Strategy and Product Ownership

“What is your Product Ownership? YOU NEED A STRATEGY.”

Product ownership encompasses a variety of areas of the organization and requires bringing together many voices, including:
• Product management
• Marketing
• Business advocacy
• Customer advocacy
• End-user advocacy
• Domain subject matter knowledge
• Business and technical analysis
• User experience and graphic design
• Innovation
• Communications
• Legal and compliance
No one individual can represent all these aspects, nor can one individual hold all these considerations in mind—there is simply too much happening for one individual to provide the clarity of understanding and direction needed. It truly requires a team.

Most companies fall into the trap of thinking about Product Strategy as a plan to build certain features and capabilities. We often say our Product Strategy are things like:
• “To create a platform that allows music producers to upload and share their music.”
• “To create a backend system that will allow the sales team to manage their leads.”
• “To create a front of the funnel website that markets to our target users and converts them.”
This isn’t a strategy; this is a plan. The problem is that when we treat a product strategy like a plan, it will almost always fail. Plans do not account for uncertainty or change. They give us a false sense of security. “If we just follow the plan, we’ll succeed!” Unfortunately, there is no guarantee of success here.

Product Strategy is a system of achievable goals and visions that work together to align the team around desirable outcomes for both the business and your customers.
Product Strategy emerges from experimentation towards a goal. Initiatives around features, products, and platforms are proven this way. Those KPIs, OKRs, and other metrics you are setting for your teams are part of the Product Strategy. But, they cannot create a successful strategy on their own.

Foundation: What you want to achieve
• Vision
• Business models
• Positioning
Market: Your customers and the market landscape
• Personas
• Competitive analysis
Imperatives: The work you will accomplish
• Goals
• Initiatives

FOUNDATION

Vision

Product vision represents the core essence of your product and what makes it unique. It should be something that everyone in the company deeply understands — the “why” behind the product you are all responsible for.
Who exactly are your customers? What are the problems you are helping them solve? What opportunities and threats do you face? Grappling with these questions allows you to understand the true value of your product and to craft a vision statement that is both accurate and aspirational.

Business models

Business models can be used to further understand the customer problems you will solve, the solutions you will build, and the growth opportunities that exist within your market. Models are useful when you launch a new product or want to evolve your strategy as the market changes.
There are many types of business models — including lean canvas, Porter’s 5 forces, and the 10Ps marketing matrix, among others. The example below shows a business model developed by Aha! that focuses on why your product is worth buying. The model includes key product messaging, go-to-market details, and investments required.

Positioning

Positioning is a strategic exercise that is usually done before a product launch. It helps define where your product fits in the marketplace and the unique benefits you provide. Strong positioning supports your marketing strategy, brand storytelling, and all content developed for customers.
Use a product positioning template to capture your mission, tagline, customer, market, and more — all the details you need to position your product for success.

Market: Your customers and the market landscape

You need to deeply understand your customers and what they need in order to build a product they will love. Developing personas and researching competitors are some of the best ways to learn the market landscape.

Personas

Personas are fictional characters that bring your customers to life. Creating user personas is one way to develop empathy for your customers — you document their likes and dislikes, professional aspirations, challenges, and more. All these details help guide how you build features that will solve their problems.

Competitive analysis

Competitive analysis involves capturing information related to alternate solutions. You can quickly see where these offerings excel and fall short. Doing this type of research provides insights into where you fit within the broader market and what opportunities exist.
Competitive research should be an ongoing process — keeping up with the competitive landscape allows you to discover new problems that your product is uniquely positioned to solve. Keeping this information in a shared location makes it easy for the team to stay current on how your product stacks up.

Imperatives: The work you will accomplish

Based on the foundational work you have done so far, you can now tackle what many consider the most challenging — and most rewarding — element of strategy. This is the time to lay out the goals and key initiatives that will help you realize your vision.

Goals

Goals are measurable, time-bound objectives that have clearly defined success metrics associated with them. These are benchmarks that you want to achieve in the next quarter, year, or 18 months.
For example, if you aim to increase revenue and expand into new territories, choose clear success metrics and a time frame for completion. One goal might be to “increase revenue by 30 percent in the third quarter.” The second might be to “expand into five new countries in the first half of the year.”
A useful exercise is to plot goals on a chart based on the depth of investment (to your team) and the impact (to your customers). This gives a holistic picture of how your goals line up against one another.

Initiatives

Initiatives are the high-level efforts or big themes of work that need to be implemented to achieve your goals. These strategic investments link your goals to everything planned on your product roadmap. Initiatives tend to involve cross-functional work. It can be powerful to visualize the timing and progress of initiatives, as shown in the example strategy roadmap created in Aha! below.

Vision, business models, positioning, personas, competitors, goals, and initiatives — all these elements serve as the groundwork for your product strategy. From here, you can build key product requirements such as releases, features, user flow and design, and technical specifications.
Using purpose-built product management software like Aha! allows you to link releases and features to initiatives and goals — so you can turn your plans into reality. By linking your strategy to your work, the business value that each effort delivers becomes clear to the entire team.

References:

Three Keys to Successful Product Ownership

https://www.scrum.org/resources/product-ownership-3-vs-practice-using-product-strategy-canvas
https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/resources/articles/product/the-strategic-role-of-product-management-when-development-goes-agile/
https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/product-ownership-team-sport-9323#:~:text=The%20Product%20Owner%20Role&text=The%20Product%20Owner%20is%20responsible,for%20managing%20the%20Product%20Backlog.
https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-strategy
https://medium.com/@melissaperri/what-is-good-product-strategy-8d5587cb7429