On Product Strategy Triplets
Strategy, vision, and team mission
What is Product Strategy?
Alright, this is a tough one.
The word “strategy” has been misused so frequently that its meaning has become murky and unclear for most of us. I was lucky enough to first learn about strategy through debate teams.
The concept is the same: you are trying to predict the behavior of those in the immediate environment around you, and make a set of educated guesses, or hypotheses — ultimately bets — that a certain action will result in a chain of events that will lead you to a goal, and make explicit how (and possibly when) you intend to get there.
That’s a strategy.
In debate, you and your team have to prepare to argue both the argument pro a motion and the argument against the motion. You need to examine all the possibilities, to prepare the best defense of a claim you wish to make about the motion.
In product, you have to examine all the possible options regarding what you build, how you build it, to whom and how do you ship it, for whom do you build it in the first place, what problem does it solve, what need does it address — and how do you balance other needs, like architecture, legacy systems, codebase silos, and knowledge transfer and sharing?
This is a complex problem.
You have to decide what you’re against, and what you choose to be for, based on an educated guess and subsequent validation. You then have to decide how you intend to do that, based on a collaborative process with cross-functional team members. You have to agree on a sequencing of events. And you have to consider whether some problems require a commitment to a deadline, for commercial or other reasons.
Product strategy is, therefore, a collaborative, cross-functional effort by a product organization and the business within which it operates that results in the development of a coherent, validated set of tactics by which to execute a series of strategic goals.
Product Vision
Just when you thought there was nothing more confusing than product strategy — enter product vision. The arena where good ideas come to die.
I’m being facetious, of course, but product vision statements are often the purple prose of product: fluffy, feel-good, mean-nothing affirmations.
Now, I’m not trying to be dismissive. Developing a product vision and crafting a statement to encapsulate it is genuinely difficult. So it’s little wonder we sometimes get it wrong. What’s going on here?
While strategy is often mistaken for ambition, product vision is confused with what a product itself is supposed to become. But a product vision should describe the change our product brings about for its users and the environment around them, and ultimately our business, too. It’s not enough to describe a future product.
Product vision should focus on:
Who we are solving a problem for
Why we are solving the problem to begin with
What exactly we intend to do about it
How we are going to influence the environment we set out to change
A product vision is, therefore, a statement about an imagined future world where we’ve solved our users’ problem though our product. It should include an understanding of the what and the why behind that effort.
And it should imagine the environment we’re creating and the effects our work has on our users, not just the product itself.
The Product Strategy Triplets
A company vision and its product vision are typically the same in a product-led business, especially in SaaS.
This is, however, different in larger orgs with many product lines, where the product vision for a line or portfolio(s) feeds into but is distinct from company vision.
A company mission statement, on the other hand, is a singular expression of a company’s core purpose, both as it relates to its product and beyond. It expresses the high-level strategic goals a company wishes to achieve through its product development, sales, marketing, etc. — essentially the operations of its entire business.
On a product org level, we usually speak of a product team’s mission, that’s subject to change more frequently than the overarching company mission. Team missions typically spell out the plan for the product domain or area that is in the ownership of the product team. It focuses on all the products, components, services, and users that the team’s work develops or affects.
You can think of company vision, mission, and strategy as the triplets of business strategy — all related, but not the same.
Product vision, product strategy, and product team missions then are the product strategy triplets, and an integral part of overall company strategy.