How to Stop Saying Yes to Everything in Your Product Strategy​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:
Next week, we talk about how Analytico can ensure its Product Strategy is Layered. 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.
What did you think of this week's newsletter? As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
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Product Practice #368 How a Product Vision Board saved my Strategy READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Jun 20, 2025 READING TIME 3 min & 53 sec Dear Reader, I once led a newly formed product team that aimed to develop a product to increase the monetization of a specific user segment. I co-led a long Discovery effort that validated and scoped this product. At one point during our Delivery journey, my boss approached the team while I was on leave and asked them what they were trying to accomplish....
Product Practice #367 3 Prompts to help TeamsGo from KPIs to OKRs READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Jun 13, 2025 READING TIME 3 min & 56 sec Dear Reader, In theory, distinguishing KPIs from OKRs should be simple. KPIs are reactive metrics you monitor, but only act on when they exceed or drop below a certain threshold. Think revenue or conversion rate. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) contain proactive metrics that help you measure your progress towards strategic priorities. Consider revenue from a...
Product Practice #366 Why bol.com made itsgoal-setting more pragmatic READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Jun 6, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 30 sec Dear Reader, This is the final part of my mini-series on how bol.com, one of Europe's largest e-commerce companies, shapes its fintech products. After exploring their product definition and discovery practices, let's look at how they've adapted traditional goal-setting frameworks to their reality. Particularly as a function that wears two hats, enabling...