(2021-03-18) Mehta The Product Strategy Stack

Ravi Mehta: The Product Strategy Stack. As software has eaten the world, product has become the most important lever for a company's success. Today, companies win or lose based on the quality of their products—and this puts enormous pressure on product teams to not just deliver products, but deliver products that drive the company's strategy. Too often, the terms "vision," "mission," "strategy," "goals," and "roadmap" get conflated into a jumbled mess—leaving product leaders without the context they need to focus their work on the difficult task of moving the company forward. (strategic context)

often, the lack of clarity manifests in hard to diagnose ways. For example, product teams may struggle to answer prioritization questions

This problem not only affects prioritization but also manifests in other hard to diagnose ways: muddied UX, miscommunication within teams, lack of coordination across teams, diminishing returns, product-market fit saturation, and negative impact on team morale

In order to diagnose and fix these issues, we need to be able to track the issues back to the source. To do this, we can't think about "strategy" as some amorphous, all-encompassing concept. Instead, companies should think about the relationship between mission, strategy, roadmap, and goals as a stack of distinct concepts

Company Mission - The world your company sees and the change it wants to bring to that world.
Company Strategy - The logical plan you have to bring your company’s mission into being.
Product Strategy - The logical plan for how the product will drive its part of the company strategy.
Product Roadmap - The sequence of features that implement the Product Strategy.
Product Goals - The quarterly and day-to-day outcomes of the Product Roadmap that measure progress against the Product Strategy.

Tops Down = Definition, Bottoms Up = Evaluation
The Product Strategy Stack is a system we can use for both planning and execution:

Slack vs. Discord: A Case Study

The missions for Slack and Discord are entirely different. Fundamentally, Slack is for work and Discord is for play

The user experience for both products is surprisingly alike

A PM at Slack and a PM at Discord might be working towards the same product goal, but in service of entirely different company strategies. Therefore, it is critical for roadmaps and goals to be tethered to product and company strategy rather than defined in isolation

In certain cases, this may mean that PMs at Slack and Discord arrive at the same answer. For example, both products have the ability to react to a chat message with an emoji

The Product Strategy Stack helps us solve one of the biggest reasons for startup failure—ambitious goals that are untethered to a clear strategy

What Problems Does the Product Strategy Stack Solve?

There are four common traps teams fall into when defining product strategy.

Misconception #1: Goals = Strategy

Misconception #2: Achieving Goals = Achieving Strategy

it's much easier to evaluate whether or not a goal was achieved than to evaluate whether or not a strategy was achieved. Teams are thus incentivized to prioritize goals that are often short-term.

Misconception #3: Product Strategy = Company Strategy

A common mistake is for product leaders to assume that product strategy is the same as company strategy. In doing so, they under-appreciate the role that sales, marketing, support, and other functions play in company success

to be a be profitable business, Stitch Fix needed not just a great interface that was easy to use and delivered a great match, but also a great operations strategy that would bring operational costs down

Misconception #4: Goal → Roadmap

In the absence of any roadmap, teams are rudderless. This "goals first" approach incentivizes teams to do whatever it takes to achieve short-term goals, often at the expense of a focused feature set

Company Mission
The world your company sees and the change it wants to bring to that world. Company Mission is at the top of a Strategy Stack. The Company Mission defines the company's purpose.

Some companies define both a vision and a mission. In this case, "vision" is a description of the world your company sees, and "mission" is the role your company plays in that world. For simplicity, we can think about vision and mission as a single layer in the stack.

Company Strategy
The logical plan you have to bring your company’s mission into being.

strategy should be rigorously logical. It clearly defines the sequence of steps your company needs to take, and it should account for the company's position in the market, unique strengths, and the set of situational risks/assumptions that factor into the plan

Product Strategy The logical plan for how the product will drive its part of the company strategy

Product Strategy serves an important role in the stack—it is the connective tissue between the objectives of the company (its mission and its strategy) and the work of the product team (product roadmap and goals).

Product Roadmap

Proper sequencing is critical to success. As we discuss in the Product Strategy program, sequencing enables product teams to unlock compounding value by prioritizing the learning and product outcomes that will have a disproportionate downstream impact.

The Product Roadmap should come before the Product Goals

product teams operating without a roadmap (or tasked with developing a roadmap in response to goals) will be tempted to achieve goals by any means necessary—resulting in a product that is inconsistent, over-optimized, and caters to the short-term needs of the company.

Product Goals
The outcomes that measure strategic progress

A good Product Goal is objectively measurable. Most often, a goal is defined as an impact to a quantifiable metric—such as "increase first day return rate by 5%". However, this doesn't need to be the case. Sometimes, the best way to measure progress is to set goals for deliverables Usually bad target

If a team does not know how to move a metric, then they should not commit to moving that metric. Instead, they should commit to product work that increases their level of understanding

Getting Your Product Strategy Stack Right

What does a poor Product Strategy Stack feel like?

Difficulty prioritizing

Miscommunication within teams

Muddied UX

Lack of coordination across teams

Diminishing returns

Product-market fit saturation

Negative impact on morale

Great vs. Incomplete vs. Poor Product Strategy Stacks

Great stacks have clearly defined components which are stacked in order

Incomplete stacks usually have one or more components missing.

Poor stacks may have some components missing, but most importantly - the components exist in silos and lack connection with each other.

Clubhouse Case Study

Clubhouse has described itself in a way that helps us understand its Company Mission: Clubhouse was designed to be a space for authentic conversation and expression

Importantly, this statement makes no mention of "audio" as a defining trait of the company.

Company Strategy: Clubhouse is a new type of social network based on voice—where people around the world come together to talk, listen and learn from each other in real-time.

Product Strategy: When you open the app you can see “rooms” full of people talking—all open so you can hop in and out, exploring different conversations

Now, a product team can take this product strategy and define a clear roadmap

Clubhouse Product Goals

*Some goals could be:

Maintain an average speaker/attendee ratio of 1:10*

Stacks on Stacks