Your product strategy helps bridge the gap between your organization’s vision and an actionable, focused roadmap. While your vision rarely changes, your product strategy needs to change as you learn more about your customers and the current market. Fail to re-align your product strategy, and you may find yourself on a bridge that leads nowhere.
How to develop your product strategy. Your product strategy “describes who your customers are, how your product fits into the current market, and how it will achieve business goals.” In effect, your strategy “helps your team focus on what will have the most significant impact on your customers and the business.” The folks at the This Is Product Management podcast put together a guide that shows how to fit strategy development into your other planning activities, the four key components of an effective product strategy, and when to iterate on your strategy.
(via @tipmpodcast)
Product strategy and your roadmap. Setting the vision and strategic goals for the product are the first steps to creating a successful roadmap. You generally expect your vision to be high level enough that it remains fairly steady, but your goals will change over time. The folks at Product Plan explain how vision and strategic goals serve as inputs to your roadmap and suggest some ways to anticipate changes to your strategic goals so your roadmap does not lead you astray.
(via @ProductPlan)
The five stages of product strategy. Winston Christie-Blick examines the 5 stages of strategic maturity from “I trust my gut” to “everyone understands strategy and objectives.” In order to move toward that fifth stage, you’ll need to change how you approach strategic objectives. Read Winston’s post to identify your organization’s current stage and what you might do to advance it to the next one.
(via @productboard)
Apple’s product strategy is changing. To understand how to go about revising your own product strategy, it can be instructive to see how other organizations approach it. Neil Cybart provides an analysis of apparent changes to Apple’s product strategy based on observations from the most recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Neil notes that “despite there being no discernible change to the grand vision behind Apple’s product development, there does appear to be a noteworthy change to strategy.
(via @neilcybart)
Amplitude is evolving its product’s north star metric. Here’s why. The folks at Amplitude are big believers in product teams aligning their vision and strategy to a north star metric. Amplitude organizes its product team around its own north star and its leading indicators—which has been a very successful strategy for them. But what happens when your strategy changes? Justin Bauer explains how Amplitude deals with changes in its north star metric and the subsequent impact to its product strategy.
(via @justinjbauer)
