I’ve noticed many product, engineering, and design teams struggling to develop product strategies without an overarching company strategy, which is bound to fail. There aren’t any universal strategies or context-free prioritization models, metrics, or product goals. If our strategies don’t mesh well, everyone suffers.
So, what exactly is a company strategy? Many resources delve deeply into this. A solid company strategy boils down to making clear choices for company growth and objectives that help all departments make aligned decisions. It involves considering various plausible alternatives and focusing on those we’re choosing not to pursue. A strategy should have a short enough time frame (like 12 months) to be actionable and meaningful, lending itself to objective key results (OKRs) or metrics.
A strategy isn’t just an airy vision for the next five years. Simply declaring we’ll dominate with the best products and profitability isn’t enough. Also, a once-a-year CEO announcement isn’t effective. Strategy should be an ongoing effort with broad participation and debate.
Product management needs this because we can’t generically prioritize tasks or validate potential improvements for all audiences or assume consistent customer segment values. Prioritizing solely on multi-column spreadsheets or cost of delay is fundamentally flawed. The specific markets and customer segments give essential context.
Imagine a mid-tier enterprise software company aiming to grow 25% next year. Executives brainstorm several exciting but untested ideas: expanding into new regions, enhancing AI capabilities, targeting larger or smaller enterprises, investing in TikTok campaigns, reducing time-to-value through integration packages, or offshoring engineering to cut costs. These ideas need thorough sorting to choose the right one, and picking multiple could spell disaster.
From a product perspective, strategies vary greatly. Usability, simplicity, and self-onboarding are priorities if going down-market. Up-market requires customization, security certifications, and numerous integrations. Entering new international markets demands language and currency support, local legal compliance, and responsive local support. We can’t build a sensible product strategy without a well-defined company strategy.
So, who’s responsible for corporate strategy? Some companies have a Corporate Strategy Officer skilled in combining collaborative inputs with rigorous analytics. If you have such a person, support them in every way possible. However, the right person in this role is rare.
Typically, VP Product or CPO roles don’t encompass entire company strategic processes, and without a clear company strategy, everyone in product management is set up to fail. So, what can we do?
First, it’s an organizational and cultural question. Strategy processes often overlook the personalities and incentives at play. As a product leader, I often step in to help, tailored to the company’s context.
Possible actions include one-on-one coaching with key peers to discuss different strategies ahead of formal meetings, pushing a strategic-thinking peer to take the lead, running numbers for top ideas to ground discussions in semi-quantitative results, facilitating strategy sessions neutrally, or even proposing the product strategy first to then critique corporate strategies.
It’s essential to step beyond the Head of Product role when the company needs it, setting aside departmental agendas and focusing on the collective success of the organization.
In summary, a thoughtful product strategy needs an overall company strategy to support it. If that’s missing, someone has to step in to improve the process, tailored to the organization’s and leadership’s unique environment.