Review

Read once. Keep on your desk forever. Strategize is a must read for new Product Managers. It covers how to form and validate a product strategy - and how to translate that strategy into a roadmap. This isn't a single idea book. It's packed full of actionable insights and structured in a way that allows for 'just in time learning'. It's easy to follow and doesn't rely on long examples to make a point. Two things that stand out…

• The book brings clarity to a messy area of product. It defines three levels of product strategy: vision, strategy and tactics - and explains how they map to product artefacts. It doesn't shy away from the things that make strategy difficult (like the relationship between company strategy and product strategy).
• It's hard to select the right roadmap for the right job. Strategize helps you navigate that choice. Should you align to goals or features? How much detail should you show? What if your environment is volatile? What if you are part of a portfolio?

Even the most experienced PMs get stuck in execution and delivery mode from time to time. This book is a welcome reminder of your strategic responsibilities.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• As a Product Manager you need to find time to elevate yourself from the day to day running of the product team so you can define and articulate a strategy. Else you’re in danger of perfectly executing the wrong strategy

Strategy Foundations

• Effective visions are big, shared, inspiring and concise
• Different types of innovation (core, adjacent or disruptive) have different levels of risks, require different mindsets and technologies.
• The product cycle should inform you product strategy (development, introduction, growth, maturity, decline)
• A product vision board can help communicate your vision

Vision

The overarching goal for creating the product

Target Group	Needs	Product	Business Goals
Competitors	Revenue Sources	Cost Factors	Channels

• A Product Scorecard

Business Goals

The business benefits the product should create - prioritised and measurable

Financial Indicators	Customer Indicators
Product and Process	People Indicators (team, stakeholders etc)

• Without KPIs you're just guessing if you product is working. BUT don't measure everything that can be measured
• Avoid vanity metrics (views / shares / downloads). Daily active usage, or referral rates would be better
• Take a balanced view to metrics → Financial indicators, customer indicators and team happiness indicators
• Choose a small number of metrics that truly help you understand how your product performs. Think about leading vs lagging metrics
• Review your strategy regularly as things change (performance, competition, trends, your company)

Strategy Development

• Segmenting the market, by dividing potential customers into distinct groups. You can segment by customer properties or customer benefits. If on stable product use customer, otherwise use benefit first. Focus on one segment and optimise for them, evaluate segments using… your strength, size, growth potential, competition, barriers to entry etc.
• Create Personas that represent customers. Base them on real interviews not guesses. Distinguish between buyer and user personas if they’re not the same.
• Identify the problem you solve (pains + gains) . Painkiller or Vitamin, it has to solve a real problem
• Clearly state the value your product creates. Describe what success looks like for the customers and the users. Design the UX and marketing to match that
• Make your product stand out - You need to make it clear why to choose your product - You need to know who your competitors are, and how you score against them, what they compete on

Strategy Validation

• Strategy validation introduction
• Iteratively test and correct the strategy. Front load the big risks and experiments.
• Involve the right people - get buy-in and create shared ownership
• Use data to make decisions. Build a culture of data validation - feedback, data and evidence help make decisions. Reduces the HIppo effect (highest paid person in the room)
• Create a fail-safe environment to encourage experiments
• Get out of the building Visit target customers to understand their needs (in the environment where your product will be used)
• Identifying the biggest risk. Work on one risk at a time = focus, collaboration, data collection and analysis. Ask how will you be able to tell that you've resolved the risk?
• Risk areas: market, needs, features, technologies, business goals
• Choose the right validation techniques. Qualitative = why people act the way they act. Quantitative = how larger groups act. Separate analysis from data collection
• Directly observe customers
• Carry out problem interviews
• Create MVP - to learn how people use your product
• Build spikes to assess technical feasibility
• If the strategy is wrong: Pivot, preserve or stop

Roadmap Foundations

• Having a shared vision and a valid strategy is necessary but not sufficient
• A product roadmap communicates how a product is likely to evolve by mapping its major releases onto a timeline. This helps you prioritise decisions and makes the product backlog simpler. You can have continuous deployments, but a roadmap stops you getting lost in small changes and helps show direction
• Roadmap: strategic, high-level, how your product is likely to develop
• Backlog: Tactical, detailed
• Keep the tools separate, and leverage their respective strengths
• Goal based: Focus on goals or objectives (acquire customers, increase engagement). Features still exist but as second class citizens, they are derived from goals and used sparingly
‣
A goal orientated roadmap has benefits:
• Feature Based: Built on product features (search, reporting) mapped to a timeline. A cost benefit analysis is often done to score features.
• Young products in uncertain environments benefit from: high-level roadmaps that focus on product goals and benefits.
• More mature products lend themselves to: more detailed roadmaps, that cover a longer time period , require reviewing less frequently
• The other big consideration is the stability of the market. If its volatile (competitors, customers, technologies), you'll have to iterate faster on the product to maintain market share, uncertainty and change will creep back into the roadmap
• Be clear who it’s for Product Manager, Sponsor, Development team, Marketing and Sales, portfolio managers, customers and users
• Involve your stakeholders in roadmap creation
• Avoid these roadmap mistakes:
• No Guarantee: its a high level plan not a guarantee
• No Speculations: don't create a roadmap without a validated strategy
• No Epics and user stories: creates too much clutter, hides the strategy we want to reveal

Roadmap Development

• Make your roadmap Specific, Measurable, Agreed, Realistic, Time-Bound
• Key challenge with a roadmap is change and uncertainty. Your options: do without, use a feature based one, use a goal based one (stays more stable). An unreliable feature based roadmap defeats its purpose. Making frequent changes can cause stakeholders to lose trust.
• Capture your Roadmap with the Go Template. Goals are more important than features

Time Frame	X	X	X
Release Name	X	X	X
Reason / Goal	X	X	X
Features that help	X	X	X
Metrics of success	X	X	X

• Releases shouldn’t be a random collection of stuff, but an actionable plan to achieve the strategy. Releases should be stepping stones toward your vision. Existing products should use KPIs to drive the roadmap. Look for areas of low performance and go after them
• Don't make the features on your roadmap too detailed - you won't see the big picture. A feature is a core capability (a group of Epics).
• Caution: beware feature soup. Ensure every feature you add moves the product in the right direction. Don't add too many to your roadmap, don't add too many to your product. Avoid your product looking like your org chart
• In the event that you can't deliver everything planned in a release. Identify what has the biggest impact, protect that if possible.
• Releasing late vs partially meeting goal vs not delivering features would have the worst impact on the product performance

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Preface:

Part 1: Product Strategy

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right Peter Drucker.

Strategy Foundations

Strategy Development:

"Creating a winning product and sustaining success is not a matter of luck, but strategic decisions."

Strategy Validation:

Part 2: Product Roadmap

Product roadmaps translate strategic decisions into actionable plans.

They help stakeholders understand how the product is likely to grow and how this will affect their work.

Roadmap Foundations

Roadmap Development