What is product strategy?
Digital product strategy refers to the overarching plan and approach you take to develop, position, and evolve your product(s) to achieve business objectives and meet customer needs in the digital realm.
Product strategy
Here are key elements and considerations to include in your product strategy:
1. Vision and goals
Clearly define the long-term vision for your digital products and establish measurable goals aligned with your business objectives. This helps guide the direction and purpose of your product development efforts.
Tesla's vision for example is:
"To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world's transition to electric vehicles.”
2. Market research and customer insights
Conduct thorough market research to understand the competitive landscape, industry trends, and user needs. Gather insights about your target audience, their pain points, preferences, and behaviours. These insights will inform your product decisions and help you create compelling user experiences.
For instance, if you’re in the FMCG , you’ll be well aware of home delivery and mobile touch-points.
3. User-centric approach
Place the user at the center of your product strategy. Understand their needs, motivations, and expectations to build products that solve their problems and provide value. Continuously engage with users through user testing, feedback sessions, and analytics to iterate and improve your products.
Starting with a user persona (or similiar) and then identifying and interviewing users that match can help you validate or invalidate that persona and bring in new pain points in a rapidly changing world.
4. Product roadmap
Develop a product roadmap that outlines the strategic initiatives, major features, and enhancements you plan to deliver over time. This roadmap provides a high-level view of your product’s future direction, allowing you to prioritise and sequence your efforts effectively.
Your short term road-map should be detailed and shouldn’t change much at all. Your longer-term roadmap can.
5. Competitive advantage
Identify and leverage your competitive advantage. Understand how your product differentiates itself from competitors and communicate that unique value proposition effectively to your target market.
For this, a SWOT analysis against your competitors can be advantageous. You could even ask Chat GPT who your competitors are if you’re unsure.
6. Business model and revenue strategy
Define your business model and revenue strategy for your digital products. Determine how you will monetise your products (e.g., subscription, advertising, freemium), and ensure that your product strategy aligns with your revenue goals.
A business model canvas can be a simple way to start this process.
7. Iterative and agile approach
Embrace an iterative and agile approach to product development. Break down your product roadmap into smaller, manageable increments or sprints to deliver value to users more frequently, gather feedback, and iterate based on market dynamics and user needs.
Typically, sprints last two weeks and start on a Tuesday, with the Monday set aside for planning and finishing off the previous sprint through documentation and demos.
8. Collaboration and alignment
Foster cross-functional collaboration and ensure alignment among key stakeholders, including engineering, design, marketing, and sales teams. Regularly communicate the product strategy to keep everyone on the same page and ensure shared understanding of the product vision and goals.
One way we do this at Skysoclear is to send a weekly memo on Slack, sharing our mission, values and the key activities of the week.
9. Data-driven decision making
Leverage data and analytics to make informed product decisions. Monitor key metrics, such as user engagement, retention, conversion rates, and customer feedback, to assess the success of your products and inform future iterations.
There are a great number of apps to help you with this:
10. Continuous improvement
Continuously evaluate and improve your digital products. Regularly assess market dynamics, customer feedback, and emerging technologies to adapt your strategy and stay ahead of the competition.
By incorporating these elements into your product strategy for digital products, you can align your efforts, deliver meaningful user experiences, and drive business growth in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
How can you get started?
You may already have some of the above in operation, so start asking around and collect up any roadmaps, documents and decisions in one place. Wherever you put it, it needs to be editable and easily accessible.
If you'd like to learn more, check out my 90-minute product strategy workshop via this Calendly link.
