The Eight Core Elements of a Winning Product Strategy

John Utz
Product Coalition
Published in
9 min readAug 30, 2022

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“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” — Michael Porter

There I sat, facing a significant strategic choice. After what seemed like months of work, our product was emerging from stealth mode. The leadership team finally agreed on the vision. The north star was clear — enabling consumers to make the right decisions about their health at an affordable price. We knew our market inside and out. However, we were at a crossroads when it came to the user base. Should we only offer the product to members or the market at large? One allowed for a personalized experience, while the other offered a larger market potential.

To build a successful product strategy, you must be willing to make tough choices that have a lasting impact and represent big moves. This requires open-mindedness, curiosity, creativity, and careful consideration of each option. That said, you must make a choice.

No choices = no product strategy.

The series of choices following a framework = the product strategy.

Back to the dilemma — As I considered the merits of each possible option to build a user base, I weighed them against the product strategy framework, the pros/cons, coherence, and value.

Going back and forth and debating with colleagues, I realized it wasn’t an and or question. Serving non-members would create a flywheel that would increase membership.

Choice made. The best answer was to serve both sets of users.

The End Game of Product Strategy

A product strategy synthesizes the choices made and packages them into a document. A document with one primary goal — creating clarity around the path forward. Clarity around the product vision, market opportunity, value to the user, how to win in the market, metrics, objectives, assumptions, dependencies, constraints, and how the product delivers results for the organization.

Clarity enables the team to translate the choices into a functional product that creates value. So as you make choices, package the strategy into a document, and share it with the product team, keep four words in mind — a clear path forward.

The Value of Coherence

Coherence has many meanings, but in the context of product strategy, I prefer this definition — the quality of forming a unified whole that is logical and consistent. Coherence is a critical factor in whether the product strategy delivers value to the organization.

When determining the coherence of options, there are three questions I use:

  1. Does the choice reinforce the product strategy? How?
  2. Does the choice align with the organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and strategy? How?
  3. Does the choice generate an advantage from the company’s core competencies? How?

Once documented, I use a simple scoring mechanism to determine coherence:

  • A yes with a solid how gets a one.
  • A yes with a weak how or a no receives a zero.

The higher the score, the better the coherence. While you could spend hours, if not days, debating the coherence of scenarios, if you are willing to flag weak coherence or no coherence, you can move through scenarios quickly.

The Elements of a Winning Product Strategy

In my twenty years in various corporate, digital, and product strategy capacities, I have boiled product strategy down to eight core elements. These core elements I find, when properly explored and documented, enable the development of a product that wins in the market.

1. Vision and the north star

A clear, crisp statement providing a point, a coordinate, unwavering and trustworthy. It represents the waypoint your team will use to navigate the product to success over the next five years. Of equal importance, you also must include a narrative on how you arrived at the statement, an origin story of sorts. Documenting how you arrived at the winning strategy, the alternatives you explored, and why you chose vision and north star will help the team buy-in, creating trust.

For more details please read How to Design a Product North Star that Motivates the Team to Acheive Greatness).

2. The market opportunity

In which market will your product compete? Is the market big enough to be interesting? Is there space we can carve out? Is there sufficient size (sometimes called the total addressable market) and space (also known as the serviceable addressable market) that will create a payback on your investment? Can your product compete and remain viable?

Many market opportunities exist; however, they may not be viable to pursue. Viability comes in three parts. First, does my company or product have what it takes to serve this market? Second, can I compete in this market? Third, can I differentiate enough to generate revenue at our target margin?

3. User-centered value story

User value is not just a metric. User value represents how the product will make the user’s life better. The user-centered value story is a narrative that explains the value the user wants and how they get it from your product. It articulates what they do with the value accrued, how the product fits in their day, and why they will want the product.

Telling a story about user value will force you to explain the product from your user’s perspective. The user-centered value story is typically a narrative with journey maps and a high-level summary of any user research.

4. How to win

Most feel this is an obvious question; however, the answers are often elusive. It’s not about a short statement like, “We will win because we are the best of breed.”. Whatever that means. It’s about the deliberate choices you must make to win in the market and create revenue and sustainable profit. Do you choose a subscription model or pay-as-you-go? Do you hire a sales team or over-index on marketing? Will you be a value provider or innovator?

Think about all the intentional choices you have to make from a strategic, functional, and execution perspective. Companies and strategists tend to skip this critical section because it’s hard. How to win represents your choices, assumptions, core beliefs, and what must hold true for success in the market.

5. Objectives

Objectives will be simple for those familiar with the OKR (objectives and key results) process pioneered by Intel and detailed in the book Measure What Matters. If OKRs are unfamiliar, I suggest reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr. OKRs represent your mile markers. The objectives define what success means year over year. The key results represent the specific quarterly measures that help you to understand if you are on track.

6. Value Metrics

Value metrics come in two parts — value to the user (and buyer) and value to your organization. While we touched on user value above, the value to your organization is equally important. Think about the positive value the product will produce for your organization. Will it create value in an existing construct — e.g., new revenue? Will it create a whole new category of value — e.g., the trading volume of NFTs?

Don’t fall for the trap of equating metrics to money. When you map the value of your product, you may find that the revenue comes at the expense of higher infrastructure costs or call volume. Track the areas your product is producing negative value (e.g., higher call center volume) as closely as a positive value (e.g., NFT trading volume). As you set your metrics, remember the buyer and seller sides, positive and negative value, and that metrics must be clear and measurable.

7. Assumptions, constraints, and dependencies (ACD)

Without these, your team won’t understand the boundary conditions to turn the strategy into a product and what hypothesis (assumptions) they need to validate. Imagine telling your team they need to build NFT-based digital donuts. In your excitement and desire to move fast, you leave out the assumption that Gen Z will be interested given the NFT hype (assumption), that the donut retail locations will be the distribution channel (dependency), and that the budget is $10 million(constraint).

You must document your assumptions, the dependencies, and the constraints. Once you complete your ACDs, you should review them in aggregate for feasibility. For example, is $10 million even enough to create an NFT trading platform for digital donuts?

8. Delivering results to your organization

Given that the product strategy is the bridge to the company’s strategy, it’s essential to tie the two together. Help the product team connect their work back to the big picture, the company’s purpose, vision, mission, and strategic objectives.

Making Strategic Choices

Given choices represent the product strategy’s foundation, I wanted to share the model I use to work through each critical choice (note that not all choices require the same level of consideration).

  1. Document the choice. What is the choice you have to make? Why do you have to make it? What happens if you don’t?
  2. Lay out the alternatives. What are the different paths you can follow?
  3. Work through each choice’s pros and cons and the imagined end point of following each path.
  4. Narrow down the alternatives based on coherence, pros/cons, and possible end points to 2–3 paths.
  5. Explore each choice in depth. What happens if you choose A over B? In my case, what happens if we open the digital health app to the general public vs. our existing members?
  6. Debate both paths with the product team. Disagree. Go back and forth. But ultimately, remember you need to commit to the decision.
  7. Document the final choice and the why.

Outlining the Strategy

Before getting started, reread:

  1. The First Principles of Successful Product Strategy, and
  2. The Essential Questions That Lead to a Great Product Strategy.

Once you complete the exercises from The Essential Questions That Lead to a Great Product Strategy, work through any other choices needed/options to add, and complete the steps above to narrow down to 2–3 possible scenarios.

The questions/answers from the FAQ and choices/options will form the basis for your product strategy outline. I will post more on each core element of the product strategy over the coming weeks as I did on the north star (How to Design a Product North Star that Motivates the Team to Acheive Greatness), so please follow me if you’d like to be updated.

Next, cut each question/answer pair or question/choice/option pair out and put it on a physical card (or put them on a card on a digital board). Creating cards will let you rearrange them on a physical or virtual whiteboard as you outline and build the product strategy. It will also serve as a backlog as you work forward.

The final step is to map the physical/digital cards to each of the eight sections of the product strategy above. Doing so will provide you with an outline and rough draft for the strategy as you move forward and develop each section.

What to Do Next

Once your outline is ready, bring key collaborators to debate and drive changes — company leaders, the corporate strategy team (if applicable), the head of product, design, engineering, sales, and marketing.

All can provide valuable input as you refine the outline and iterate on each product strategy section. As you bring them in, be sure you have clearly defined sessions and timelines; otherwise, it can get unproductive and drag on endlessly. In addition, you need to ask for specific and time-boxed feedback.

Finally, share the product strategy outline (and the final product strategy when ready) with each key collaborator. In a way, they each act as a coach to you, and you, in turn, will serve as a coach for their teams as they execute the strategy.

📌 Follow me on:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-utz/
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/prodlabio

Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.

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Customer obsessed digital product and strategy leader with experience at startups, consulting firms and Fortune 500. https://tinyurl.com/John-Utz-YouTube