πŸ› οΈ How to Know if Your Product Strategy Has Worked


How to Know if Your Product Strategy Has Worked

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​HERBIG.CO​

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 β€œAtomic” 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​

Join my In-Person Workshops in Berlin

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Content I found Practical This Week

Input metrics are so hard that most product teams give up

When a product team has good input metrics, they are off to the races in running experiments and placing bets to create maximum impact. Solid input metrics allow teams to creatively solve the most important business problems without being told what to build by the top of the org. In short, input metrics enable aligned autonomy. In the absence of clear, data-driven input metrics, decision-making can become subjective, driven by internal politics or the highest-paid person's opinion. In that kind of environment, the people doing the hands-on work can lose confidence in the priorities and get disillusioned. Sadly this is the norm for most companies.

Forecasts & Uncertainty

Indeed, limiting uncertainty is not as straightforward a matter as just gathering information. For one, collection requires effort, time, and money; eventually one has to decide where to draw the line and define how accurate is accurate enough. But perhaps more to the point, a complex context will not allow such collection unless through probing. This is not something that can be done beforehand and, so to speak, set aside under the assumption that things will remain unchanged.

The Secret to a Great Planning Process

Planning is hard because it's inherently different from other exercises your organization takes on. Rather than focusing on day-to-day execution, it requires a large number of people to think about a variety of possible futures, align on one single future, and then plot a concrete course to get there. Taking this on for your own personal goals (for example, a New Year’s resolution), feels challenging enough β€” doing this with dozens or thousands of people can feel nearly impossible.

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Who is Tim Herbig?

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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