Product
strategy

Create a winning product strategy that defines success, describes how to get there, and gets everyone onboard.

Duration: 2-6 weeks

Team: 1-3 people

A strong and clear product strategy is vital to enabling long term success. It provides a practical framework for making better product decisions that drive you towards a desired end-state. A good strategy will help you communicate your intentions, engage, and align people and teams across organisational boundaries. But a great strategy hinges on its ability to produce results. That’s why we don’t just help you create a winning product strategy, we help you turn it into winning products.

  • Align and motivate your teams
  • Know where you’re heading and how to get there
  • Make better decisions and prioritise more effectively
  • Support your organisation’s strategy and goals
  • Engage your business and get stakeholders onboard

Step-by-step

1. Align

The first step is to understand your current state through research and analysis.

We take an inside-out approach, starting by immersing ourselves in your organisation. We’ll dig into your culture, strategy, operating model, and existing products and technologies to understand what you’re good at, what you’re not, and what your constraints and challenges are.

Then we turn our focus outwards to understand your users and the market context: Who are your users? Who aren’t they? What job does your product solve for them? How could you make them switch? How are your competitors positioned? What are the market threats and opportunities?

2. Define success

Creating a clear and long-term definition of success for your product not only motivates and aligns your teams, but also allows you to work backwards and chart a course of coherent action to get there.

There are lots of different ways to define product success. From vision, mission, and purpose statements, future press releases, strategic narratives, north stars, objectives and more. And there are just as many ways of measuring success. But the key to creating something that catalyses change and sticks, is to understand what’s going to land best in your organisation, and aligning your product’s definition of success with that of your company’s.

We’ll help you choose the most appropriate approach to define and measure your product’s success and test, learn, and iterate towards the best solution, together.

3. Build a decision making framework

This is where we create the framework for making better product decisions that will guide you towards your definition of success.

First, we need to characterise your target market and users. Who are they? Where are they located? What category will your product occupy or create?

Then we need to define how you’re going to win in that market. Whether your product is an internal, technical platform or a high-profile, D2C service, creating a compelling value proposition, business model, and differentiated positioning is essential if you want to cut through the noise and convince people to start using it.

And finally, we’ll help you turn the decisions you’ve made into a set of product principles that your teams can use as a cheat-sheet to make informed product decisions, faster.

4. Create a coherent plan of action

Now that we’ve understood your business, user and market context, defined what long-term success looks like for your product, and created a framework for making decisions, we need to create a concrete plan, and a set of discrete actions to ensure you get there.

This usually takes the form of long-to-short term roadmaps that focus on the outcomes that you want to achieve, not the features you want to deliver. That level of detail will come from product discovery.

5. Communicate and engage

Finally, and critically, we’ll help consolidate your product strategy into a set of concise, digestible artefacts that can be easily shared and accessed.

This might be a PDF, a website, a printed brochure, online whiteboard or training modules. Again, choosing the most effective format will come down to understanding your business, and picking a format that has the best chance of resonating. We’ll also help you create a communications plan to make sure anyone who needs to understand your product strategy, does.

Key outputs

  • Research and analysis outputs and insights
  • Definition of product success
  • Value proposition statement
  • Positioning statements
  • Product principles
  • Business model canvas
  • Long-to-short term roadmaps
  • Communication plan
  • Product strategy document

How we work with you

Agile

We favour responding to change over following a plan. We use backlogs and task boards to manage our work and run 2-week sprints, with regular ceremonies for communication, planning, and reviewing our progress.

Collaborative

Our mission is your mission. We work transparently and inclusively with your organisation and your suppliers to co-create your product strategy.

Lean

We deploy a lightweight, highly experienced team and take a ‘just-enough’ approach to research and analysis. This helps us make decisions quickly, accelerate time-to-market, and acknowledges the need for future iteration.

Craft a killer product strategy that gets everyone onboard

Do you need help creating or fine-tuning your product strategy? Book a call with one of our team today.

Book a call today