How to build a product people will fall in love with — a digital product strategy framework
The answer is simple.
Don’t ever stop talking to your customers… ever.
By talking to your customers, I mean doing qualitative research — customer discovery, surveys, usability tests, focus groups, customer feedback from the customer support team, or even having an informal conversation with a potential customer at a tradeshow. It doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or if you launched your product 10 years ago. If you want people to fall in love with your product, and continue growing, you need to have an ongoing conversation with your customers.
While I believe customer development is one of the most important elements to create products people will fall in love with, it is not the focus here. Today, I will talk about a much broader topic: Product Strategy. There are many components that go into de-risking your ideas and creating an outstanding product.
Basically, Product Strategy is the framework to make it all happen.
Why should you care about Product Strategy? Simply put, if you have a tech startup, the product is the most important element of your business. It is how you make money, after all. There are strategies for everything: business strategy, marketing strategy, go-to-market strategy. Why is no one paying attention to the most important of them all? The Product Strategy.
This article is written for founders, product managers, product designers, product marketing professionals and anyone else involved and attempting to create awesome digital products.
What is Product Strategy?
Product Strategy is part of product management and is usually done by a product manager or the CEO. According to Marty Cagan, author of the book Inspired, Product Strategy is how a Product Vision is delivered. Let’s briefly talk about product vision first.
“The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two or five years out…” Marty Cagan
A product vision example could be something like this.
In 10 years, the U.S. will have the best progressive K-12 educational system in the world.
Isn’t that an awesome product vision?!
The product vision answers questions like: Why is this product being created? What value does it bring to users? It is a leap of faith, and we want to believe in it.
Now! Product Strategy is the HOW to make that vision happen. Cagan defines it like this:
“The product strategy is our sequence of products or releases we plan to deliver on the path to realizing the product vision…”
He is basically saying that a Product Strategy is a set of product releases, or even a set of products; it’s not a single release or a single product. It takes time to achieve that vision. (Mainly the ambiguous one I had set above.)
Furthermore, Product Strategy is the big picture of what the company is trying to achieve via the product vision. It is the long-term goal. It defines the “what” and the “how” to build it. What are we building? And how? A Product Strategy will help your team be better aligned, focused on the North Star, and thus, be more efficient and achieve the product/market fit, or the multiple product/market fit faster. Here is how I define Product Strategy:
Product Strategy is a framework to help leaders make smart product decisions, reach product-market fit, and scale.
Frameworks are like guidelines; the basic structure to help teams perform their work. In our case, the Product Strategy framework is flexible and should be customized to each product, team and company stage. It’s a loose approach to achieve the product vision. Drawn from many decades working with big and small product teams, I created the Holistic Product Strategy Framework.
As you may have noticed, this framework (or it could also be considered a methodology, per se) is not entirely new, as it combines the basic elements of any product development process (research and planning) together with the Lean Startup methodology. My attempt here is to put on paper what most product teams are already doing, or should be doing. I’m just putting the puzzle together.
Discovery
When starting to define a Product Strategy, I usually start with “discovery.” If you’re a product manager joining a team with an existing product in the market, this part will be more like assessment, as you need to know where you’re getting yourself into. If you’re a founder or a product manager building a new product, it is pure discovery and research. The first step you should take when creating your product strategy is to ask questions.
- What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
- Who is the target audience?
- How do they use the product and why? (for products already available in the market)
- How big is the market? Who are the competitors?
- What is the value proposition?
- What is the current situation of the product? What has already been tested?
- What are the challenges?
- What are the metrics?
- What is the business model, pricing model?
The questions listed above will help you get a solid understanding of the product and business goals. They are basically helping you to understand the product vision, the current challenges and risks, and the direction the company is going. Discovery can last from a few days to a couple of months, it really depends on company stage, circumstances and resources. While doing discovery, you are basically exploring the following topics:
- Target audience
- Competitive analysis
- Value proposition
- Market analysis
- Hypothesis list
- Business model
- Product audit (for existing products)
- Business goals
- And more
Planning
This is the fun part. It’s when you get to make decisions, be creative, and set the company’s “destiny.” It is the strategy within the strategy.
Planning is about taking all that you have learned and starting to sketch a plan. I use the word plan loosely, because as I said before, Product Strategy is a framework, not a plan. To make a parallel between product and animation, let’s say product strategy planning is like storyboard thumbnails; it’s a sketch of what the film will be when released — a loose sketch with lots of room for interpretation and creativity.
Planning is the core part of Product Strategy. This is when you will start defining how to put the product vision into action and start defining the following:
- Setting the product vision
- Creating personas
- Defining and prioritizing the product backlog
- Defining hypothesis validation experiments
- Hiring the team (designers, developers, data analysts, QA testers, product owners, etc)
- Establishing the go-to-market strategy (marketing, sales, partnership)
- Clarifying the technology and businesses risks and constraints
- Setting the tech stack
- And more or less
There are a few different techniques you can use to get this part done. Again, it will depend on your product, company stage and resources.
Roadmaps and Objective Key Results (OKRs) are the two most important outcomes of a Product Strategy.
On a roadmap, you set what each team will be working on, for the next 3, 6 or 12 months. While with OKRs, you set milestones; for example, “Get 1M customer by day X,” or “Increase purchases 30% by day Y.” Today, there are companies leaning towards OKRs rather than roadmaps, as they are more flexible and leave room for teams to have more autonomy.
Another extremely important activity to be discussed during Product Strategy is KPIs (Key Performance Indicators); a widely overlooked topic by many early-stage startups. Qualitative data is important, but metrics is your quantitative data. Data is what should drive every single decision you make, or at least, most.
Strategy is a team effort, not a single player game. To build a strong strategy, you will need a leader as well as lots of conversations with people from all departments in your company. As the product leader, you’ve got to involve everyone with grace.
The Feedback Loop
Once you have your strategy in place, it is finally ‘action’ time. The feedback loop — build, measure and learn — is the core component of the well-known “Lean Startup” methodology. It doesn’t matter if you’re building a cheap Wizard of Oz prototype to validate a solution, or if it is the actual expensive real product. It’s time to experiment and put the strategy into action. If it’s the actual product release, it’s when we build beautiful experiences, like the final movie.
Once you build and measure the product launched, you then analyze the data and decide what to do next. Have you had some success, so you can continue with small improvements and iterations? Was it a big failure and is it now time for a major pivot? Or is there further research required?
Product Strategy is like a woven fabric, it stretches, overlaps and can go on and on. Once you reach product/market fit, you continue exploring new markets, new audiences, and new products. Until you reach the desired product vision.
Product Strategy Tenets
Before I conclude this post, I thought I’d leave you with a summary of guidelines I believe are crucial to create strong product strategies. In other words, how to create products that people will fall in love with!
- Have a clear product vision and share it with the entire company.
- Give your teams autonomy; many times they are the ones with best product ideas.
- Review your OKRs and Value Proposition regularly; a good rule of thumbs is every 2–3 months.
- Customer interaction must be a constant; keep talking to your customers.
- Have a deep understanding of your market; it’s a ongoing effort, as it’s always changing.
- Keep experimenting until you reach product-market fit.
- Team alignment is essential; keep communication channels open.
- Plan your next sprint according to data and research; be laser-focused on your KPIs.
So, if you are working on a digital product, create a Product Strategy. At least, have discussions around the topics covered in this article and ask questions. That, in and of itself is a great start.
And remember, Don’t ever stop talking to your customers… ever.
To learn more about Product Management, take a look at one of my previous blog posts, Why Every Startup Needs Product Management.
Best of luck!
(P.S. Have you noticed the artwork credentials in this article? If you guessed they’re all from my family, you guessed it right. The beautiful heart is from my 9 years old daughter, comic bubbles from my 11 years old son and the rest from my husband. Life is a team effort!)
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Adriana T. Torresan is a Product Manager and UX Designer consultant and coach. Subscribe to her newsletter at www.adrianatt.com to get updates on her upcoming posts, events and takeaways. Or follow her on Instagram at @adriana.t.torresan.
