100 Product Strategies

Alignment is one of the hardest challenges of strategy. Conflictive goals, every department fighting for their priority, opposed world views and interpretations of how the future will unfold…

Luckily, Bruce McCarthy is an expert on the topic, and in this episode, he shares many tactics and tips on how to surface these conversations, use the right artifacts, and create alignment.

Resources

We all know Strategy is complex, cumbersome, and foggy. We strive to navigate and make strategic decisions in this environment, which usually leads to opinionated battles and stakeholder misalignment since we can all interpret the signals in different ways.

Remarkably, Dan Olsen, my guest in this episode, created simple tools and one-pagers that help you crystalize your thinking, find the opportunities that can truly make a difference, and have more meaningful conversations with stakeholders.

I’m amazed by how Dan brought complex situations down to their essence and explained how framing and structuring them can truly make these daunting challenges approachable and almost easy to resolve.

Important note: In a few moments, Dan shared a screen, so if you can watch while you listen, it could be helpful to get a visual reference (but it is not required to understand the concepts discussed).

Ready for some strategic wisdom? In this episode, I had the honor of delving into the depths of product strategy with Marty Cagan, a true luminary in the field. I asked the hardest questions and tried to explore topics beyond what you would normally find in Marty’s writing. From the pitfalls of neglecting strategy to the necessity of ongoing adaptation, Marty's insights are a game-changer for product leaders. We explored controversial topics, such as why strategy trumps discovery and the critical role of top-level input in shaping successful product strategies. But that's not all—we also discuss the significance of understanding team scope, capabilities, and experience, the role of strategy in budget allocation, and the importance of seeking guidance from experienced mentors. Every part of the episode has actionable advice, which Marty very eloquently shares. Where to Find Marty’s Work:

There are infinite ways to define strategy. Most involve finding a critical challenge and defining the big strokes of how to solve it.

This can be an intimidating task to any leader! Furthermore, if we spend the high effort involved in putting it together, and communicating it as our brilliant strategy for the next 12 months, chances are that the organization will not be super receptive to feedback, learning and iteration on this critical strategic bets.

This is a very complex and nuanced topic, but I had the fortune to speak with Jeff Gothelf, not only an expert in the topic, but someone who can articulate complex problems in simple ways.

We covered how Jeff defines a “lean” strategy, how connecting strategy to OKRs help you learn fast about your hypothesis, and how leaders should take a more humble (and smarter!) approach to explicitly calling out uncertainty and willingness to learn.

Where to find Jeff:

We often talk about strategy diagnosis and insights as if they were something we go through in isolation when defining the direction of our product.

However, those insights come (or should come) from our discovery efforts. Unfortunately, this connection is often missing, and to be fair, it can be pretty messy.

That’s why I had a wonderful conversation with Teresa Torres, one of the top voices on product discovery, and we went deep into the hard questions of connecting these two worlds:

• How involved should leaders be in Discovery?

• How do we validate our strategic assumptions with users?

• How do discovery at different levels interconnect?

and much more. Teresa shared multiple tips on tactics to overcome the typical pitfalls.

Where to Find Teresa’s Work

While strategy is always difficult, large corporations add complexities into the mix: dependencies, politics, complex budgeting processes, and more.

In this episode, I spoke with Phil Hornby, a Product Coach with vast experience in different contexts, and we discussed his experience with the product strategy for a business unit within Continental, a large German automotive company.

Phil shared great examples and tips on how to gain alignment, deal with politics and dependencies, handle risk, and much more!

Few elements wield as much influence over a company's fate as the art and science of monetization. And I know from personal experience that this is a hard-to-master topic for product people.

Consider the multiple complex questions that may arise: do we go for a subscription or pay-as-you-go model? How many tiers of subscriptions? What’s the right price? Do we include ads? How frequent? How intrusive?

At the core of all these questions is the value exchange: how much are users willing to pay (in money or attention) in exchange for the value we provide? Solving it correctly can be the difference between success and stagnation.

Frequently, strategies are about finding avenues for growth. We often think about that as directly impacting the core company metrics.

But when developing platforms that allow integrations to the core product, the strategy is more complex: we enable entry points that enable 3rd party developers to solve “edge but valuable” use cases adopted by users who *only then* increase the core product metrics.

In this conversation with Frank Harris, VP of Platform Product at Slack, we discussed how they formulated a strategy in this complex landscape and the nuances and challenges of the growth journey.

Why do we create strategies?

To focus on the most critical problems or opportunities which will help us get closer to our vision.

And the first step of putting that focus into action is concentrating our resources there.

This is easier said than done, and the complexity becomes more evident when we have more than one product, at different maturity stages, and with very different strategic paths ahead of them.

While this problem can fall into the Portfolio Strategy space for larger corporations, startups also face this challenge when expanding.

In this episode, I had the chance to speak with Iryna Struk, who is running product management at HandsHQ, a startup with a mature product and another trying to find product market fit.

We discussed not only resource allocation but also a broad set of topics, starting as usual with how they create strategy, how they handle context switch, and how they balance the different levels of uncertainty when planning.

You can connect with Iryna on Linkedin:

Many of us work in complex environments where the set of opportunities we can potentially pursue to impact a desired outcome is very wide.

As you can imagine, at Google, you can find both very complex and large environments, and opportunities to innovate in multiple directions.

In this episode, I spoke with Stefan Schnabl, who works in the education space at Google, with the potential to cover very different audiences, problems, and solutions.

He shared many tips and stories, from how they align on direction down to how the team does research and experimentation in the space to identify strong opportunities.

Most companies' strategies are “roadmap on steroids”: large plans of multiple big ideas to implement, which usually have not been validated.

To differentiate and create thoughtful and successful strategies, you must start with evidence-based insights.

But how do we collect that evidence? How do we gain confidence and compare opportunities? After selecting opportunities, how do we keep validating the strategy through the multiple solution ideas we may pursue?

I had the pleasure of speaking with the evidence-guided guru, Itamar Gilad, and we explored the practices, tools, and challenges you will use and face to make your strategy more robust relying on solid evidence.

Startup challenges change as they grow. The focus and needs of the product strategy also change, as the company moves through funding rounds and product maturity stages.

What are the critical factors leaders should consider at each stage? How does collaboration among different areas evolve? What’s the impact of funding rounds on focus areas?

We all love good strategy stories. What is better than good strategy stories? The ones that are simple and that we can derive lessons to apply elsewhere.

Over the last 18 months, I have interviewed 29 product leaders, inquiring about their strategy formulation and challenges.

We covered different industries, customer types, company scales, product types, and geographies.

If you create a great strategy and communicate it properly, and have good people to execute it, what can possibly go wrong? 

Well, as you can imagine, multiple layers of complexities can get in the way. 

In this episode, Randy shared two stories where different company intricacies made good strategies fail. The learning will help you view your strategy process from a wider perspective, and help you avoid these pitfalls.

The world is full of hard problems, which led to opportunities to tackle them using groundbreaking innovative products. 

Bigger companies are in an interesting position: they can invest in exploring new problems related to their core mission, but which can be years ahead in terms of helping them expand their business. Yet, for many reasons, they fail to innovate. And the first problem is how they strategize in this context.

Luckily, in this episode, Andrew Skotzko shares a great story about such a situation and what we should do when facing it. 

If you are a product leader joining a new organization, or if you have recently been promoted within your organization and are tasked with creating a strategy, where should you start?

How do you align on what strategy is?

How do you collect the existing knowledge and past decisions and combine them with new trends and goals?

Besides years of product leadership experience, Tobias has helped many organizations and leaders create their product strategies and answer these questions.

In this episode, we talked about:

• What are the symptoms of lacking strategy?

• How do different artifacts (objectives, strategy, vision) play together, and what should go first?

• Diagnosing your current situation.

• What is inside a good strategy?

• The written narrative approach.

• How to test your strategy, and what to with conflicts?

And much more!

In this episode, I spoke with Nils Janse, CEO and co-founder of Delibr, a tool to help Product Managers organize and structure decision-making across the entire product flow. We covered amazing insights, going from crafting a value proposition, followed by how to select the focus areas and how to be stubborn on the vision while flexible on the execution based on customer feedback.

Pay special attention to Nils’ definition of the “three interacting trees” (minute 20 approx). He uses three interacting models: an opportunity solution tree for specific outcomes, a higher-level JTBD-tree, and a Product-tree focused on the components. Amazing discovery to balance all the different opportunities you may need to handle.

The conversation was a bit “meta” since we discussed their process and, at the same time, Delibr’s strategies to support the process! 

In this episode, we talked about:

• How Delibr made its way to a Product Management tool, starting as a tool for “structured decision making.”

• How to differentiate in the product management tooling space

• Starting your strategy by identifying your ICP

• How to mix the “upstream” vs. “downstream” opportunities

• Not trying to fit all your opportunity space into OSTs, and other trees can be used.

• How LLMs can be extremely helpful in so many text-intensive PM tasks

And much more!

The role of strategy in pre-market-fit startups can sometimes be unclear. How would we focus or double down on a path when we have so much uncertainty and risk? We would likely pivot many times before finding what we need to double down on, and doing a deep strategic exercise is a waste of time. 

But when we neglect strategy, the consequences can be worse. Not having clarity on what we are trying to achieve and testing random things has crashed many startups.

Luckily, there is a middle ground. In this episode, I spoke with David Pereira, an experienced product leader and strategist, who told us (with very detailed examples!) how to create strategies that help startups find Product-Market Fit and connect them to an iterative execution that drives success.

In this episode, we talked about:

• Where to start when defining strategies in the seed-stage startup context

• How to find the right problems in a new or unknown market

• How to align on the expected result

• How a strategy for a seed-stage startup can look like

• How to connect strategy with the fast-paced execution of a startup

And much more!

Playing to Win is a strong framework, but it can create some confusion during its implementation, like making your winning aspiration “be the #1 of X”.

I spoke with Stuart Congdon, a strategy veteran, who has used it many times and walked us through a complete example with my typical annoying questions to get to the root of their strategic decisions!

In this episode, we talked about:

• A real implementation of the Play to win framework

• Using Customer Journey and Service Blueprint to identify opportunities

• How to find your niche for the “where to play”

• How to differentiate and don’t make a strategy that could be the same as any competitor

• Recommended Book: Superstrings. A Theory of Everything

And much more!

Many strategies come from a need to grow, or start by reviewing many opportunities to find the ideal ones. But what if we have a unique asset that we can leverage to create a strategic advantage? A recent example could be how Disney used their unique IP to create a winning streaming platform in an already competitive market. 

In this episode, Joe Jenvey from Sedex shared a more “down to earth” example: using their unique supply chain data to create new value propositions for their customers. 

Joe explained (among *many* other things) how they started from the business need and did a discovery process to understand the customer problem they could solve and how to solve it. 

We talked about:

• How their process started with a business need and developed into a product-led customer discovery.

• How they interacted between different areas of the business

• The tools they used to collect and share data

• How they validated their strategy

• How do they manage vision, roadmap, goals, and checkpoints

And much more!

Strategy in B2B has serious power dynamics. There often seems to be a fight between PMs and Sales, when in the end, hopefully, they are trying to do what's best for the company. Adam Thomas has used multiple hats in the past and brings some advice on working with the different sides of the organization to create a trusted and focused strategy, and how to keep validating your strategic investments with survival metrics.

In this episode, we talked about:

• How to formulate portfolio-level strategies

• How Product and Sales interact, why we always struggle, and what to do about it

• The importance of focus (and consequently trade-offs) for strategy

• The but - therefore storytelling rule

• Survival metrics

• How “Product Strategy” roles interact with Product leaders and teams

And much more!

One of the key elements of a solid product strategy that generates growth based on your product success, is building and sustaining strong differentiators. But finding, validating and aligning on that differentiation is hard work.

In this episode we explored strategy creation with Leah Tharin, Head of Product at Jua.ai and Product Led Growth expert. We covered many aspects of strategy creation, starting with the importance of determining your target user, how to identify opportunities that you can later select for your differentiation, and all the way down to how to summarize it in an inspiring one-pager.

In this episode, we spoke about:

To create a good strategy, you need a vision. If the vision is inspiring and drives a significant purpose, chances are you have stronger bases to build a motivating strategy.

Simone started her product career in gambling! In Canada the government provided the service, which already had some nuances for strategy. At some point she felt the calling to do something more purposeful, that eventually led her to work on renewables, and finally at an ONG.

In this episode, we talked about:

The key drivers of your strategy can be radically different in nature: are we optimizing on a well known topic? Are we doing a new big bet into uncharted territory?

Unfortunately, many times we are not conscious of the type of decision we are making, and how this affects the strategy “health”, risk, time horizons, and execution process.

Luckily, Alessandro doesn’t fall into that trap. He has a well established Playbook, that he uses with the team to balance the strategy and communicate the proper level of uncertainties and how they plan to reduce it.

On top of that, he has a very structured approach to uncover opportunities using a combination of Jobs To Be Done and Opportunity trees that we explored at length.

In this marvelous episode, we talked about:

• The inputs to start thinking about your strategy
• How to map the opportunity space from a JTBD perspective
• How to make the entire company contribute to the opportunities and better influence the roadmap
• How he uses the strategy playbook at Amenitiz.

And much more!

Depending on your product, a team’s mission can be very clear (a checkout page for e-commerces) or a bit fuzzier. Going back to the old “painkiller” versus “vitamin” problem, many companies will have across their portfolio teams that are an integral part of their core proposition, and others that add value “around” it.

Our guest Diogo was in such a situation, in a very successful product: Adidas Running. Leading the “social” vertical, their contribution to the product experience and value was unclear, and they lacked strong input from upper management. Yet Diogo wanted to create a solid strategy, finding a purpose and a strong value proposition. In this episode we explored how he managed to do so, and his advice is certainly valuable for those looking for purpose as well as for those who have it and want to express it more clearly.

We talked about:

• Where to start when your team's purpose is unclear?
• How to dig insights for products that are not the core value drivers of the user experience?
• How to decide where to focus on, in a very broad problem space?
• How they decided the best KPIs, type of users and critical success criterias when formulating the strategy.
• How the strategy was communicated, shared and discussed across the company.
• The role of "principles" and guiding questions in the execution of the strategy.

And much more!

The “shape” of the opportunity space can greatly influence how we approach strategy creation. Some opportunity spaces are straightforward, and the work revolves around optimization and improvements. Others are completely unknown and require a much more exploratory approach.
Interestingly enough, complex spaces are not only reserved for “new fields” like the Metaverse. Alasco has the mission of “Digitalizing the 2nd biggest industry in the world”, construction. As an industry, we can think of it as old and well-known. But the opportunities for digitalization are definitely varied and complex.

In this episode, we talked about:

There are many challenges for the collaboration of Product and UX on the strategic level. As a product and design trainer and consultant, Sol Mesz works with both teams to make this collaboration more successful. She shared with us many tips and tools that can help any leader get the most out of both “sides of the table”.

In this episode, we talked about:

Description: many of us work on consumer products, or B2B SaaS, or other products where the business model and the value proposition is strong and clear. But there are products and industries that need to connect a variety of different players, creating not only complex problems but also complex structures where the needs of different groups need to be constantly prioritized and considered to be successful.

Over his career, Jason Boast has had more than one of this situations, and he shares valuable tips (that are applicable also to our “simpler” worlds), and war stories of the challenges he faced and how to solve them.

In this episode, we talked about:

• Starting with the fundamentals: How to, as a new product lead, you need to start by understanding everything before making strategy decisions, and how to do that when everyone in the company gives you a different answer.
• The power of making things simple, and over communicating.
• The importance of understanding the basics in complex marketplaces to be able to define a strategy.
• The importance in complex business of keeping all teams aware of the high level goals and how they contribute, preventing silos.

And much more!

It can be hard to create a strategy for innovation. But if we are talking about B2B enterprise innovation, especially when hardware products are involved (like climate and energy tech), it truly is challenging.

Furthermore, if you are looking for advice, few have actually “been there and done that”. Daniel Elizalde is one of those. Furthermore, he has codified his approach in the B2B Innovator’s Map, a 6-step framework, whose initial steps are all about strategy definition.

While there are a lot of B2B examples, I would argue there are lessons here for product managers in any product.

In this episode, we talked about:

• How to do Strategic Alignment with stakeholders in early phases
• How to do Market discovery properly (and quickly!)
• For new products, how to interact with your potential initial customers (or Champions, as Daniel calls them), to understand their needs.
• The differences in process between B2C and B2B, and new products versus adding on top of existing products.

And much more!

We all know different products and contexts require different strategic thinking. B2B SaaS and subscriptions is an important product category, and John Pearce has been working on it for a long time. In this episode, he shared:

• The framework he has been using at Chargebee to build their strategy
• The differences with strategies for consumer products.
• How to integrate, balance and align sales inputs to the strategy

And much more!

One challenging topic about product strategy as organizations grow, is “how many product strategies” should we have, based on how many products we have on our portfolio (or “sections of a large product, or business units, or any other organization slice we may have). It is also related to the question “who should we involve” to define the strategy, and how PMs, Heads of Product, VPs, and the different hierarchy levels contribute to the process.

In this episode, I spoke with another strategy enthusiast, Alberto Barcelos from Taxfix, who has a strong view on what sort of contribution and strategies PMs should create.

We discussed:

• How strategy is related to storytelling and shared beliefs
• At what levels we define strategy and how they influence each other
• How do you balance top-down strategy definition with these bottom-up plans
• How do PMs collaborate with stakeholders for their strategy definition

And much more!

Startups and Enterprise operate very differently. Product management is done quite differently. What about product strategy? What are the differences (and similarities)? What do we need to pay attention to? What is important to consider if we are moving from one to the other?

In this episode I spoke with Jonathan Rodriguez, Product Lead at Flieber, a growing startup in the logistics industry. Before he was a lead at Eventbrite, a multi-business, multi-national, enterprise sized company.

With this transition, Jonathan has a very interesting view of how strategy is done differently in these opposite contexts.

We talked about:

• Enterprises deal with unique multi business unit conflicts. Strategy is negotiated, and many times difficult to communicate and propagate.
• How Eventbrite increased their strategy practice, and how the different levels of the organization contributed (executives, managers, individual PMs).
• How larger companies need to generate high-level goals and discuss how different teams need to contribute to that goal.
• In startups, how to handle the high-involvement of the CEO at the tactic levels.
• What is the “right frequency” of strategic discussions in startups, given the fast-paced learning
• How they moved from weekly decisions to a two years strategy
• Strategy meetings: why they should be more frequent in startups, and how Jonathan aligns the product teams on the updates of the strategy meetings

Among many other things!

What is like to set a strategy when your company is growing in headcount by 2x (or more!) per year? How do you identify the areas where the new joiners will be working? How do you balance new opportunity spaces versus focusing on the existing ones? How do you onboard new members on the strategy topics?

Nicholas Goubert is working in one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, and has first hand experience with all these challenges.

We talked about:

• How he created the strategy at Utopia music considering the high-growth conditions
• How he balances the delegation of strategy aspects with his product leadership team.
• How to take into account resource planning for the strategy process, very critical in a hyper-growth situation.
• How to make sure you still spend time in strategy, when conflicting with high priority sensitive activities like hiring and onboarding.

Among many other things!

Over the last decade(s), many companies have started the different types of transformations, most of them going in the same direction: how to become more agile and make software-product development a first-class discipline they had to master.

To achieve such a transformation, many things are required, starting at the top with monetary resources, leadership commitment, and patience.

How is this related to 100 Product Strategies? Because Strategy is also needed to successfully complete such a transformation. In today’s episode, Sam McAffee tells us about the role strategy plays, and how in turn the different stages of the transformation effects the strategy.

We talked about:

Megan joined Hotjar two years ago, and had the challenge to create the strategy from scratch. But moreover, she has the opportunity to review with fresh eyes how the execution went and what she learned along the way. In this very interesting conversation we covered the journey, starting with very insightful tips on the initial strategy creation, how they communicated and aligned the strategy across the organization, and eventually what they learned while executing.

We talked about:

Sherpany is a B2B SaaS for meeting management. The space is so wide, that there can tackle endless opportunities, which it might in turn reduce focus and end up in a mediocre product. So, how do they define a strong and focused strategy in such a wide space?

Nina is Chief Product Officer at Sherpany and she told me how they deal with this challenge and went deep into the very solid strategy formulation process they have.

We talked about:

• A very clear walkthrough of Sherpany’s annual strategy process, from high level company goals all the way to key initiatives.
• “Sausage making”: Sherpany’s code name for the alignment between top-down and bottom-up strategy definitions.
• Why the diagnosis process is more internally focused, looking at internal.
• How sherpany uses KPI trees and opportunity solution trees to map their opportunities.
• How they do positioning, not comparing with others but looking at the touchpoints they want to deliver great experiences.
• The influence in strategy formulation of selecting a narrow user group and use case to enable growth.
• During the formulation, they leveraged what the product was good for and being used for, to become even better and expand from that existing strength.
• How Sherpany is using a version of Google’s 70/20/10 to explore a bet for future growth.
• Product plays an important role in facilitating discussions like what users should we focus on, that has an impact not only in product but also in other departments.

And many other things!

In this episode, we spoke with Johannes Mayer, Director of Product at Kununu, the largest employer and salary review site in the DACH region.

We explored how to create a strategy in a context where you have a user-centered product that relies on monetizing companies' premium services, and discussed how to balance and navigate the conflict of interests that may arise, and even how Kununu creates synergies to use those tensions to benefit both sides.

We talked about:

• Kununu’s process to create its product strategy, starting from a broader view and advancing to details on a yearly basis.
• How the strategy combines the 5-years Vision, mission, and their JTBD (considering functional, social, and emotional needs)
• Using company level yearly objectives and JTBD as guardrails for the product strategy
• Johannes’ suggestion of avoiding the “ivory tower”: leveraging team collaboration and stakeholders, gaining feedback, and identifying synergies with other parts of the organization.
• The artifact they use for the strategy: a slide deck with ~20 slides with the Vision, Mission, JTBD, key findings, and objectives. That leads to the pillars of product strategy for the year, which in turn leads to the roadmap.
• How do they combine in their OKRs the user-centric impact with the B-side companies' impacts.
• The extra complexity of being a user-centered team, with another business unit doing the “selling” and monetization of the product.
• How Product values can help you navigate the conflicts between both sides of the product.
• The role product managers have in bringing people together and exposing the conflicts and potential impacts of initiatives to decide together what the best course of action is.

And many other things!

As companies grow and expand their services, they need to localize their product. In some industries, where each region has very different needs and regulations, there is high interaction between the need for a global strategy, and the needs of each region to succeed.

Jesus Cagide, Product Leader at Intuit and ex-Paypal helps us explore how this can be handled in companies and industries where the local need has a critical role.

We talked about:

In this episode, we spoke with Petra Wille, an internationally renowned Product Leadership Coach and author of Strong Product People. We explored how product people can become more strategic and how leaders can coach their teams to develop their strategic thinking.

We talked about:

Darrell Stephenson is Product Director at Zalando (and previously at SoundCloud). Being a really large corporation, Zalando has strategies at multiple levels that interact and intersect with each other. In this episode, Darrell has been extremely open and generous, explaining how product strategy creation works at Zalando, and how leaders face the challenge of the different interconnected areas and corporate goals.

We talked about: