From Vision to Strategy

The product vision sets the ultimate destination, the change the product should create in the world. The product strategy tells how you are going to realize this vision.

While the vision serves as north star and remains stable for a longer period of time, the strategy is continuously adapted to changing situations.

Product Strategy

The product strategy addresses:

1. Market and needs (Sense)
2. Differentiators (Sense)
3. Business goals (Focus)

1. Market and needs (Sense)

Market

Market are the target segments your product addresses.

Segmentation is the process of creating homogenous groups of your users. In data analytics segments are called cohorts and can also be reflected as personas in product discovery and development.

Usually those groupings are either

• Property based: common attributes such as demographics (age, gender, education, etc.), psychographics (interests, opinions, etc.), geographic regions, industries (automotive, health care, finance, etc.), company size (small and medium size enterprises, large corporate, etc.) or
• Benefit based: problem and value the product creates for the users

Needs

The benefit based approach will connect your users immediately to the value proposition of your product and you can still sub-segment your users further based on properties if needed.

Potential

Having identified the potential target groups will then give you the possibility to narrow it further down to choose the main group you want to address for a clear focus.

Attractiveness of the market segment can be analyzed with questions such as:

• How large is the main target group?
• What growth potential will it offer for my product?
• What are existing competitors for this group?

2. Differentiators (Sense)

Differentiators / Key Features / Unique Sales Proposition (USP) / Crucial Success Factors (CSFs) are the essential elements your product must deliver to be successful. To keep it simple: those are the reasons why a user would be willing to spend money on your product.

Most often you will not develop the next big thing that will completely disrupt markets. Therefore, you must ensure that you understand where your product stands out compared to the competition.

3. Business value (Focus)

In Product Thinking this is called Focus: Identifying what outcomes drive what business results.

There are many tools available to bring all dimensions together in the context of business value creation:

• Extended product vision board: (Roman Pichler)
• Business Model Canvas: (Osterwalder and Pigneur)
• Opportunity Canvas: (Jeff Patton)

The most important feature of all of those tools is to define clear metrics what success will look like. You need clear success metrics to continuously monitor if you are on the right track or if you need to pivot. Metrics must measure the outcome, that means the impact your product has on actions of your users.

Validation

Risk-driven validation

Uncertainties

Building digital products involves a lot of uncertainties and there are different methods to build up confidence.

Biggest risk

As a first step you need to validate those uncertainties that have the highest risk for the success of your product.

Just enough… not more

When you run product discovery validation focus only on the minimum you need to learn to adapt fast. There will always be something you learn in research. If you make discovery work too large it will take longer and you don’t want to delay learning in early discovery stages.

Review

After having release the first iteration of your product you must continuously monitor success. Your product strategy has already defined success metrics. Based on those metrics you will be able to steer the direction of the product and make course corrections and adjust the strategy to head towards the vision’s destination.

The vision defines the north star – the ultimate end state what problem we will solve for our users. The continuous learnings will help to adjust the strategy – the path towards that vision.