(2022-03-08) Set Non Goals And Build A Product Strategy Stack

Set “Non-Goals” and Build a Product Strategy Stack. Based on interview with Ravi Mehta.

DO YOU HAVE A PRODUCT STRATEGY PROBLEM?

He points to three sneaky anchors that might be dragging down your product strategy momentum

1. Goals ≠ strategy

2. Product strategy should not exclusively live in the product org.

3. Good strategy hygiene makes prioritization easier — not harder.

THE PRODUCT STRATEGY STACK: 5 STEPS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

The five components of what the duo termed the Product Strategy Stack (strategic context)

One of the things that the Product Strategy Stack is trying to solve is to take the emphasis away from the goals and put it more on what the team is trying to achieve.”

How to create stickier products with the Product Strategy Stack.

story from his own product career

Tripadvisor

Around 2016, as we were defining the product strategy map, one team was responsible for building out the trip planning functionality

We put together a 40-slide deck that included high-level wireframes of what the trip planning process should look like — not today, not in the next six months, but on a four-year time horizon,” he says.

“We had a lot of 1:1 conversations and found two really important insights. The first was that folks didn’t approach trip planning as a single-player activity. You’re often planning with a partner or a group

The second insight was that the trip planning tool needed to play well with others

Our Trip Planning tool needed to be open, where you could add links and notes

TIPS FOR CRAFTING YOUR OWN PRODUCT STRATEGY DOCUMENT

Mehta advises using a sprint approach. “You start at the top of the stack, with the mission, and then you define each piece in order, all the way down to the goals for the next couple quarters (over the course of a) couple of weeks

To capture the insights from the group, Mehta prefers to fire up a slide deck. “The product strategy documents that I’ve created at Tripadvisor and Tinder are typically anywhere from 25-40 slides, and most of those slides are wireframes that illustrate how the company can take the abstract, strategic ideas and think about how to render those ideas into an interface for the user,” he says. (I'm dubious about this. This feels like the wrong kind of roadmap.)

Here are a few tips on how to structure your own slide deck:

Start with the mission.

Bring in the customer

one slide on the target user and the key use cases to make sure that strategy is tied back to the customer's needs.” Oftentimes when crafting a strategy, the company focuses too much on itself and what it wants to achieve, and not enough on what’s best for the user.

Sketch it out. “I recommend having 10-20 wireframes because really good product strategy isn’t broad and vague. It’s big, conceptual and ambitious — but also specific and concrete.

Here’s an example: “One of the key considerations for mobile products is what are the 4-5 things that you’re going to have on your navigation bar — you can’t have any more than that, because there’s not enough physical real estate. So companies need to make strategic decisions around how to organize the product.

Track your progress. “The final piece is the goals for the next quarter. How are you going to measure progress against your product strategy?

Start planning your roadmap. “List out your next 100 days

Get specific about what you’re not going to do. (not-to-do list)

when the strategy document is not specific enough, everyone walks away with a different opinion of what the strategy is

we’ve chosen to do A, but also to explicitly reinforce that we’re not going to do B,

be sure to include slides that outline what Mehta calls non-goals

NOT A FAN OF OKRs? TRY NCTs FOR CLEARER GOAL-SETTING.

Mehta’s found a few common snags to using the framework.

Fuzzy objectives

Hyper-focus on metrics.

Aspirational thinking.

If 50 to 70% of the OKRs are completed, the quarter is considered successful. This makes OKRs probabilistic — there's a probability that certain things will get done at the end of the quarter — when what teams really want is a goal-setting process that's deterministic

Introducing NCTs: Narratives, Commitments, Tasks

Narrative: “The narrative is similar to the objective in an OKR, but teams are specifically recommended to make it longer.

Commitment: “Each narrative will have 3-5 objectively measurable commitments. The word commitment is used very deliberately here — you should plan on achieving 100% of those commitments (Outcome or output? Is outcome that controllable?)

Tasks: “What work needs to be done in order for the team to achieve its commitments and make progress on the narrative?

Here’s a sample NCT using the previous Tripadvisor example:

Narrative:

Commitments: Increase the number of unique savers from X to Y by the end of Q1. Increase saves per saver from W to Z by end of Q1.

Tasks: Launch new backend saves service. Launch saves funnel health metrics dashboard.

Mehta’s final piece of advice is to be patient.