I shared with you Why you don’t get Value from your Product Strategy. Today, we're going to talk about the How.

Making your Product Strategy decisive means making choices that help answer "What does this allow us to say no to?"

Imagine a b2b SaaS Analytics software called Analytico. If your Product Strategy says you target "Companies building Digital Products," every stakeholder conversation will go like this:

"We need customizable dashboards to meet a company's branding." - "That sounds reasonable."

"We need a data import from Shopify" - "I guess we could do that."

"We need native Android and iOS SDKs" - "Sure, companies might need that."

You don't have a basis for saying no to any of these. But if you break down your audience into comically narrow segments, you shift the conversation. You can break "Companies building Digital Products" down by many criteria: Business model, industry, revenue, number of employees, geography, technology used, etc.

This might lead you to a segment like "European Web-first eCommerce companies making 10-50M€ per Year in Revenue." Nobody knows exactly if this is the right segment. It's an informed assumption. But at least this choice shifts the priorities:

"We need customizable dashboards to meet a company's branding." - "No, our customers are scrappy and don't represent their data to the outside."

"We need a data import from Shopify" - "Yes, 75% of our target customers run on Shopify."

"We need native Android and iOS SDKs." - "No, there are only 100 native eCommerce apps in the European App Store, and none of them fall within our target segment."

Other possible tentpoles you can establish to make your Strategy conversation more decisive are:

The high-level problem space you want to serve (i.e., understanding how customers behave vs. making it easier to aggregate and report data)
What you want to offer(i.e., integrate with everyone or be the one-stop-shop solution)

Next week, we talk about how Analytico can ensure its Product Strategy is Layered.

HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Can you say no? If you can't name three things your Strategy allows you to say no to, it's probably not that useful.
How can you narrow your audience? Think of criteria that differentiate segments in your target market. How can you stack them to get to a decisive choice?
Test against your Roadmap. Which initiatives on your roadmap would be dropped if you were to focus on this segment? If the answer is nothing, you might still be to broad.

Did you enjoy this one or have feedback? Let me know and reply. Hearing from you is what motivates me whenever I sit down to write this newsletter. If this newsletter isn't for you anymore, you can unsubscribe here.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

Good News!

There are a few tickets available for my 1-day Product Strategy workshop in Cologne on November 14. Learn how to navigate the practices of Product Strategy with confidence.

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Content I found Practical This Week

How to Write a Great Product Strategy

Watch it here

Staying Synced on Strategy

When a strategy is legible, it’s easy for folks to digest. It’s clearly written, well synthesized, chunked into digestible pieces, and ideally summarized into a compelling visual or tagline. We’ve all seen and read and heard strategies that overly rely on buzz words and rambling explanations - legibility means short and sweet. And when a strategy is legible, it enables and empowers teams to make decisions and trade-offs at a local level vs escalating things up the chain.

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The intersection of company and product strategy

So I think your product strategy is a perfect subset of your company strategy, and the only thing that we’re really debating here is how much of a subset is it? Is it most of it or is it just one little piece? A classic example for me is Ikea. I was at a conference last week and I was talking to somebody who manages Ikea’s mobile product, which has fancy augmented reality stuff in it and everything you’d expect these days. But obviously that’s not the Ikea strategy, that’s just a product strategy, so I think there is clearly a subset relationship and just the magnitude of the subset is what’s actually relevant.

Read it here