Our conversation about the product continues. “For me, two essential things are missing,” my interlocutor tells me. “In fact, for me this is the boundary between product ‘ownering’ and product management:

• Product strategy: for me the reference is John Cutler with for example the North Star framework, do you perhaps have other references?
• Marketing and analytics, the key indicators”.

Well, how to start? These are not easy questions you’re asking.

About strategy

Often, very often, very very very often, the first step, but it’s eminently important, is to ask the product owner, or the product manager, or the head of product, what makes you think that in three or six months regarding their product, what they’re leading will be a success? That it will have had an impact? Or, in a solution focus way: we’re six months from now and they’re smiling about their product’s impact, why? What’s causing that smile?

This approach, this question, which seems trivial, is however literally overturning. What is the desired end point and no longer the starting point. This avoids a multitude of pre-constructed solutions based on their habits, or their beliefs, or on internal politics (and which therefore pursue another objective), and brings the subject back to the essential, the impact.

Impact in the etymological sense of rupture: what has caused a change.

This question often poses many problems for the people who must answer it, notably due to lack of habit, or due to fear.

On one hand, the answer is only valid if the answer is limited to one success criterion, and doesn’t take the form of a Prévert list. Because when you give an endless list of success criteria (for a period of three to six months) it means you don’t know how to describe the expected success. Imagine also 10 success criteria? How to answer key questions in your journey? Impossible or too long if so many criteria are at stake. And if a list must nevertheless be provided, it’s imperative to prioritize it, and thus you only take into account the first point for the coming months (the others will follow).

On the other hand, we expect genuine concrete (and therefore measurable) success criteria concerning the products, and not: “we will have delivered on time and on schedule” which says absolutely nothing about the impact of their product, or even “we will have delivered the 20 new features” which again says nothing about the impact of their product, except that it has 20 more features and nothing says they’re useful. The measure must be external to the domain of control of product owners and product managers, it must be drawn from a domain they don’t control and for which they want to have an impact. For example: “we increase the purchase conversion rate by 3%”, or “young people under 16 start using our product”, or: “thanks to the new version the user saves 1 hour of manipulations per week”, etc.

Let me come back to the question of “concrete”: the target must be concrete even if it’s illusory. Strange? It’s about being able to articulate conversations, make decisions. We don’t talk about “having a better conversion rate”, but “having a conversion rate that increases by 10%”. By 10% or 30%? you already see that depending on the figures the conversations will be different. If it’s 10% or 30%, it’s not the same gap, and therefore not the same strategy. Thus rather than “young people under 16 start using our product”, “at least 1000 young people under 16 start using our product within 3 months” would have been better.

Strategy carries a goal with meaning. Having a new feature has no meaning. We want a new feature for the purpose of… A strategy will be a way to orchestrate, to make a hypothetical projection to achieve this goal.

We’re going to reduce this success demand to a single element to systematically facilitate realization. Organizations can hope for plenty of success criteria, but you need only one to answer questions, make decisions, make choices, and… chart a strategy. It’s the North Star you’re talking about for example. Otherwise if you keep more than one element you jeopardize your action: there is no governance without choice.

We’re talking about a period of three to six months. Don’t be mistaken, beyond that we start talking about vision. Thus a vision over a few years could be broken down into three to six month objectives, which themselves individually will be broken down into sub-objectives. Strategy is how to achieve this objective and this breakdown into sub-objectives.

Because strategy is the way to put into perspective the different possible articulations, or the different hypotheses to try to achieve a result.

Strategy which is neither a vision, nor an ambition¹, but a way to put into perspective the different articulations to try to achieve a result.

This result itself being a way to make an ambition, a vision, pragmatic.

So we potentially end up with a vision, which translates into an objective, and a strategy based on hypotheses, paths, to achieve the result.

It’s somewhat the entire journey operated by tools like the lean canvas (for example, for vision, or solving pain points), impact mapping for hypotheses and the strategy journey, user story mapping for the tactical breakdown of what the strategy will have brought out. OKRs² that everyone is talking about right now are an implementation of these principles: a tree structure of objectives that connect to a primary objective. All are quantified to allow articulation of conversations (on measurable elements), acceleration of decisions, and to quickly know if they’re achieved or not.

Once again the important thing in the changing world surrounding us is to economize (and this economy now also enters into an eco-responsible approach), not to go too far before validating or learning. Thus strategy aims, not only to move forward, to indicate a potential path, but also to validate as quickly as possible (and regularly) our hypotheses about it.

From the beginning I’m not making much difference between product owner and product manager, but if you want, it’s not a rule, and not necessarily my philosophy, but a sort of convention makes people say that product owners deal with tactics (how we do all this in the field, the implementation of sub-objectives, hypotheses), and product managers with strategy (through which paths we imagine passing, the whole tree, and they feed the why).

Thus a strategy is the orchestration of a desire (ambition, vision, pain point, etc.) in a pragmatic way: pragmatic being what knows how to make concrete the validity of an implementation, the validity of our hypotheses. Which proposes a certain way to validate, to achieve, an objective.

Very often the idea of having a self-organized team that will move toward a clear objective, and only one, concrete as seen above, would be salvific, and a giant step forward for so many organizations! But too often politics has made these objectives illegible: we’re not capable of prioritizing them, we’re not capable of making them concrete, there are too many dependencies, etc. This is where we need the strength of leaders: that they know how to reduce your objectives to the essential, that they know how to make them concrete, that they know how to prioritize the reduction of dependencies, that they know how not to get carried away by internal politics, that they know how not to be seduced by other hidden objectives, etc. They won’t reduce all dependencies, but the more they would reduce enough of them to do good for their products, decisions would be accelerated with prioritized and concrete objectives, genuinely linked to their products. And the rest? And the other constraints? The other objectives? They will follow. And above all, they will follow much faster than if you they take all of them into account immediately!

So a strategy: a clear, concrete objective, which can be broken down into sub-objectives just as clear and concrete (measurable) in the manner of an impact mapping or an OKR approach for example. Strategy is the path, the prioritization in the different branches of this path, and a way to quickly validate or invalidate hypotheses (hence the measurable intermediate objectives). All over a relatively limited period, because beyond six months hypotheses become really not very solid and don’t deserve that we spend too much time considering them.

I’ll talk to you about measures next time.