Defining your product strategy for a new year

How I create my product strategy with a template!

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

It goes without saying that strategy is like the Google Map for your project journey. If the journey is new and exciting, there’s a high chance you need guidance to get there.

Defining where you want to go with your product is a ritual you must undertake to ensure you’re in tune with the customer and business needs at given points in time.

However, toward the end of each year, most companies begin to scramble, review numbers for the year, and hash out plans for the coming financial year — making this a great time to define your product strategy that aligns with the goals of the company.

My custom experience as a Product Manager has given me the ability to focus on strategic thinking and building out plans for a product. I’m not saying I know it all (cause no one ever really does) but I have had quite the opportunity to identify what works (and what does not).

In this little write-up, I focus on all you need to know about creating a stellar strategy for your product by defining the critical blocks of a strategy document/framework for you. I also provide a nice-enough template to guide you on your strategy development so that my abstract words have meaning to you. Let’s get into it!

It starts with a vision.

Vision is the foundation of any strategy you want to come up with, even for the most mundane activities of life. For example, I want to get a fabulous new car; how and what I must do to get this car becomes the meat of the strategy.

Vision, if done well, helps you align the entire team and company and serves as a compass for the company steering the product development process in the right direction.

To define my product vision, here are a couple of things I like to do;

1. Review (again) the company’s vision and map out your product vision from it (your product vision has to align with the goals of the company). Identify what the company needs and how the product can meet those needs. For product-led organizations, this is relatively simple because a bulk of the company’s goals are closely interrelated to the product itself.
2. Discuss with team members to bat around ideas. Getting the perspectives of other members of your team and organization at large steers your product-visioning ship in the right direction. As you may have heard, “a problem shared is a problem half-solved”.
3. Take notes from research, reviews, and conversations, and begin to map out the vision statement. If you’re not clear on how to write a vision statement, this article from ProductPlan is extremely helpful and helped me when I had to take my first run at statement writing.

Your already existing product may have a vision statement. Feel free to review it and readjust it if need be and ensure your vision is aligned with that of the company.

Speak to customers

Customer engagement is valuable for defining your strategy. You are designing the product for them after all, and you are hoping that what you design addresses their issues well enough that they are willing to pay you for it.

To engage your customers effectively and get the insights you truly need;

1. Run a quick survey or two asking the very important questions. Make sure your survey isn’t too bare as you risk not getting useful insights at all and also ensure it’s not too loaded as it might increase drop off which also prevents you from getting useful feedback.
2. Have one-on-one sessions/interviews with some customers to dig a little bit deeper. It could be a follow-up to the survey with you interacting with some of the customers that consented to a one-on-one interview or completely random. Whatever the case, getting that qualitative feedback helps you get proper alignment on what your strategy should be.

Do some research!

Market research and competitor analysis are important blocks to your strategy. You need to know what’s happening out there! How do users perceive company A’s product? Where does company B win and where do they lack? What does the market look like for the business in the next 1, 2, or 5 years?

Running temperature checks against the market and your competitors allows you to truly step out of your comfort zone and ask tough questions. This is personally the toughest part of drawing up the strategy document for my product.

Last year, due to a lack of information, I had to sneak team members and clients to other companies’ demos to get a sense of what they were doing. And for others, I had some of our customers demo these products if they were also subscribed to them.

Highlight your OKRs and KPIs

Defining your objectives and key results (OKRs) is where your strategy begins to take on shape!

At this point, you’re moving from the rigmarole of visioning and researching to actual planning and this is my favourite part of a strategy document. Let’s zoom in.

Going back to the business’ vision, let’s say your company is looking to 10x your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) next year (I’m assuming that management would have set some KPIs).
- This is your product KPI.

You’ve done the relevant research and gotten word from your customers. You see where your competitors are leading and lagging. You’ve set out or revisited the vision for your product and the supporting vision statement. Everything has come together. You now have an idea of what people want and how to own your space.
- These are all the activities from above.

As the good PM that you are, you know that the only way to 10x revenue with your product is to address your customer’s pain points, you need to find that sweet spot that becomes a value-generating machine.
- The sweet spot is where your value proposition lies.

So you identify the goals of the product (your objectives) and the results of achieving these objectives. If done well, it should align with your KPIs and the company’s vision.
- Defining the initiatives that drive your OKRs is the start of your product plan and roadmap.

So you’ve mapped out your OKRs and what it takes to achieve these objectives. These initiatives can then be further broken down to define your product roadmap for the new year.

To summarise this all-encompassing read,

1. you get feedback from customers, run your market research, identify the business goals etc.
2. you define the vision for your product, map out KPIs that align with that of the company,
3. set OKRs that would steer you towards achieving these KPIs and break down the initiatives that would achieve these goals
4. you define the product roadmap from these initiatives and close out your product strategy framework

To help you get started, I have added a quick template that would help you hit the ground running and become a lean-mean-product-strategy-making-machine!

So give it a try or also reach out and share your thoughts and/or improvement areas with me, after all, I’ve only been a PM for about 2 years.