Product Strategy Framework

Simply put, a strong product strategy maps out where you're headed (your most lucrative markets), how you’ll get there with the right mix of products, marketing, sales, and customer experience, and most importantly, why you’ll succeed with a go-to-market plan you're sure you can execute.

When it comes to crafting your product strategy, there are two key goals you want to achieve:

First, you want to clearly show the value your product investments will bring to your target customers. Second, you have to articulate how those investments will benefit your own organization financially and strategically.

The Overlooked Truth About Product Strategy

One common misconception is that product strategy only involves the product teams responsible for designing and building your products. In reality, a successful product strategy touches every part of your organization - marketing, sales, customer experience, and even back-office functions are all essential to successfully executing your product strategy.

A Practical Approach: The Product Strategy Framework

The Product Strategy Framework is a cross-section of our Product Management Framework that simplifies strategic planning by helping you answer five crucial questions. These questions guide you in creating a product strategy that brings value to both your customers and your company, and it's completely defensible because quantifiable customer value is front and center.

Here are five basic questions every product strategy should answer.

1. Which market segments are our sweet spots right now?
2. Which market segments have the most growth potential over the next 1-3 years?
3. What are the top business priorities of customers in those markets, why do they matter, and which ones offer us the best opportunities?
4. What go-to-market tactics will ensure our strategy is a success?
5. How will this strategy contribute to the financial and strategic goals of our company?

Benefits of Our Product Strategy Framework

Stakeholder Alignment

Let’s be honest, aligning stakeholders can be a nightmare for most product managers. But here's the key: instead of trying to get your strategy to match up with every stakeholder’s agenda, focus on aligning everyone around a shared, value-driven view of the market. This approach not only simplifies the process but also energizes stakeholders and gets them excited about your product strategy because measurable customer value is the centerpiece.

Elevating the Stature of Product Management

Our Product Strategy Framework positions your product management team as the most knowledgeable in the company when it comes to market dynamics and how they impact the business priorities your target customers. These insights are the number one factor in becoming a product-led organization and shifting the perception of product management from tactical to strategic.

Improved Agile Execution

Nothing will improve your agile execution better than clear value targets for your designers and engineers. That's the beauty of a product strategy centered on quantifiable customer value. User jobs, ideal outcomes and obstacles draw the perfect bullseye for engineering, and they come with a direct line of sight to the customer's strategic goals and yours.

Multiple Product Strategies or One Market Strategy?

The more products you have, the more difficult product strategy becomes because of the silos and ultimately the competition for resources. And it's not just engineering resources. It's marketing budgets, sales mindshare and customer experience resources everyone's competing for.

Those headaches disappear with our Product Strategy Framework because it eliminates all the redundancies that go with multiple product strategies, and it elevates your strategic planning to a single cohesive market strategy that's supported by all products and all disciplines.

Market Strategy Defined

In its most basic form, a market strategy answers the following five questions:

1. Which market segments (by name) are most conducive to meeting our organization’s goals over the next 1-3 years, and what’s the projected (financial & strategic) contribution from each?

Here's the catch. You’re doing this for the entire portfolio, not each product. Simply put, it's a lot easier and even more accurate to quantify market potential and forecast revenue by market segment than it is by product.

2. What are the top business priorities of target customers in those markets, why are those priorities critical to their success, and which ones are most lucrative for our organization to pursue financially and strategically?

It’s the same question we had to answer with a product strategy except now you’re doing it for each market segment without regard to any one product.

3. What’s the role of each product relative to the top business priorities of our target customers?

This is the best part. Every product will have a well-defined role relative to the market strategy. Product priorities now have stronger legs and there’s a lot more at stake when you start changing them on a whim.

With a market strategy, every product roadmap is analogous to a load-bearing wall in your house. Mess with it and you're compromising the structural integrity of the whole house.

4. Go-to-market tactics?

With a market strategy, every discipline in your organization has a coordinated to-do list that ensures your organization can successfully execute its strategy. It’s no longer just a product thing. Now you have one synchronized cross-functional execution plan for the entire organization instead of unrealistically expecting every discipline to support every strategy for every product.

5. Marrying the corporate strategy to the market strategy.

There’s a good reason product managers often struggle to connect the dots between the corporate strategy and their individual product strategies. There’s a huge gap that sits between the two. A unified market strategy is the missing link—it creates a natural alignment between corporate and market goals, something individual product strategies can’t achieve on their own.

The Bottom Line on Using a Product Strategy Framework

You have choices! Can you be more successful with a strategy for every product, or would a single market strategy for all products make it easier to hit your numbers?

Whichever route you decide to take, the Product Strategy Framework from Product Management University gives you a common definition for product/market strategy and a consistent approach for creating and executing it.

If you want to simplify the process of defining where you're going, how you'll get there, and why you'll succeed, contact us to discuss the best way to elevate your strategic planning process.