MASTERING
PRODUCT STRATEGY
& PLANNING
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………..…. 1
2. Product Strategy ………………….………………………………..…… 4
3. Business Alignment …………………..…………………………..…… 6
4. Strategic Research .…….………………..………………………….… 11
5. Composing a Strategy ……….……………………………………… 22
6. Elements of Planning ……….…………………………………..…… 27
7. Prioritization & Alignment……………………………………..…… 36
8. Creating a Roadmap ……………..………………………………….. 40
9 . Conclusion …………………………….…………..………………….…. 51
We’re so glad you’ve downloaded this ebook! Let us quickly
introduce ourselves before jumping in.
Productfolio creates amazing Product Management software,
so your team can focus on creating amazing products. We’re
passionate about the craft of Product Management and have
learned from interviewing hundreds of Product professionals,
that every team is a little bit di erent, but most successful
teams share a core set of patterns and principles.
We hope these insights are helpful and love to hear from you if
you have feedback or questions about this content herein,
or our platform ([email protected]).
Happy Product’ing!
Neal
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1.
PRODUCT
STRATEGY
Strategy is both easy to understand and a complex, mysterious
art. Like a game of chess, it is a game, but to do it e ectively,
one must understand the contextual landscape, the capabilities
of the actors on the board, and with a mastery of that nuance,
navigate a path to success.
E ective product strategy is rooted in research, in order to
achieve a deep understanding of our customers, competitors,
and capabilities. By paying attention to the nuances in these
areas, we can identify needs or desires of our customers that
haven’t been met, weaknesses or blindness of our competitors,
and disruptive opportunities to innovate how the problem
space is addressed.
“Strategy is fundamentally about choice –
choosing what NOT to do, so you can
do a few things really really well”
Michael Porter
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There are essentially three steps to de ning a product strategy:
• Product charter you’re starting with (implicit or explicit)
• Strategic Research that you’ll do to develop a nuanced
understanding of your competitive landscape
• Product Strategy you’ll ultimately de ne based on and
detailed understanding of the charter and competitive
landscape.
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2.
BUSINESS
ALIGNMENT
BUSINESS ALIGNMENT
In large organizations, there are generally four levels of
strategy and planning to be aware of – Corporate strategy,
Business strategy, Functional and Action Plans.
In smaller companies this will likely be collapsed down to just
2-3 layers and the distinction of these di erent layers may not
be as clear, but it’s good to think in these terms and keep this
‘normalized’ model in mind as a starting point.
At the top of the pyramid is a corporate strategy that
determines what business to be in – this drives M&A activity,
corporate initiatives and the budget allocations for the strategic
business units of the corporation.
Each Business Unit then has a budget and a mission that
cascades down from Corporate that they’ll determine Business
strategy in response to. Missions and budget are then
cascaded down to the functional groups such as Marketing,
Engineering, and Product and they develop their own
strategies to support the business strategy, and so forth.
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The action plans that follow are the tactical plans that support
the cascade of aligned strategies that sit above.
Product Management is a function that works with the domain
of a product, to achieve the mission of the Business Unit. Thus,
a critical aspect of Product strategy is ensuring your plan for
the product is closely aligned with the strategy and intention of
your business sponsors.
As Marty Cagan has said, “The business strategy and business
portfolio planning provide a budget and a set of business
metrics. The product organization then lives within that budget
to pursue as aggressively as possible the best ways to hit
those business metrics.” This is where a clearly articulated
Product Charter can be helpful.
PRODUCT CHARTER
There is almost always an expectation from Business leaders
about what Product Management will produce and that it is
well-aligned with the goals and direction of the Business
Strategy but it’s not always stated explicitly.
When that happens, it is the responsibility of Product
leadership to extract this information from business leaders, to
ensure those expectations are declared and understood,
enabling Product to build a strategy on a solid foundation.
A Charter can be simple, stating the mission of the team, key
business goals, and guiding values that will act as guard rails.
3.
STRATEGIC RESEARCH
(DIVERGE: UNDERSTAND)
STRATEGIC RESEARCH (DIVERGE)
With a Product Charter in place, it is time to dive into market
research, to develop a deep understanding of the landscape
within which we’re operating. This can be a bit of a deep dive
in the beginning, but once you’re up and running, iterative
improvement to this research is something you’ll want to keep
up on, so you always have your pulse on the market, and are
able to see opportunities when they arise.
CUSTOMER
We should generally start our research with understanding the
customer. We’re on this journey to achieve our Business goals,
but we accomplish this, by addressing the needs and desires
of our customers.
In fact, this is what makes Product Management a strategic
function – it is our responsibility to understand the needs of the
Customer and how to perform in the external market, in order
to achieve Business goals.
To start this process, we need to understand who the
customers/prospects are. Every customer is a little bit di erent
but generally speaking, there are groups that people naturally
cluster into – so by understanding those key groups, and the
needs + desires shared by that group, we can develop a much
more nuanced sense of how to resonate with those users.
Customer Personas are a great tool for clarifying who those
customer groups are. There are probably 3-5 di erent
personas for every product that have overlapping needs which
bring them to our product.
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We might say for example that a working mom, a sales
professional, and a young person looking for a dating spot, all
have overlapping needs of a nearby restaurant, but if you
scratch below the surface, you’ll see the “why” for each of
them is every di erent – the working mom needs quick and
healthy food she can take home after work, the sales executive
needs a quiet spot for a sales meeting, and the young person
is looking for romantic ambiance.
Understanding these nuances can help to understand more
need or desire that can be served, creating more value for the
customer and thus increased product-market t. There are
several tools and frameworks listed below that can be useful
for stepping through this analysis and developing a detailed
understanding of your customers.
Useful Frameworks
• Customer Personas
• Design Thinking
• Jobs to be Done
• Journey Mapping
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COMPETITION
It is not enough to understand what a customer wants and
needs – we need to understand the unmet needs and desires.
This means we need to develop a good sense for who our
competitors are, the products they o er, the gaps in their
o ering, and what their future plans may be. With this
understanding, we’ll be able to determine a di erentiated value
proposition that stands out in the market.
The rst step is really knowing who our competitors are and
what they’re capable of. Get to know everything about them
such as where they’re based, what funding they’ve raised, how
many employees, and how long they’ve been around.
Also, spend some time with their products and going a little
gap analysis – this will give you a much better sense of who is
leading, lagging, and innovating in the market. Once you have
a sense for this, chart the data to make it easy to communicate
and refer back to – The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a great
framework for doing this.
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Useful Frameworks
• Gartner Magic Quadrant
• Generic Competitive Strategies
• Competitive Gap Analysis
• Landscape Diagrams (ex Lumascape, et al)
CAPABILITY
Finally, we need to look at recent technology and process
innovations that we might be able to bring to bear. In a
crowded market, having a better way of solving the problem
can help to provide disruption and di erentiation.
The Kano Model has become a popular way of describing the
di erence between Delight’ers and Must-Have features in a
product. What’s sometimes missed in this model however, is
the reverse line between the two, meaning that over time, a
delighter becomes a must-have, once it is commonplace.
“What makes a resource truly strategic
and a sustained advantage — is not
ubiquity but scarcity.”
Nicholas Carr
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To that end, technology is always improving and even non-
technical processes continue to evolve. Spend some time
understanding the market to nd out what is changing and
what the opportunities might be in your industry, to apply these
innovations to create additional value for customers – either
through new experiences, increased e ciency, or
consequently lower prices.
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Useful Frameworks
• Kano Model
• Product Lifecycle
• Anso Product-Market Matrix
• Innovation Curves
Finally, with these insights from our research about customers,
competitors, and available capabilities – it’s time to begin
formulating a product strategy. Product-Market t is what sits
at the nexus of these three things, and the culmination of all
your research.
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There are a number of frameworks that can be useful for
constructing a di erentiated position, once you’re clear on
these details. For example, Generic Competitive Strategies
(Porter) suggests there are really only three positions that one
can take:
• Cost Leadership - if early to market and able to grow quickly
• Di erentiated Product - for when there’s something truly
unique or disruptive hasn’t been realized yet
• Niche Audience - by addressing a the needs of a speci c
group/segment/persona.
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You can also try using the Value Creation Plane (Cabage) to
plot yourself and your competitors across a 2-dimensional
value plane and systematically identify new ways to approach
your solution that can di erentiate and might resonate with
your audience.
Spend some time exploring these frameworks and ideating
possible options, then sharing these with your Business
sponsors and customer research cohort, to get a sense which
options might be a good t.
Useful Frameworks
• Generic Competitive Strategies
• Value Creation vs Value Capture
• Value Creation Plane
• Product Vision De nition
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4.
COMPOSING A
STRATEGY
(CONVERGE: COMPOSE)
PUTTING IT TOGETHER (CONVERGE)
So far, we’ve covered the product charter, the 3 core aspects of
strategic product research, and the frameworks for
synthesizing together our insights into a cohesive product
strategy. In this last step, it’s time to create the Product Vision
statement and articulate the pillars of our product strategy that
are supported by vision.
PRODUCT VISION STATEMENT
The Product Vision is a Northstar for the team – it concisely
articulates the future-state of this product, 3-5 years out. The
goal is to keep this as short as possible (1-3 sentences) and
every word should count, so take the time to think this through
and re ect all of the hard work you’ve done in the research
leading up to this.
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A good format for a Product Vision is “A [what] that will [why]
for [who] by [how]”. The ‘What’ variable is your chance to
describe the tangible thing that you’ll be creating.
‘Why’ expresses the unmet customer need or desire. ‘Who’
indicates who we’re serving and ‘How’ describes the key
aspects of the ‘what’ that provide the di erentiated value.
“Vision without action is a day dream. Action
without vision is a nightmare.”
Japanese Proverb
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PRODUCT BRIEF (AKA ‘ONE PAGER’)
The Product brief (aka “one pager”) brings together the
product vision, a discussion about strategic context, and high-
level requirements into one document. Ideally this would also
include design mocks / visuals as well to demonstrate user
ows, when that applies.
What’s Included
• Summary (simple 2-3 sentence overview)
• Vision (the vision statement described above)
• Discussion (describe the “why”)
• High-level requirements (5-15 requirements)
• Design Mocks/ ows
What’s Not Included
This should not include any planning details however — it’s a
stateless description of what we want to build and why, but it
does now include details about goals, priorities, timeline,
resource allocation, etc.
Note - even thought we call this a “one pager” it rarely is. Its
not uncommon to reach 5-6 pages, but try to keep it concise.
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PRODUCT PLANNING
Now that we have a product strategy in place (a one-pager that
asserts the key hypothesis, evidence, goals, and requirements,
the next step is to gure out what to work on for the coming
time increments to ful ll that strategy and how to manage
progress and communication in the direction of our goals.
The aim here is to maximize the ROI of possible features and
tactics, toward the impact of our goal(s) and long-term vision.
In other words, what things can we create that will maximize
and expedite the desired outcomes? And then we need to
create a plan for when these activities will occur and plan to
inform resource allocations etc.
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5.
THE ELEMENTS
OF PLANNING
THE PLANNING HIERARCHY
To align our e orts and resources, it is helpful to think in terms
of hierarchical layers of planning that connect our vision to
every incremental task that a team works on during product
development.
For purposes of product planning, we assume the Product
Strategy is already complete and the Product Vision is
available as a starting point for our planning activities. We also
assume that the more tactical details of Requirements
De nition is a separate step in the process.
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For Product Planning, we’re speci cally interested in de ning
the Goals, Themes, and Projects that will be shown on our
roadmap. Just like the Product Vision was the output of our
product strategy, the roadmap is the output of our product
planning e orts.
GOALS
Goal setting is perhaps the most critical part of planning. It
ensures your longer-term vision is aligned with business goals,
and provides a focused outcome to prioritize team e orts
against.
You’ll generally have a cascade of goals that start with broad,
long range (2-5 years) goals at a business level, and those are
broken down into product-speci c goals in the functional
strategy. At the product level, you’re generally aiming to set
goals that follow SMART principles which can be achieved in
the next 6-12 months.
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There are three elements that should be part of your goal:
• Human Language Goal - what you want to achieve. (ex:
increase user engagement through personalization)
• Success Metric - How will you measure progress
• Metric Target - The number you wish to achieve and by
when? (ex: +5% in the next 6 months)
The most important part to get started with goals, is simply
articulating the Human Language Goal (HLG) that you hope to
a ect with your e orts – this part alone is of signi cant help for
driving alignment discussions.
The Success metric are secondary but still very helpful for
setting expectations in furtherance of alignment. They’re also
important for outcome-accountable teams, to demonstrate
success at the end of a roadmap timeframe.
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GOALS -VS- OBJECTIVES?
This is often a point of confusion – is there a di erence
between goals and objectives? Technically yes but in practice
most companies simply have a cascade of goals that become
more speci c and concreted, as you traverse the
Corporate > Business > Functional hierarchy. Some companies
refer to these as goals and others call them objectives
(particularly companies who practice OKRs).
Note - At Productfolio, we prefer to just call these Goals for
simplicity, but we support either terminology.
GOALS ANTI-PATTERN
Finally, a word of caution related to goals. It is important that
Product develop its own functional strategy and not simply
work against the business goals alone. Business strategy is
generally oriented toward value capture, whereas Product
strategy should be value creation oriented and in service of
customers.
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If you prioritize features directly against business goals, you’re
not going to create a product that most customers are
passionate about and are abdicating a key responsibility of
Product Management. So make sure you’re setting value-
creation oriented goals that align with the broader business
strategy.
PLANNING THEMES
Moving on from goals and outcomes, let’s talk a bit about the
actual product creation side now.
Similar to a composition, there may be a handful of broader
themes that the features we identify, will coalesce around, as
threads through the fabric of our roadmap. It can be helpful to
identify these themes in order to think about how much we
want to emphasize one theme over another, and balance our
allocation of resources across these themes.
In larger scaled Product Mgmt teams, we may have several
Scrum teams working on the same product, in which case
those themes become the basis of forming those teams. For
example, you might have a Scrum team with a Product Owner
working on features for checkout whereas another team is
responsible for signup.
Teams setup in this way are sometimes called “feature teams”
and Product Owners responsible for feature de nition for these
teams are said to own a feature, a “problem space” or a “focus
area”.
There might also be a temporary “initiative team” setup when
intensive support for an initiative is required for a period of
time. All of these terms are essentially referring to the same
thing however – thematic clustering of related features, that
are surfacing as likely candidates for our roadmap.
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ROADMAP CANDIDATES
Roadmap candidates (at Productfolio we just call these
“candidates”) are the units of work that are typically 1-3 months
in duration, similar to a “project” or an “Epic”.
In Product Development, these are usually features which
create a new ability of our product that is valuable to our
customers, but it can also be an e ort to re ne an existing
feature, optimize a conversion funnel, or to perform
infrastructural work that may not be visible to the customer.
These candidates are a re ection of the opportunities that are
identi ed during Opportunity Discovery, as incremental actions
we take to achieve our goals.
“Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.”
Winston Churchill
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PRIORITIZATION & ALIGNMENT
Assuming you’ve started collecting roadmap candidates, the
next step is to begin scoring them, to determine a stack-
ranking of candidates. The best way to do this is to line up
those projects on a matrix and start scoring each project for
how well they’ll impact the stated Planning Horizon.
Context dictates how distant of a horizon to plan to – typically it
will be something between 6-12 months, with a quarterly
refresh cadence. Most larger organizations nd themselves
locked to the annual cadence of their organizations operating
and budget planning cycles and thus they need to plan 12
months ahead.
Companies building physical products may have a more
sophisticated materials planning cycle and might have a
roadmap that looks 2-3 years into the future. In contrast, Agile/
Lean tech startups often advocate for not even having time-
based roadmaps, because they’re still actively discovering
market t and making radical pivots as learnings surface.
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6.
PRIORITIZATION
& ALIGNMENT
As a rule of thumb, try to plan as far out as you reasonably can
see a clear horizon – mature products are much easier to
predict and involve more complexity that bene ts from the
longer-term planning.
This will provide a clear view as to which projects will impact
the stated objectives most. We’re not done yet though – we
also need to consider the e ort/cost aspect, in order to get the
full picture of ROI (impact – e ort = value).
To achieve this, we can use a scoring rubric. There are several
popular rubrics such as RICE, ICE, or WSJF. You can also use
something simple like impact vs e ort that can help produce a
nice visual of the best opportunities.
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If you have multiple goals and especially if you want to weight
the importance of those goals, a rubric such as Weighted
Impact can be another great way to go.
Note - Productfolio supports all of these options, it's just a
question of what best suites your needs. The most important
part is to use a rubric to objectify the process and use it to
align expectations with the team and stakeholders.
SCORING ANTI-PATTERN
It's important to keep in mind that feature scoring is imperfect
and is as much an art as a science, and not fall into the trap of
trying to do detailed NPV type estimates for every feature.
NPV absolutely has its place in the context of portfolio funding
decisions, but would be overkill at the feature/project level. It is
important to right-size the tool for the job.
“E ciency is doing things right; e ectiveness
is doing the right things.”
Peter Drucker
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7.
CREATING A
ROADMAP
CREATING A ROADMAP
It is time to begin working on our roadmap! At this point, we
should have a prioritized list of projects and we need to start
guring out how to layer those onto our roadmap. The process
of roadmapping thus, is primarily about organizing and
orchestrating projects, so they align with our themes,
availability of resources, and any market or internal events that
we need to line up to.
We’ll generally try to plan high-priority projects rst, but it’s
possible there are superseding considerations that may cause
us to prioritize something else ahead of it. For example, we
may need to complete a project already in ight, so that a
shared resource can roll o of one team and go support
another team.
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Or, we may need to support a business initiative with an
integration of a new capability in Q1, and since that has a hard-
date everyone is aligned to, we’ll put that rst and then move
on to the priority project.
PLANNING HORIZON
Context dictates how distant of a horizon to plan to – typically it
will be something between 6-12 months, with a quarterly
refresh cadence. Most larger organizations nd themselves
locked to the annual cadence of their organizations operating
and budget planning cycles and thus they need to plan 12
months ahead.
Companies building physical products may have a more
sophisticated materials planning cycle and might have a
roadmap that looks 2-3 years into the future. In contrast, Agile/
Lean tech startups often advocate for not even having time-
based roadmaps, because they’re still actively discovering
market t and making radical pivots as learnings surface.
As a rule of thumb, try to plan as far out as you reasonably can
see a clear horizon – mature products are much easier to
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predict and involve more complexity that bene ts from the
longer-term planning. Startups in active market- t discovery
might bene t from simply using a Lean Plan instead (Now, Next,
Later).
TYPES OF ROADMAP
There are a number of di erent avors of roadmapping but
mostly they break down into three types: Timeline, Kanban,
and Strategic Roadmaps. Let’s review each one and when it is
used:
TYPE 1: TIMELINE ROADMAP
The original and by far still the most common, is something
akin to a traditional project management Gantt chart, except
that it communicates a 6-12 month plan in broad strokes –
discover it communicates when projects will occur, rather than
project tasks.
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It is called a “roadmap” because it resembles lanes on a road
with cars progressing over a de ned period of time. And if you
wanted to carry the metaphor one step further, a roadmap
demonstrates the steps we’ll take on the path to achieving our
vision.
Timelines though have their pros and cons, like any other tool.
Product teams often lament how the structure leaves little room
for pivots due to discovery, but the upside is that a mature
organization that has many dependencies (development,
marketing, sales, customer support), can all see what’s
happening and align their own e orts accordingly. For mature
products in scaled organizations, this is a very e ective tool
overall.
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TYPE 2: KANBAN ROADMAP
The Kanban roadmap, also known as a Theme-based roadmap
or Outcome-based roadmap, lists items that the team will work
on, but avoids a precise timeline in order to leave room for the
team to do discovery and adapt as learnings come in. Those
items are typically either broad themes or outcomes rather
than de ned projects with expected output for this reason.
This is most important for early stage initiatives and startups,
where there is still signi cant discovery and product-market t
work that needs to be done.
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TYPE 3: STRATEGIC ROADMAP
This is perhaps the least common of the roadmaps overall, but
is popular within big tech companies that empowers the teams
to de ne their plans in response to goals that come in from
leadership. Plans within these teams are a lot more about
demonstrating goal alignment than product development.
The Strategic roadmap is not visual in nature - it does not use a
Gantt or Kanban chart to explain when we’re doing things.
Rather, it de nes a summary of current thinking about the
strategy, goals, and a list of projects the team is thinking about
delivering for a period of time.
What’s Included
• Vision
• Goals (metric, ship, learn, etc)
• Projects
This is the key point of alignment between upper layers of the
organization, and the de nition of projects that should align
back to these goals.
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SOCIALIZING THE PLAN
Whichever plan format you choose, remember that the point of
it is to drive understanding and alignment – for your team and
stakeholders.
Once the plan is created, it needs to be socialized with
business sponsors, stakeholders and key customers, to eld
any feedback or ideas that might come out. This is a process
sometimes referred to as the “Product Roadshow”, since it is
making multiple presentations of the roadmap to di erent
groups.
Product can be inherently political since it sometimes means
having to make choices to prioritize one e ort over another
with your limited resources. For this reason, it’s good to think
defensively about how you approach it.
Start with those closest to you and share the plan with them –
your partners and the development team. Do they have any
concerns, ideas, or feedback?
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Once you’re feeling good here, you can proceed to
stakeholder partners to do the same, and once that’s feeling
good, you’re ready to share with your executive leaders and
perhaps any key customers after that.
Product planning is the connective tissue between the product
strategy and Product Development – It is the orchestration
layer that translates a high-level product vision into prioritized
projects for the development teams to work on, and ensures
alignment with organizational strategies.
By taking a top-down approach to identifying appropriate
goals, themes, and candidates, we can ensure resources are
optimally aligned to realizing our strategy. Techniques such as
impact-based prioritization and inside-out roadshows not only
keep us honest about the validity and alignment of our
planning but also defensively mitigate risks of a misaligned
plan.
“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is
coordinating the talents of those who work for
us and pointing them toward a certain goal.”
Walt Disney
CONCLUSION
Getting to the heart of the matter, product strategy is about
guring out the product that will resonate with customers
(product market t). And product planning is about
orchestrating the e orts of the team to achieve the vision for
this product with PMF, that is also aligned to the near-term
goals and expectations of your business. What remains are a
series of frameworks and principles for how to do this
e ectively.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
Whether you’re a new Product Manager learning the role or a
team leader, seeking to standardize planning for your team,
Product Management software can streamline the process of
planning and align your e orts with best practices, so your
team can focus more time on building great products.
Check out how Productfolio can enable your team and elevate
the craft of Product in your organization.
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We create amazing Product Management software so
your team can focus on creating amazing products.
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