• First determine the key factors (price, features, design)
• Evaluate to what degree your competitors fulfil them
• Compare against how well you fulfil them
• Use the market standard comparisons
• Product reviews can help you discover the right factors
• IF the two lines are too close together you are not differentiated enough
• Then its hard to get users to choose you
• The area where your product does not face any competition is called a blue ocean (or blue market)
• It helps you challenge your competitors but also move into areas where they do not exist

• The degree to which a feature is provided. (Fully implemented / not implemented)
• The degree to which a customer is satisfied. (Dissatisfied / Delighted)
• Basics, performers and delighters.
• Basics: required features, can't sell a product without them
• Performance: not sufficient to differentiate your product
• Delighters: delight or excite customers.

• Theres a trap "Our product must provide all the competitors features and more"

The Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid:

As a product grows, it tends to bloat (use cases, customers, features)

• Complex product
• Vague value proposition
• Poor user experience
• High development cost

Spillting products:

• Simplifies the offering
• helps you avoid the above and lay the foundations for growth
• Helps you better serve the existing audience

Drawbacks to spitting products:

• Could offer too many specialised products, giving customers too much choice... leaving them confused and frustrated
• New products cannibalise old ones
• Product families require portfolio management
• If you create a new product hare as much as you can Standards for assets, components or other engineering building blocks

• A new bigger offering
• Benefits:
• Individual ones are too small or not compelling enough
• Customers spend more if they get a bundle discount
• Edge over the competition
• Drawbacks:
• Can put people off if bundles are too big
• Don't restrict the buying choices too much
• Don't forget to harmonize the UX across the products

• Products don't exist in isolation - shared features, components, offering
• Helps coordinate the development and launch of products, identify and manage dependencies
• Use a Go portfolio roadmap:
• You can even extent this format to multiple portfolios
• You need solid product roadmapping before you can empty portfolio roadmaps

Finding space to elevate yourself from the day to day running of the product (stories, design, architecture and tech decision)....

So you can make the right strategic decisions which will influence its success. You don't want to perfectly execute the wrong strategy, just because you didn't get your head up.

Developing a successful product strategy has 2 steps:

• finding the right overall strategy
• deciding how best to implement it

Product Strategy

How the long term goal is attained

• Value proposition
• Market
• Features
• Goals

Product Roadmap

How the strategy is implemented

• Releases
• Dates
• Goals
• Features

Vision = the ultimate reason for creating the product. Why the product should exist. Guides strategy.

Strategy = how the vision will be realized.

Roadmap = how the strategy will be implemented

Part 1: Product Strategy

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

Strategy Foundations:

A product strategy is a high level plan that helps you realize your vision. It explains:

The product strategy isn't fixed and should be updated over time.

The strategy is a plan that describes how you intend to realize your vision. It makes sense to start with your vision, because that's the reason for creating your product. The vision describes the positive change you want to bring about.

Visions are important because to be fully committed we need to believe in what we're doing. Enthusiasm helps inspire people.

Effective visions are:

• Big (increases chance of buy-in, allows you to change the strategy)
• Shared (motivate and unites people)
• Inspiring (resonates with those working on it, motivation and guidance)
• Concise (easy to communicate and understand, consider using a slogan)

Without a strategy, how can you define the right details / tactics to propel you forward?

To get support from leadership, you must let the business strategy direct the product strategy

The product vision should be in line with the overall company vision, and the product strategy should help implement the business strategy.

Products create value, by innovating, by offering something new.

3 types of innovation:

Product lifecycle:

A product is born or launched; it then develops, grows, and matures. At some point it declines, and eventually the product dies and is taken off the market.

The life cycle model is not a predictive tool, but a model that helps you reflect on how your product is doing so you can make the right strategic decisions.

To use the model, you have to define the business benefits your product delivers and then track them over time. E.g: revenue or active users.

How lifecycle might influence strategy:

Development:

• Develop a valid strategy: a strategy that results in a product that is beneficial, feasible, and economically viable

Introduction

• Adapt and improve your product to achieve product-market fit (PMF)
• Incremental changes: improve the customer experience, adding new features, and refactoring the architecture.
• Or pivot if necessary
• Try to achieve break-even and ensure the model is scalable.

Growth:

• Sustain the growth by penetrating the market and fending off competitors
• Keep your product attractive, and refine it.
• Manage the growth by unbundling your product or by creating variants
• Ensure that your product is profitable (if it is meant to generate revenue)

Maturity:

• As growth stagnates, extend the life cycle and revive growth by:
• new markets, bundling
• defend market share and focus on profitability

Decline:

• Reduce cost to keep the product profitable for as long as possible, then start phasing it out

Capture Your Strategy with the Product Vision Board

The best strategy is useless if you can't communicate it effectively. The vision board is designed to describe, communicate, test, correct, and refine the product strategy.

Note, you could use a Business Model Canvas instead. Or Just extend the Vision Board to include competitors, revenue streams, costs and channels. As below

Choose the right KPIs for your product:

• KPIs are metrics that measure your products performance
• Help you understand if you're meeting the business goals
• Without KPIs you're just guessing if you product is working

Making the business goals measurable:

• Business goals must be measurable
• The challenge is to establish a goal thats realistic (hard for early stage products)
• If its hard to set a target, consider using ratios or ranges:
• Increase the companies revenue by 5-10%

Choosing relevant indicators:

• Avoid vanity metrics (views / shares / downloads)
• Daily active usage, or referral rates would be better
• Don't measure everything that can be measured
• Use the business goals to choose a small number of metrics that truly help you understand how your product performs
• Some metrics are sensitive to the product lifecycle
• Profit before growth phase.
• Adoption and referrals in the decline phase (not going to be much use)

Lagging and leading indicators:

• Lagging indicators, such as revenue, profit, and cost, are backward-focused and tell you about the outcome of past actions
• Leading indicators, in contrast, help you understand how likely it is that your product will meet a goal in the future

Take a balanced view to metrics

• Financial indicators, customer indicators and team happiness indicators

Bring it all together in a product scorecard:

As well as product KPIs you could introduce operational metrics, that show how well you're doing at shipping stuff

• Your strategy needs to be supported by your stakeholders, you need to secure support and buy-in and make it a shared strategy
• You need to identify, engage, collaborate with and get their approval.

• Be aware that collaboration requires leadership. As the person in charge of the product, you should be open and collaborative but decisive at the same time.Have the courage to make a decision if no agreement can be achieved. Great products are not built on weak compromises
• Collaborative Strategy Workshop:
• Invite the players, including members of the development team, to the workshop and consider involving selected subjects, such as product managers of related products. Encourage the workshop attendees to actively contribute to the strategy. Use a tool like the Product Vision Board discussed earlier to structure the conversation and to capture and visualize your ideas. Be aware that the workshop is the first step toward a valid product strategy. The objective is not to create a definitive and correct plan of action, but to establish a shared initial strategy.

As your product develops and grows, and as the market and the technologies evolve, the product strategy has to change, too. You should therefore regularly review and adjust it.

KPIs tell you about performance, keep an eye on the competition to stay differentiated, trends can uncover opportunities for improvement and growth, and finally, keep an eye on the company strategy to make sure you're aligned.

• Dividing potential customers into distinct groups
• Helps you focus on value proposition and user experience
• Segments should be clear-cut with no overlap
• You should be able to tell who belongs to to a segment and who doesn't
• Each segment homogenous and the people within it should respond to your product in the same way
• Segmentation can help you derive variants from an existing product

Segmenting by customer properties and benefits:

• You have 2 choices - Customer properties, or customer benefits
• If on stable product use customer, otherwise use benefit first
• The advantage of the benefit segmentation is that it will capture all of your customers, you won't overlook people who are likely to take advantage of the product
• Don't make these mistakes:
• A) Blindly follow predefined segments
• B) Don't discard an idea because it doesn't fit a segment (you may create a new market)

Customer Properties:

• Demographics
• Psychographics (lifestyle)
• behavioural (usage, brand loyalty)
• Geographic
• Industries or verticals (automotive, education)
• Company size (small, medium, enterprise)

Benefits provided:

• Use your product for x
• Use your product for y

Once you have segments:

• Ideally you focus on one segment and optimise for them.
• Select the most attractive one:

• How do you define attractiveness:
• Strength of the segment need
• Size of the segment
• Growth potential of the segment
• Competitors
• Barriers to entry
• How do you define business strength? (your ability to serve)
• Skills?
• Knowledge?
• Capabilities? (sales channels, marketing)
• Can you acquire these?
• How hard to acquire customers?
• Markets that don't exist can't be analyzed - therefore qualitatively evaluate the segments.
• Perform a quick assessment, hours not weeks and test if you are addressing the right people as part of your strategy analysis
• If you've picked the wrong target group, then select and test the next segment

• Fictional characters that usually have:
• Name, picture, characteristics, behaviours, attitudes and a goal
• The goal is the benefit the persona wants to achieve, or the problem to be solved
• Different personas can have different goals
• Understanding goals and problems helps you focus on the value you provide (and users use your product)
• Persona tips:
• Base them on real interviews not guesses
• Describe them according to your market insights not your assumptions
• Distinguish between customer and user personas, as their goals and characteristics may differ
• In B2B the user of an X-ray machine is not the buyer of the X-Ray machine
• Once you have a list of personas - select your primary persona (who you're really developing the product for)
• creates focus and facilitates decision making
• If you have too many products, you may need to unbundle your product or introduce variants
• Visualize your personas
• Put them on the office wall

• I like to re-use the persona names in user stories
• Don't list everything in the details section, be selective

• To create a successful product - you need to understand why people want to use it
• What problem it solves. Which pain or discomfort it removes. Which benefit or gain it provides.
• Finding a problem that people what to have solved, or a benefit that people would no longer want to miss once they experience it, is the most important step to achieving product success.
• Some products are vitamins: They don't solve a pain or an urgent need. They provide a nice to have benefit.
• Products that solve pain points are called painkillers
• Painkiller or Vitamin, it has to solve a real problem

• Once you know it, state is as clearly as you can
• Describe what success looks like for the customers and the users
• Then you can design the UX and marketing to match that
• If you have multiple pain points then determine the primary one
• You may have to trade off customer needs to select the primary one

• Few products have no competition
• You need to 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

• First determine the key factors (price, features, design)
• Evaluate to what degree your competitors fulfil them
• Compare against how well you fulfil them
• Use the market standard comparisons
• Product reviews can help you discover the right factors
• IF the two lines are too close together you are not differentiated enough
• Then its hard to get users to choose you
• The area where your product does not face any competition is called a blue ocean (or blue market)
• It helps you challenge your competitors but also move into areas where they do not exist

• The degree to which a feature is provided. (Fully implemented / not implemented)
• The degree to which a customer is satisfied. (Dissatisfied / Delighted)
• Basics, performers and delighters.
• Basics: required features, can't sell a product without them
• Performance: not sufficient to differentiate your product
• Delighters: delight or excite customers.

• Theres a trap "Our product must provide all the competitors features and more"
• Theres a lot wrong with this:
• Comlex product
• Costly to develop
• Vague value proposition
• Poor user experience
• Expensive to maintain
• Not to blindly add features, but rather to explore which ones you can remove, thereby simplifying and decluttering your product

The Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid:

Can be combined with the strategy canvas:

• Tempting to think you have to replace all of the features
• Review analytics and users to see if this needs to be the case

• First, solve a real problem and do it well
• Second, focus on experience and craft
• Know how, when, where and why your users use your product
• Get the overall user experience right then remove any barriers that make it difficult to use the product

• Two tactics that can help you increase the benefits your product provides by launching a new, specialized version.
• Creating a product variant establishes a product line or product family
• Unbundling your product means promoting a feature or feature set to a new product
• Facebook messenger for example is a promotion of the messaging feature on facebook
• Benefits:
• Grow the product
• Serve new segments
• Generate more businesses benefits
• Increase the products competitiveness

As a product grows, it tends to bloat (use cases, customers, features)

• Complex product
• Vague value proposition
• Poor user experience
• High development cost

Spillting products:

• Simplifies the offering
• helps you avoid the above and lay the foundations for growth
• Helps you better serve the existing audience

Drawbacks to spitting products:

• Could offer too many specialized products, giving customers too much choice... leaving them confused and frustrated
• New products cannibalize old ones
• Product families require portfolio management

‣

Shared assets and platforms:

• If you create new products, share as much as you can
• Standards for assets, components or other engineering building blocks
• Keeps user experience the same, reduces the development effort required

Shared stuff can become a platform that is part of all products:

• A new bigger offering
• Benefits:
• Individual ones are too small or not compelling enough
• Customers spend more if they get a bundle discount
• Edge over the competition
• Drawbacks:
• Can put people off if bundles are too big
• Don't restrict the buying choices too much
• Don't forget to harmonize the UX across the products

• Strong brand that clearly communicates what your product stands for and that resonates with customers
• The value of the brand is to capture customer loyalty and preference
• To build a strong brand, either go with the company or build your own
• If you WANT to differentiate create a new brand (Toyota - Lexus)
• If you want to take your product to a new market or extend the lifecycle consider a reposition
• Look and feel refresh

• Making big changes is likely to contain risks
• To maximise chance of success, systematically identify and address key risks before you fully implement the new strategy

• Use the lean startup iterate and test approach
• Front load the big risks, do experiments and feed the outcomes into roadmap / strategy reviews
• Core innovations are less risky than adjacent innovations which are less risky than disruptive ones

• Getting the strategy right is a team sport
• You will benefit from the support of stakeholders
• Use the team to help validate major risks
• Creates shared ownership and buy-in, leverages the creativity of the larger group, results in better decisions,
• Collaboration requires leadership though

• Build a culture of data validation - feedback, data and evidence help make decisions
• Reduces the HIppo effect (highest paid person in the room)

• We should be careful with the core
• We should expect to fail when trying something new - this means we need to get comfortable with learning and experimentation
• Your strategy will be, at least partially incorrect
• Without negative feedback you won't be learning much
• Create a fail-safe environment to encourage experiments
• Incubators or 20% time can help

• Visit target customers to understand their needs (in the environment where your product will be used)
• You need to do a mixture of analysis and observation
• Recruit a test group

• What statements make you uncertain?
• What things could have a negative impact on the product?
• A successful product needs to address the right market, the right needs, have the right features, use the right technologies, and deliver the right business goals.
• Work on one risk at a time = focus, collaboration, data collection and analysis
• You can use the red dot game, to highlight the big risks
• How will you be able to tell that you've resolved the risk?
• Risks and sample questions

• Choose the right technique and the right test group
• Qualitative = why people act the way they act
• Quantitative = how larger groups act
• Separate analysis from data collection

• If the strategy is wrong:
• You can stick with the vision and change the strategy (Pivot)
• You can change the vision (stop)
• If the strategy is sound you can carry on or (preserve)
• Pivoting is attractive only if you pivot earl, when switching cost is low

• Timebox the work
• Use a kanban board
• Regular review meeitngs

• Having a shared vision and a valid strategy is necessary but not sufficient
• You need to describe now the strategy will be executed
• Its an actionable plan that gets everyone aligned
• A product roadmap communicates how a product is likely to evolve by mapping its major releases onto a timeline
• A release is a product version that creates value for customers or users, by enhancing the UX or providing new functionality
• This helps you prioritize decisions and makes the product backlog simpler
• It can become the primary tool for expressing strategic decisions
• A roadmap is still too detailed to offer a clear longer-term outlook
• You can have continuous deployments, but a roadmap stops you getting lost in small changes and helps show direction

• 2 basic types:
• 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
• Feature Based:
• Built on product features (search, reporting) mapped to a timeline
• A cost benefit analysis is often done to score features

• You can vary the roadmap to the audience (internal vs external)
• Align stakeholders - show how the product is likely to grow
• External ones are used as sales tools and to signal commitment to the product
• Roadmaps often have tables that show release dates, time frames, goals, and the features. But you could make them more visual (like a story board or a comic strip)
• Start building on a spreadsheet so you can play with the format!
• The biggest mistake you can make is to pick a format or tool that does not work for your roadmap

• Choose the technique based on the uncertainty thats present
• Young products in uncertain environments benefit from:
• high-level roadmaps that focus on product goals and benefits
• Such as increasing engagement or retaining customers
• that don't look too far ahead
• are frequently reviewed
• 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

• Your roadmap should facilitate collaboration
• Create a shared understanding of how your product is likely to grow
• Helps your stakeholders plan accordingly

• Be clear on stakeholder expectations:
• Product Manager:
• Communicate how the strategy is implemented
• Communicate how the product is likely to grow
• Obtain management approval, acquire budget, set & manage expectations
• Track the success of the individual releases to proactively manage the product
• Management sponsor:
• Alignment to the company strategy
• Track the performance, understand if its delivering
• Agree on budget
• Development team:
• Understand whats ahead
• Influence the roadmap (also for tech changes needed)
• Make sure the roadmap is feasible and the team can design and build the product
• Marketing and sales
• Marketing campaigns and materials
• Train sales staff
• Influence the roadmap so their needs are taken into account
• Signal to customers future commitments
• Product and portfolio management:
• Anticipate and manage dependencies
• Coordinate releases across different products
• Customers and users:
• Influence the product
• Prepare for new releases and make sure ready to make the most of new features

• A great way to achieve alignment is involve them in a workshop
• They can hear ideas and requests and stops you brokering, they can hear others state their case
• Start the workshop by reviewing the product strategy (get alignment on this first)
• 2-4 hours time
• Goal is to create a roadmap with measurable goals, dates, key features and metrics. Shared and actionable.
• Roadmapping means making tough decisions.
• This will involve some negotiation and compromise, not everyone will be happy with the end roadmap
• Don't say yes to every request. This will turn your roadmap into feature soup.
• Use the strategy to make the right decisions
• Get somebody else to establish the ground rules and facilitate the workshop

• Roadmap: strategic, high-level, how your product is likely to develop
• Backlog: Tactical, detailed,
• Includes epics, stories, nonfunctional requirements, design sketches, other artifacts that describe what the product should do and look like
• Product roadmaps shouldn't contain too much detail
• Product backlogs shouldn't look too far into the future
• Keep the tools separate, and leverage their respective strengths
• Employ the roadmap to describe your products overall journey and the backlog to capture the details
• Derive the backlog from the roadmap. Particularly when your market is still young or the market is dynamic
• Backlogs should be concise, so they're easier to update and change by using the feedback and data generated as you expose product increments to the customers
• The backlog can influence the roadmap. Feedback from customers will feedback.

• 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

• SMART ensures the roadmap is actionable
• Specific:
• If everyone involved understand what the releases are about and why they're worthwhile
• Only add as much detail as you can realistically anticipate while still ensuring that the roadmap contents are clear
• Measurable:
• If you can determine that the release has achieved its goal
• Delivery of benefits
• Metrics
• Agreed:
• The stakeholders and the team buy into it
• Realistic
• its a feasible plan that guides the work of the team
• Time bound
• Dates or timeframes are shown
• The further into the future use ranges
• Maybe not required for an external roadmap

• Key challenge with a roadmap is change and uncertainty
• UX, features, tech and market are changing. All 4 are in flux
• You have 3 choices:
1. Do without a roadmap
2. Use a feature based (likely to change sticker)
3. Use a goal based (stays more stable)
• An unreliable feature based roadmap defeats its purpose
• Making frequent changes can cause stakeholders to lose trust and de-prioritize your product
• Goal orientated roadmaps are a helpful alternative.
• A goal orientated roadmap has benefits:
• Shifts conversation from features to problems
• These in turn are less prone to change and more reliable than a feature based one
• Shared goals facilitate collaboration: focus on the benefits not the features
• Goals can make it easier to market and sell your product (as they describe product benefits)

• Goals are more important than features
• Date, release name, goal/reason, features, and metrics

• Strive for a plan that tells a realistic and coherent story about the likely growth of your product
• It should not be a random collection of stuff, but an actionable plan to achieve the strategy
• Releases should be stepping stones toward your vision
• They should help you execute the product strategy and move the product forward
• Existing products should use KPIs to drive the roadmap
• Look for areas of low performance and go after them

• Showing prelaunch releases can be helpful if you require more than 6 months to ship a minimal first product
• Structure long development efforts in quarters and have quarterly goals on your roadmap.
• Have releases as a minimum cadence, not a maximum one

• 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)

• Goal orientated: Features exist to meet a goal and generate a benefit. State the goal and then derive the features from the goals.
• Don't use more than 5 features per goal, avoid listing features at all when planning accuracy is low.
• Make goals measurable
• Feature Roadmap: features are added to releases, they are the goal

• Perform a cost benefit analysis.
• High level effort estimate vs benefits * risk

• 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
• Stakeholder to pressure to build something seemingly unimportant is a sign that they don't buy into the roadmap or understand it
• 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
• Time - Scope - Budget
• Brooks law: adding more people to a late software project makes it later
• Only expand the team size when planned, not because of a crunch or because its late

• Adjust the roadmap or change the product strategy

• You should be able to tell if releases had the desirable outcome
• Are we executing well? Is the strategy working?
• Make goal roadmaps measurable.
• Realistic targets only. Select the right metrics. Within a timeframe.
• Choose the goal first and the metrics second
• Make feature roadmaps measurable by listing expected benefits

• Roadmaps are not static. Ignore changes and it will become an outdated plan.
• These practices help you review and update your roadmap:
• track the progress (burndown charts)
• hold regular reviews
• depends on age and volatility
• Mature & Dynamic (quarterly)
• Mature & Stable (6 monthly)
• Young & Dynamic (monthly)
• Young & stable (quarterly)
• Involve stakeholders, for feasibility checks and buyin.
• In reviews, take into account changes to product strategy, progress of work, new data from customers and users
• Incremental vs pivots
• Be open to big radical roadmap changes, especially if the strategy is still valid

• Products don't exist in isolation - shared features, components, offering
• Helps coordinate the development and launch of products, identify and manage dependencies
• Use a Go portfolio roadmap:
• You can even extent this format to multiple portfolios
• You need solid product roadmapping before you can empty portfolio roadmaps