Demystifying Product Strategy: What You Won’t Work On

What is a product strategy?

Most importantly, it is what you won’t work on.

Here’s how Ed Biden explained it in this deep-dive.

It’s easy to get drowned in requests from users and various stakeholders around the business. Everyone has a great idea or a pressing question that needs answering.

But not all these requests are worth doing. Some might be great ideas, some might be ok, and a few will probably be counter-productive. Analysing each one of them would take a huge amount of time.

We need an approach that allows us to consistently work on high impact features, without needing to go back to first principles on every idea.

This is the essence of what a product strategy is.

A product strategy should explain what you will work on, and why. It should link the day-to-day work that you are doing to the big picture company strategy and vision.

A product strategy is your plan for creating the most value possible for your users and your company. And to do this, you need to focus your time on a small set of really high impact work, and not dilute your efforts across all the different things you could potentially do.

Good product strategies therefore have two core features that allow you to create amazing value for your users:

1. They are composed of high impact work
2. They are mutually reinforcing

That is to say, of all the pieces of work that you could do, product strategies choose the ones that create more value in a shorter amount of time. But not only that, they also choose pieces of work that when combined create more value than the sum of their parts.

Strategy is never done.

A lot of people think creating a strategy is something that should be done on a periodic basis, after huge amounts of research and analysis.

Whilst having a solid evidence base for your strategy is undoubtedly good, creating a strategy is much better thought of as an ongoing activity, rather than an ad hoc task.

“When I start a new job, I define a SWAG (Stupid Wild-Ass Guess) product strategy within my first two weeks.”
– Gibson Biddle, ex VP Product Netflix

You really need a working understanding of what your strategy is at all times. You want to start with a basic hypothesis as soon as possible, and then strengthen it over time.

This approach has several benefits:

1. It’s easier to get feedback from stakeholders when they have something to comment on
2. You can focus your discovery by seeing where your evidence is weak
3. You can use your hypothesis as your strategy whilst you firm things up

As you ship features, engage with stakeholders, and do more discovery your strategy will naturally shift. That’s fine and normal.

It’s almost always better to get going and course correct as you go along, rather than do nothing for several weeks before acting.