How to Know if Your Product Strategy Has Worked

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PUBLISHED

Oct 11, 2024

READING TIME

4 min & 16 sec

Dear Reader,

Your Strategy can be perfectly thought-out, based on well-researched insights, co-created by Individual Contributors and Leadership, and contain sustainable advantages over alternatives. But if nobody understands it and you can't integrate it into teams' decision-making processes, the value of Product Strategy will remain locked.

The degree to which Product Strategy is executable depends on many factors like your team’s abilities, organizational structures, and more. But the two aspects I want to focus on in this essay are the following:

An executable format: Can you translate the messy work of choosing and connecting components into formats that resonate? As mentioned in the Just Enough Strategy chapter, don't treat canvases or statement structures like the defining guardrails for your strategy. See them as simplified windows into what you're trying to say.

The measurability of execution: By nature, your product strategy will make and connect qualitative statements about what you will and will not do. While this is the first step towards enabling teams to say no, you must further remove subjectivity from these choices. One of the most effective ways to do that is to translate choices into measurable indicators of progress and success.

For measuring the execution of Analytico's Product Strategy choices, the key question is: "Twelve months from now, which three metrics would tell us that this Strategy choice has worked?"

For a Strategy choice like expanding their market to upstart mobile-first eCommerce shops in the US, their metrics need to go beyond "Total Revenue" or "Number of Clients." These are reactive KPIs, but not proactive measures of strategic progress.

Instead, they would use metrics like

Number of new US clients with 30 days of continuous incoming data
% of renewed first-time US customers
Volume of tracked native app events from the US App Store

Translating your strategy into metrics will feel particularly easy if you approach your strategy creation from the “Atomic” perspective I discussed before; you assembled and connected strategy components to form the overarching strategy patterns.

Here's where you can find the first two parts of this mini-series on the valuable attributes of Product Strategy:

Part 1: How to Stop Saying Yes to Everything in Your Product Strategy

Part 2: How to Build a Product Strategy That Fits Your Company’s Focus

HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Avoid Evergreen Metrics. If you can plug a metric into any quarter or year, it won't help you measure strategic progress.
Try to predict the future. Pick metrics that you would proudly present at the next summer party as indicators that your strategy has worked. And then set the right ambition level.
Keep the formats simple. Don’t let the format hold you back from doing the work. Writing out your Product Strategy in simple bullets answering the key questions can be enough to bring choices across.

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

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