Your Product Strategy Can Be Focused Without Covering Everything

​Dear Reader,​

If your Product Strategy prioritizes paid customers, what happens to everyone using your product for free?

Aakash Gupta raised this question in our Product Growth podcast conversation. At Apollo, the strategic focus was on paid users. But he couldn’t ignore everyone else.

It’s a useful tension. A strategy needs to concentrate your effort, while your team still has responsibilities beyond that focus.

Free users need a functioning product, bugs need fixing, and existing commitments need attention. Adding all of those responsibilities to your strategy can make it harder to see which changes deserve more of your team’s effort.

Your strategy doesn’t have to cover everything your team does. But the choices it contains need to work together.

Imagine a used-car marketplace deciding to compete on price. That choice raises questions about which buyers care enough about price to choose the marketplace. Narrowing the audience raises another question: Is that segment large enough to support the business goal?

If the answer is no, the team might revisit its audience, expand the geography, or reconsider how it plans to compete. Each change has implications for the other choices.

This is why the work behind a strategy often looks much messier than the final presentation. You revisit an earlier choice because something you learned elsewhere challenges it. You can fill every box in a template and still leave those connections unexplored.

Aakash captured these loops in his graphic of how Product Strategy gets built:

Now bring that thinking back to the paid-customer example.

Suppose a team chooses to grow revenue by improving retention among paying customers. Better onboarding for those customers could support that choice. A feature designed to attract more free users would need a different explanation of how it contributes.

Both ideas might create value. The strategy helps the team decide which deserves more attention when they require the same people and time.

Maintaining the experience for free users can continue alongside that focus. But if maintenance repeatedly consumes the capacity intended for retention work, the team has something concrete to reconsider. Perhaps it underestimated the cost of keeping the product running. Perhaps the proposed improvements require more capacity than it has.

That’s also where Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery can strengthen each other.

The team’s OKRs can help it see whether paying customers are getting started successfully and continuing to use the product. Operational metrics can still track whether the product works reliably for everyone. Every responsibility doesn’t need its own Key Result.

Discovery can reduce uncertainty around the choices behind those goals. Is getting started really what prevents these customers from staying? What would they need to do differently for the onboarding improvements to matter?

And if the expected changes don’t happen, the team can revisit those assumptions before committing to more of the same work.

For your next strategy review, pick one choice about your audience or differentiation. Ask a colleague:

“If we changed this, what else would we have to reconsider?”

Then look at the work already competing for your team’s attention:

“Which work are we deliberately giving more attention to, and where have we made room for it?”

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​Watch my full conversation with Aakash Gupta.​

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

If you consume one thing this week, make it this...

How to find leading indicators: Journey Mapping and Driver Trees Read it here

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.