Five Steps for a Winning Product Strategy
To be successful as a Product Owner or Product Manager, you need to be the CEO of the Product. You’re much more than a tactical ‘backlog administrator’ — you’re the boss! You evangelize the vision and drive the strategy. In their book Playing to Win, A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin describe five key elements for strategy:
Winning Aspiration: Your purpose; vision; BHAG, north star
Where to play: Geography, customer segments, product categories, distribution channels
How to win: unique value proposition; competitive advantage. E.g. should you pursue a Blue Ocean strategy?
Capabilities needed: People, expertise, skills, technologies.
Management systems required: Structures, policies, metrics, leadership traits, processes
If any of these levels is lacking or unclear, you’ve got some work to do as a Product Owner. You may consider some of these tools and techniques to guide your thinking for steps 1 to 3:
Value proposition canvas
Jobs to be Done
Opportunity canvas
Lean canvas
Value curve
Etc.
It’s important to note that a Product Roadmap is not a strategy: it’s merely a rough forecast of your delivery timeline. It’s derived from the strategy. Furthermore, your strategy is likely to evolve as you vaildate your product/feature hypotheses through customer feedback. That’s right - it’s a hypothesis that remains to be proven or disproven in the arena of the customer marketplace.
To get all that right, you need the right management systems - level five in the strategy model above. This is where Lean startup, disciplined Agile & adaptive processes come into play.
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