An Effective Guide to Product Strategy, Prioritisation and Roadmap
The key element in creating a strategy or a plan to grow a product is to have a problem-solving mindset. It’s about sensing uncertainty and understanding which questions we need to answer before diving into building.
It’s also about having a culture of experimentation and hypothesis validation (customer segments, value proposition, customer creation, usability), and keeping an eye on the big picture (desired outcomes, customer value, user base, community).
We must avoid a team behaviour that is too attached to ideas and activity. Focusing solely on ideas can deviate us from identifying the areas of biggest impact. And, having a team that celebrates internal productivity — the quantity of experiments completed, features released, metrics gathered and analysed — doesn’t always equate to growth.
I recommend an approach that begins with establishing a product baseline, the starting point for developing our strategy and plan. We must first understand where we are now and where we want to be. Then, to think about the most effective roadmap to achieve our goals and to be able to prioritise smartly.
The content below is structured as a guideline to create a product strategy that impacts growth, in which I have divided into four parts:
- Product Baseline
- Experimentation
- Launching Strategy
- Product Backlog, Prioritisation and Roadmap
1. Product Baseline
Identifying business priorities and opportunities, assessing the current product landscape through an analysis of the key areas for improving the product, and understanding how the products and services are currently structured to create value for the users.
The baseline assessment
Where we want to be
- Expected outputs
- Expected outcomes
Where we are now
- Product landscape (Business Modelling, Customer Behaviour, User Base, Community)
- Team landscape
- Product touch points and infrastructure
- Resources and assets
- Pre-defined roadmap and priorities
Categorising product initiatives by the level of uncertainty
The next step is to appropriate priorities using key inputs from The Baseline Assessment and according the current stage of the Product Lifecycle. The initiatives identified with a high level of uncertainty are appropriated to Experimentation activities, and the ones identified with a higher level of certainty go directly to Delivery.
2. Experimentation
Experimentation is based on empirical testing through experiments — building models of customer behaviour and running experiments to validate those models. Doing that iteratively, starting small and scaling overtime, is what the team must focus on.
Business Modelling:
- Strategy model
- Value proposition model
- Customer journey model
- Solution model
Proof-of-Concept Validation:
- Key Hypothesis Definition (validation board)
- Design of Experiments
- Get out of the building (running experiments)
- Hypothesis Validation (persevere, optimise or pivot decision)
For a more detailed best practice about Experimentation check my blog post on Rethinking Product Management Towards New Horizons.
3. Launching Strategy
What does launching a product mean? What is the best approach to maximise our chances of success? Should we go with a Soft (gaining traction) or a Big Bang (scaling) launch?
A Big Bang launch means bringing a lot of attention and awareness to your product, which results in driving tonnes of potential users to the top of your funnel. Deciding on this strategy makes sense when your product is ready to scale.
Are you 100% sure of your Product/Market Fit? Do you already have a strong “fan” base? Is your story crystal-clear? Are you confident with your technology? Is your product a game changer? If your answer for one of these questions is “no”, the smartest decision is to go with a Soft launch and focus on gaining traction first.
P.S. You may have a portfolio of products, or features that can be considered as independent products. For each of these parts of your product you must ask yourself, does this particular product/feature hit Product/Market-Fit?
Soft Launch Focus Areas
Product/Market Fit Validation
To build a habit-forming product that works deeply with the user behaviour three elements must converge at the same moment: motivation, ability, and trigger.
In the previous Experimentation initiatives we focused on validating the Motivation element qualitatively. Now, the team must validate motivation quantitatively, as well as experiment with the ability and trigger elements.
- Motivation: customer value
- Ability: time, money, physical and brain effort, social deviance, non-routine
- Trigger: internal, external
Growth Optimisation
Establishing a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective ways to build and engage the user base.
It is based on analysing and segmenting the user behaviour through the Customer Lifecycle and the Customer Profile.
- Identify what kind of user is currently performing best (from KPIs analysis), where they live (channels), and focus on getting more of them.
- Identify what factors are currently turning users into active ones, keeping current successful factors and optimising unsuccessful ones (consequently improving churn).
- Focus on levers to drive growth — segmentation, churn, conversion rate, pricing, sales representatives, international markets, referral campaigns, acquisition optimisation, awareness campaigns.
Community Building
Based on the fact that the two scarce elements of our economy are trust and attention, having a brand that influences its customers as a trusted advisor can be an Unfair Advantage because it cannot easily be copied or bought.
The content strategy and execution must be treated as an important part of our product, where authenticity and transparency are key to building a unique story.
Content and Community strategy:
- Mission, values, vision and voice
- Where does your community live?
- What channels should we use to publish content?
- Content Strategy and Editorial Calendar
- Branding and storytelling message
Scale Phase
To scale our goal is to have more potential customers coming to the top of the funnel and to increase and optimise the acquisition and referral steps. Some examples of initiatives are referral campaigns, viral loops, paid acquisition, product launch events, public relations, new channels, and venture acquisitions.
Internally, it is time to clean up the mess. During the previous phases, we had focused on taking shortcuts to achieve Product/Market Fit as fast as we could. Probably, these shortcuts added up and became technical and organisational debt, which can be a serious bottleneck when we want to grow at the speed of light. At this point, we will need a process organisation dedicated to refactoring our technical and people structures.
A note about approaching Competition
We must avoid looking to competitors from the point-of-view of being a player in the market. Instead, we must view them from the customer’s point-of-view (as a user, what are the alternatives that I have to solve a particular problem — vide Jobs-To-Be-Done).
Performing well in comparison with other players is a natural consequence of first performing well in solving the most relevant JTBD of our Customer Segments. Products create value in the marketplace based on how well they do “the job” better than other alternatives. Using this approach is key in continuing to be the disruptor — instead of being the disrupted.
However, shouldn’t we keep an eye on competition?! How are they creating value? How should we strategically position our brand in the customer’s mind?
Chasing parity with competitors is also very important. To do so, I like to use the “80% Benchmarking | 20% Innovation” mindset. The 80% Benchmarking guarantees that we always have the right mix of solution alternatives for the users (for example, Instagram copying Snapchat Stories). And the 20% Innovation is crucial in making our value proposition unique.
4. Product Backlog, Prioritisation and Roadmap
After going through The Product Baseline, Experimentation, and Launching Strategy, your product backlog is probably looking like a bunch of different product initiatives.
Possible product initiatives:
- Prototype Ideation (ethnographic research and prototyping)
- Prototype Validation (motivation, ability, triggers)
- Product Development (functional, non-functional, spikes, BAU)
- Growth Optimisation (Metrics and AARRR)
- Community Building
Building a Product Backlog with User Story Mapping
User Story Mapping is a way to map the future state of the product and slice it out into phases. It’s a map from the outcomes to the outputs, which uses a storytelling format to connect the strategy to product development.
Steps to create a User Story Map:
- Framing the desired outcomes — business goals, customer segments, product principles
- Creating a map of the User Tasks and Product Touch Points
- Prioritising it into phases — based on Customer Value
Delivery Plan and Roadmap
Once you have mapped out the whole user story and prioritised it into phases, the next step is to elaborate upon how the team is going to build it. The approach described below is based on Agile Delivery best practices.
Getting the Product Backlog ready to go:
- Envision (Initial modelling and delivery planning, initial requirements and release plan, epic story validation and breakdown)
- Cards creation and (rough) estimation
- Prioritisation based on Feasibility
- Match with team capacity and define roadmap
Getting the Sprint Backlog ready to go:
- Write User Stories and Acceptance Criteria
- Sprint Planning (super quick)
Prioritisation Guidelines
A Product Team must be focused on Learnings and Impact. Learnings are the foundation. The more you know about your users, product, and channels the better you become at coming up with solutions that influence growth.
However, it isn’t enough to just learn. The purpose of a team is to have impact on growth. Impact starts with identifying the biggest problem or area of opportunity using quantitative and qualitative data.
Intuition also plays an important role when coming up with possible solutions or opportunity initiatives. Usually, the best insights come from the intersection of Quantitative Data, Qualitative Data, and Intuition.
The guidelines described in this blog post can be used to launch new products from scratch, as well as to improve products that have millions of active users and thousands of subscribers. Whether used in a startup or in a large organisation, these best practices will help your team to build, launch and manage products that get and keep more customers.
