Your Roadmap is not a Product Strategy

Strategy tends to be the most confusing out of all the tasks that you should do. Too often, some window dressing on a roadmap is called strategy.

Strategy needs to be a level higher than roadmaps:

1. It must connect vision & roadmap
2. It must consider competition
3. It should help prioritize

If you want to go deeper into building strategies, check out this newsletter piece.

1. It must connect vision & roadmap

A simple heuristic to remember is the 5 questions (pictured):

• Why → Vision
• What → Strategy
• Who → Segmentation
• When → Roadmap
• How → Specifications

Product strategy helps answer the question, “what are we going to build to achieve the vision?”

Unlike vision, which is timeless, strategy should be specific to the state of now. It should describe key focusing points to inform the roadmap.

2. It must consider competition

Consider the word, “strategy.” It comes from general business strategy.

The reason strategy was a revolutionary concept was accounting for competitors. Great product characterizes competition & counter-positions.

Consider the word, “product.” It is about building something for someone.

So product strategy is the plan for how the product will drive its part of the company strategy. Great product strategy helps justify why a product team even exists.

3. It should help prioritize

Strategy is created on a 1–2 year timeframe. Roadmaps can be as fine grained as next month or quarter.

A roadmap prioritizes the series of features that you will work on. Its critical input is the strategy.

Consider these examples of different strategies in a similar market — Discord, Slack, & Teams:

• Discord: brings together communities of gamers & crypto enthusiasts
• Slack: tasteful chat for the technically inclined
• Teams: integrated chat for Office 365 users

This informs the roadmap for these teams.

For instance, a particular quarter for each of them might look like:

• Discord: gamer integrations
• Slack: third party bots
• Teams: ability to live edit word docs

Strategy helps products in the same market pursue different features.

So what does a strategy look like? The format itself is different. What I’ve seen done best is:

Roadmaps : spreadsheets

Strategies : docs

Great strategy docs encapsulate the principle of “Smart Brevity.” It’s not a long novel. It’s a short, well-written doc.