Product Strategy Breakdowns - Why and How?
If strategy is considered one of the essential, but harder, things for a Product Manager to do, how do you get better at them?
The problem with most strategies is it's hard to determine whether your strategy is good or not, in large part, because it is something that yields benefits over time.
After all, a bad strategy with brutally perfect execution can mask a bad underlying strategy till it's too late.
Most strategy books and newsletters focus on highly strategic companies, such as the FAANG; and while those concepts can be applied to smaller companies, it's often harder to stretch the "small company" strategy.
I also think that one of the reasons PM's don't think or practice their strategy muscles is that it's often not relevant in most companies. Given that a large number of companies just want the PM's to ship features and, in a best case scenario, "talk to customers", the actual need for a strategy is low.
Yet, for higher-level roles, strategy is often expected (whether it will, in fact, be used is unclear).
Truth Telling / Seeking is a Skill AND Mindset
Even if no one will ever use your skill, you want to have it if you are building a career in Product Management.
Why? If it's hardly ever actually used or genuinely requested, why would this be the case?
Even if you are in a feature factory and your strategic insight is never asked for, you can potentially still benefit by prioritizing or, if possible, picking those parts of the features or business that you do think will be strategic.
You probably won't have that much wiggle room in a traditional feature factory. But you likely have more agency than you think.
The issue will be, even if it is strategic, do you want to work on that features (Visibility Cuts Both Ways in Product)
So having an understanding of the strategy actually can help you in your day to day job.
Second reason: add cohesion to your own roadmap thinking and planning
Even if your opinion is not asked for a strategy, you will be asked for what your roadmap is. Explaining this in a coherent way will depend upon your strategy.
Instead of providing just a task list, you'll be able to shape how everything fits together.
That's valuable for you, in terms of helping you to make sense of the backlog and feature list; it will also make your roadmap appear more understandable.
A related benefit is that IF your strategic underpinning is something that execs do NOT agree with, you can correct your own assumptions; unfortunately, with short-sighted execs, they will likely see that as a negative "Why don't you know your strategy?" "What's your strategy?" "Well I don't know!"
To me, this is nevertheless worth the risk in all but the most dysfunctional organizations (and unfortunately, most are dysfunction due to the Lizard Brain - Why Most Companies Suck.
Third reason: you might get lucky and someone cares
There is a reason that product strategy is considered important, even though it's not implemented. There's not much to the product in a scale up or competitive environment if there's no real strategy.
Strategy helps one take action with limited resources in the face of ambiguity to gain an advantage with customer demand. But...it also presumes an adversarial environment -- whether it comes from direct competitors or bad structural economics of your industry.
So, although most companies don't treat product right, some do.
And if lightning strikes and you have an opportunity to join a company that is scaling and can be product led with a culture of truth-seeking, you definitely will not get that role if you haven't been developing your chops.
Fourth reason: likely you need those skills for yourself.
While the actual strategy of building a solo business or developing your career arc is not directly the same as building a product strategy, the considerations are still similar. It's still a bit of a muscle. I'd argue it's largely harder to have a personal product strategy because it's all so, well, personal.
But a desire to be able to see things and how they work matters.
How to do them?
Breaking something down quickly in your head is very similar to practicing for product sense.
In fact, I'd argue it's very similar, just zoomed out to address other considerations like competition, size of market, that aren't often included in those interviews.
This framework is going to be a work in progress as I start to explore the idea and practice doing these breakdowns.
So read along with me as I start to write them out. Note: this will be purposefully simplistic to build upon the razor. I know there are alot of pre-existing strategy frameworks. But starting from the ground-up can help to sort out what is most important.
Where are we going and where are we now?
Truth seeking needs to not just set a goal, but needs to realistically assess where things are now.
A trap is believing, without evidence, that your company is in a market leading situation right now when it really isn't.
This can be a source of conflict. A visionary founder may correctly see that your start-up, in fact, can compete against Big Tech or Fortune 5 or whatever the leader is; the challenge is evaluating whether their assessment is delusion or the truth.
Very bad strategic mistakes can result in this mistep.
For example, if your leadership believes your company owns the market and, from that position, cannot benefit from partnering with those that may not be true friends in the market, even if it will help turn it out, will make a huge mistake.
This is probably far more common than not since the current, perilous situation may have resulted from similar missteps by the same leader; so acknowledging a current bad situation will compromise past decisions.
Steve Jobs, for example, famously partnered with Microsoft.
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https://www.neowin.net/news/a-quick-look-back-at-when-microsoft-invested-150-million-in-apple-46-years-ago-today/
This certainly was met with boos from Apple fan boys, and must not have been an easy thing for Steve Job's ego. The two companies couldn't have been more misaligned in values. Consider this quote:
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." "Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires."
Yet, Steve Jobs had an honest assessment of what the state of his company was, and with that truthful understanding of what it was, combined with a rigorous vision of what Apple could become based on a truthful sense of where the world was going he was able to put together a viable strategy.
So in doing a breakdown, assessing the state of teh current business and where things are going is a good place to begin.
That state consists of a few things:
- Who is the customer?
- What is the problem being solved?
- What is the difference the company currently has that matters to customers?
The difference is perhaps the hardest part. I have been in meetings where the difference is something temporary, something marketing believes but isn't true, or a vision of the future that the leader holds, but hasn't yet executed.
I don't think this difference has to be a massive moat from the beginning or a huge, even discernible, difference. After all, if it were that obvious, there wouldn't need to be any strategy.
It can be as small as a mustard seed.
But there needs to be just enough substantance to have conviction.
Without this, it's hard to form the basis of a product strategy.
The second part that needs to be understood is the market dynamics -- how will customers, competitors, and market conditions evolve and change?
This is the harder part, which is why having a few frameworks or principles to use as a starting point help.