Read the transcript
0:00 Why product strategy matters
Well, if you're here, you must be a product manager. And if you're one, then you already know that one of the hardest things that you need to do is to prioritise features that deliver on company objectives. But what used to be difficult is even harder now because engineers have access to AI coding agents. That means they're able to deliver a lot more. And that means you have a lot more things to decide.
Now there's one thing that can potentially help you, and it's having a robust product strategy, especially if that product strategy is endorsed by your senior leadership. A good product strategy is useful because it acts as a primary filter for the things that should be done. And this is what this series is about. It's for product managers. It's about product strategy. It's about how to build one, how to present it, and how to defend it.
And in this video in particular, we're going to explain what it actually is. Now my name is Cyril Le Roux, and I've worked for over 20 years in different tech companies here in London in the United Kingdom. And these days I teach product management via a company called Product Focus, but I've also founded Produxity, which is where I've built Scaffold, which is an AI native tool to help product managers like you come up with a robust, defensible, a strong product strategy.
So let's start with the definition. What exactly is a product strategy?
1:29 What product strategy isn't
When you ask people what strategy means for them, you get a fairly long list of potential things. Some will say, well, it's the budget, or it's the way the resources have been allocated, others will say it's the positioning, some will say it's the vision, it's the mission, others will say it's the roadmap. Well, what I like to use as a definition myself is this.
1:49 The definition
Strategy is the pattern of activities undertaken in pursuit of long-term goals. And note here this word, it's a pattern. In other words, it's not so much the decision itself, but it's how you're making the decisions. In other words, it refers to the principles that you've used to make those decisions.
2:10 Strategy is a trip
We could illustrate strategy as a trip. Let's say you want to go to Austin, Texas, in the United States. Well, that's your destination, but it's your vision. So if we're bringing this back to a business context, that is your product vision. And we have a separate video in this channel on how to come up with a good product vision. But you have the destination. What is the next thing you need to know?
Well, you need to know where you are right now. So if it was a trip, do you need to know where in the world you are. So I'm in London in the United Kingdom. But it's not just that. It's also what's my budget? How flexible are the dates? How long do I want the trip to be? All of that will help me decide the strategy. So if we bring this back to a business context, all of this are your market conditions.
What Marty Cagan called the domain. That includes current company performance, what your competitors are doing, what your customers are thinking, what the rest of the industry is doing, what are technological social trends that you need to take into account. All of that is part of the domain. So a good product strategy is grounded in a very solid understanding of what the domain is. So now you have the domain or your point of origin, you have where you want to go, that's your product vision.
The product strategy is how you're going to link the two, but not the details of how, but the principles you're going to use to decide how. So if it was a trip, some of the principles could be, well, I want to minimise my carbon footprint. And so notice that it doesn't tell you what the option is, but you're going to review all the options and prioritise the one that have the least carbon consumption.
The other one would be I want to have maximum flexibility because it's actually going to be a business trip, and I don't know when I need to go. I will only know perhaps a day in advance, maybe a few hours. Well, then you're looking for very flexible ways of going there. It could be that you have a private jet if you can afford the budget. Or perhaps you want to enjoy the trip.
So you decide to instead land in New York City and drive down all the way to Austin, Texas. And you see, you have to separate the principles from the actual actions because the principle won't change if a plane becomes unavailable, if the most carbon effect efficient solution is no longer available, you move on to the next one. But the principles stay the same.
4:38 Present it before the roadmap
And once you've explained what your principles are, what your strategy is, once you've explained that to your stakeholders, it makes things a lot easier because everybody is everybody understands what you're solving for. So when you have a roadmap presentation, for instance, and you present in it before the roadmap, you present how you're making your decisions, and when everybody is aligned on how you're making decisions, then the debate is no longer whether we should prioritise a sales feature versus a customer service feature.
It becomes much more aligned with the strategy. What is it that we should be doing next. So this is why it is a very helpful, it is very helpful to have a good product strategy.
5:18 A real strategy: OpenTable
One real life example that I think is very interesting is that of OpenTable. So if we go back to the analogy, what was their destination? Their destination was to make it effortless to book a table in a restaurant at a time when you would have had to call, hope that somebody would pick up, you would have to call during opening hours, obviously, and then they would put your name down on their booking system, but it would probably be pen and paper.
So that was the destination, make it effortless. The starting point was that most restaurants either had no way of really managing their operations or were using largely pen and paper as well, or maybe some loose spreadsheet to cover some aspects of their operations. So you have the starting point, and you have the destination. As part of the starting point, you have to bear in mind that restaurants would probably not be interested in deploying a system just for reservations.
Not the biggest issue that they had at the time. So you have your starting point and your destination. How did they bridge the two? What was their strategy? Well, the strategy is called come for the tool, stay for the network. What OpenTable did was to create what you could call an operating system for restaurants that would allow them to manage different parts of their operation. And it was priced in a way and delivered in a way that made it a no-brainer for restaurants to adopt.
So they started by building the supply side of the equation instead of both supply and demand. And once they had half of restaurants running on their system, well, it was just then a case of turning the tap. And allowing people to book directly into that system. So I find that interesting because the pattern is clear. Build tools that people will use and want to have in their own right, so that you have the infrastructure deployed to be able to do something else that perhaps, as far as the original customer was concerned, wasn't part of the original plan.
7:13 Assess your strategy
So what do you do with all this? Well, you need to assess your strategy. For instance, look at what you've prioritised over the last few dev cycles. Look at what's been at the top of your backlog and rate it on a scale of one to five. What you'll find is, well, either you're delivering on your strategy. Four times out of five, that would be great. It's very hard to do.
Or you may find that your strategy is actually a little bit fluffy, a little bit vague. So that actually any feature you pick, you could find a way to make it fit within that strategy. And that is not a very helpful strategy because it doesn't help you filter things. Or you would find that you have a robust strategy, but you're actually not delivering on it. In which case, what you need to do is see how you can influence your stakeholders to adopt your strategy.
And perhaps presenting it formally ahead of presenting the roadmap would be a good way of gaining that support.
8:02 What's next
So this video was just about defining what strategy actually is, and how do you know that you have a good one, but hasn't actually told you how to build one. This is the subject of another video. How do you come up with a good strategy? How do you come up with a good vision? How do you understand where you are? All of these are things that I'm covering in my channel, so you know what to do.
Like and subscribe if you want to see more of this content.
Vision, strategy and roadmap
The three are often written as one document, and that is where most of the confusion starts. Each answers a different question, and each changes at a different speed.
| Question | Vision | Strategy | Roadmap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answers | Where are we going? | How will we get there, and what will we not do? | What do we build next? |
| Changes when | Rarely | When the evidence changes | Every few weeks |
| Written as | A sentence or two | A short narrative with its reasons | Themes or a sequence of work |
It is Thursday, and the week has gone the way most weeks go. A customer issue took Monday. Sales needed a feature explained for a deal. The CEO forwarded an idea from a conference. You shipped, you fixed, you answered, and the strategy document you meant to write is where it was on Monday: a heading and a few bullet points.
If you are the only product manager on a small team, this is the normal shape of the job. You decide what gets built, you have to defend it, and you spend fifty hours a week doing everything except the thinking that would make those decisions easier to defend.
Why the strategy is always the thing that slips
Tactical work drowns strategy because it feels like progress. Tactical decisions are easy, and fixing a customer's problem makes you the hero. Meanwhile nobody is minding the strategy, and the cost arrives later, usually when you present the roadmap.
Stakeholders who are not aligned on a strategy ask for what suits them now. Sales wants what closes accounts before the period ends. Customer service wants the fixes that cut its costs. Marketing wants something worth a campaign. Each request is reasonable; together they are death by a thousand cuts. You become a feature factory worker, your line manager steps in with less knowledge of the domain than you have, and you end up delivering a strategy you do not believe in.
There is a second reason, less often said. Many product managers are not sure what a product strategy is. Popular books show what a good strategy looks like, often as a canvas to fill in, without explaining how you arrive at one. The canvas is the destination's photograph, not the route.
Strategy is a trip
Before any trip you need two things: where you are, and where you want to go. How you link the two is the strategy.
Where you are is domain knowledge. Knowing your own product inside out is necessary and not enough: you need to be the subject matter expert on the domain, which means your competitors' strategies, the economics of your industry, and an intimate understanding of your customers and their pains. That expertise takes years, which is one reason it pays to specialise in an industry and stay there.
Where you are going is the vision. In a company with several products, it cascades from the company's vision rather than appearing on its own. A good vision is one you can picture. Microsoft's early ambition, in paraphrase, was a computer on every desk and in every home: you could imagine that world at once. Be as clear about how your product makes its users' world better.
The strategy is the set of principles you follow at every decision point. The roadmap is those principles applied to particular circumstances. The roadmap can change without the strategy changing.
Good principles say what you will not do. On a trip, "get there first at any cost" and "keep the carbon footprint low" are both reasonable principles, and they cannot both win. Choosing one is the strategy. A principle that never rules anything out is a slogan.
Six steps, in order
- 01Understand the strategy you inheritBefore writing anything, learn the company's vision and strategy, and whatever product strategy already exists. Accept that it may be light. As the first product manager this is a handover that takes time, longer if the domain is new to you, so do not rush it.
- 02Establish where you areBecome the subject matter expert on your domain, not just your product: your customers and their pains, your competitors' strategies, and the trends shaping your industry. Knowing your own product well is necessary and not enough.
- 03Choose where you are goingWrite a product vision that cascades from the company's vision and that people can picture. Be clear how the product makes its users' world better.
- 04Link the two with principlesThe strategy is how you get from where you are to where you are going: a short set of principles you will follow at every decision point. Good principles rule things out.
- 05Test the principles on real requestsTake the last month of requests and run them through the principles. If nothing is filtered out, the principles are too vague to be a strategy.
- 06Present the strategy before any roadmapEvery time you show the roadmap, show the vision and strategy first. If the roadmap is challenged because the strategy is, stop and agree the strategy. Then turn "no" into "not right away".
1. Understand the strategy you inherit
Your first job is not to write a strategy but to understand the one that exists: the company's vision, what leadership believes the business is for, and why the product looks the way it does. Accept that it may be light. If you are the first product manager, this is a handover with nobody to hand over, so it takes time, and longer again if the domain is new to you. Take it gradually. A strategy written in your first month is written without the knowledge it needs.
2. Establish where you are
Three kinds of evidence, in an order that works:
- Customers first. The value proposition canvas, from Alexander Osterwalder and his colleagues at Strategyzer, lays out customers' jobs, pains and gains beside what your product offers, and shows how well the two fit. For the conversations that feed it, Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test is the simplest discipline there is: ask people about what they have actually done, not whether they like your idea.
- Competitors next, and their strategies rather than their features. A feature comparison dates within months and means little unless you know where each rival is heading. Profile each one: what it appears to be playing for, and what your play against it would be. An AI assistant will draft these quickly; check its sources.
- Then industry trends: the forces that will change what customers need over the next few years, whatever any competitor does.
3. Choose where you are going
Write the product vision down, check that it cascades from the company's, and read it aloud to someone outside the team. If they cannot picture the world it describes, it is not finished. If it could describe any product in your category, it is not yours. More on that in how to write a good product vision.
4. Link the two with principles
Now the strategy itself: a short list of principles that get you from where you are to where you are going. It helps to see some that worked. Here are eight well-known patterns, each with a company that used it. Notice that none of the strategies names a feature. Each one decides, at every roadmap review, what comes out.
Scroll across, or use the arrows.
- 01 / 08Come for the tool, stay for the networkThe problem: A marketplace is only worth joining if the other side is already there. Buyers leave when there is too little to choose from, and sellers leave when there are too few buyers, so supply and demand have to grow at the same rate or one side is let down and walks away.The strategy: Grow one side first, by giving it a tool that is useful on its own, and open the other side once that side reaches critical mass. Chris Dixon gave the pattern its name.Who did it: OpenTable began by installing its Electronic Reservation Book in restaurants, replacing the paper book at the host stand and subsidising the setup to win them. Diners came as the restaurant network grew.At every roadmap review: anything that does not grow the chosen side waits.Chris Dixon, Come for the tool, stay for the networkHarvard Digital Initiative: OpenTable
- 02 / 08Stack features, do not spread peanut butterThe problem: Spread effort across everything customers ask for and every feature ends up thin: good enough to ship, never good enough to be the reason anyone chooses you.The strategy: Add features that make the ones you already have more valuable, so each release deepens the reason to use the product instead of widening it.Who did it: Apple's Continuity features, such as Handoff and Universal Clipboard, each make a second Apple device more useful, and several are built on Handoff. The opposite has a name. In 2006 Brad Garlinghouse, then a Yahoo senior vice president, described its strategy as spreading peanut butter: "a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular".At every roadmap review: a feature that does not strengthen the ones you have waits, however easy it is to build.Apple: Continuity features and requirementsAllThingsD: the Peanut Butter Manifesto
- 03 / 08Win a narrow market firstThe problem: A new product aimed at a whole market is nobody's first choice, and a small team cannot serve everyone well.The strategy: Pick a group small enough to serve exceptionally well, become its obvious choice, then move on to the next group along.Who did it: Facebook was at first only for Harvard students, a potential market of a few thousand people, before it opened to other universities.At every roadmap review: requests from outside the chosen group wait, however attractive the customer.Paul Graham, Do Things that Don't Scale
- 04 / 08Do things that don't scale, then automate themThe problem: Early on you do not yet know which steps customers value most, and software built on guesses is slow and expensive to unwind.The strategy: Deliver the result by hand for the first customers, then automate only the steps that turn out to repeat. Paul Graham gave the pattern its name.Who did it: Airbnb's founders went door to door in New York, recruiting hosts and helping them improve their listings, long before any of that was part of the product.At every roadmap review: nothing is automated until it has been done by hand often enough to prove it repeats.Paul Graham, Do Things that Don't Scale
- 05 / 08Win the user, then the organisationThe problem: Selling to a whole organisation up front is slow and expensive, and a small team cannot wait months for each deal.The strategy: Make the product easy for one person or team to adopt and pay for on their own, then grow each account as its value spreads. Atlassian calls it land and expand.Who did it: Atlassian chose a self-serve purchase experience over traditional sales, offers free versions of its products, and grows each customer by adding seats and products over time.Incidentally: this is Scaffold's strategy too. It sets out to win one product manager with their own strategy map first, then the organisation, as product books are shared with colleagues and a head of product.At every roadmap review: anything that needs a sales conversation before someone gets value waits.Atlassian: how growth levers help your business go the distance
- 06 / 08Serve the people nobody serves yetThe problem: Many people who need a result are nobody's customer, because the existing tools cost too much, need an expert or take too long to learn.The strategy: Remove whatever stops them, and compete with doing nothing rather than with the incumbents. Clayton Christensen called this competing with nonconsumption.Who did it: Canva's mission is to "empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere": everyone, not only designers.At every roadmap review: features that only an expert would miss wait.Canva: aboutChristensen Institute: disruptive innovation
- 07 / 08Make every use show the product to someone newThe problem: A small team cannot outspend anyone on marketing, so it needs a way to be seen that costs nothing extra.The strategy: Design the core use of the product so that using it introduces it to the next customer.Who did it: Every email sent from Hotmail ended with "PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail", so each user introduced the service to everyone they wrote to.At every roadmap review: anything that hides the product from the people on the receiving end waits.TechCrunch: PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail
- 08 / 08Give the tool away, earn from what it enablesThe problem: Charging for a tool slows its adoption, but a free tool on its own does not pay for itself.The strategy: Make the tool free, and earn from a related activity that the tool makes easier.Who did it: Wave gives away invoicing and bookkeeping, and earns a fee when customers take card payments on those invoices, and from paid extras such as payroll.At every roadmap review: a free feature that does not lead towards the paid activity waits.Wave: pricing
Yours will not look like any of these. It comes from where you are and where you are going. But it should pass the same test: if a principle never takes anything off the roadmap, it is a slogan, not a strategy.
5. Test the principles on real requests
Take the last month of requests from sales, customers and the CEO and run each one through the principles. Some will be in, some out. If nothing comes out, the principles are too vague. If everything comes out, either the principles are wrong or the business has been heading somewhere nobody wrote down, and that is a conversation to have with leadership now rather than at the next roadmap review.
6. Present the strategy before any roadmap
Every time you present the roadmap, present the vision and strategy first, so the discussion that follows is about solving the same problem. If the roadmap is challenged because the strategy is, there is no point discussing the roadmap: agree the strategy first. With the strategy accepted, most pushback changes shape. It is no longer "this is a bad idea" but "these other ideas get us to the destination faster". You are not saying no; you are saying not right away.
That also means you will talk about strategy a lot. That is the point. The more you talk about strategy, the better.
Where the time comes from
None of this happens in the gaps between tactical work, because there are no gaps. It happens when you take time back. AI gives you a way to do that. Keep asking of each task: is this a job for me, or something an AI could take care of? Sales enablement material and customer service training are examples that no longer deserve much of a product manager's time. Reinvest what you save in understanding your market, your customers and your competitors, and use AI there too, to move faster.
Two cautions. Never trust an AI completely: good domain knowledge is what lets you spot the claim that does not add up, so check the sources. And an AI can offer strategic options, but you are the one who has to explain the strategy you choose. Convince yourself it is the best option before you present it.
Where AI helps, and where it doesn't
AI is good at the legwork: reading what your company has already written, researching the market and competitors, and drafting a first version for you to react to. It should not make the choices. A strategy is a set of trade-offs that someone has to own and defend.
The tools differ more than their marketing suggests: AI tools for product strategy, compared by the job they do.
A worked example: the strategy narrative in Scaffold
Scaffold is an AI product strategy tool: it finds what your material already says, drafts what research can support, and leaves every choice to you. For the only product manager, the route through these steps looks like this:
- Company Foundations records the company's vision, mission and strategic pillars, usually from internal documents you upload, so the product direction stays consistent with leadership's.
- Product Vision builds on it and defines what the product will become and who it serves.
- Competitor Profiles, Market Watch and Megatrends research your rivals, the market's signals and the long-term forces on your industry. They are among the 9 activities that make claims about the outside world, and on those, three models draft and a judge reconciles.
- Growth Paths or How You Compete explore the route, and Strategic Options compares the directions you kept with changing nothing, on the same evidence.
- Strategy Narrative ("The Trip") frames the strategy as a journey: where we are, where we are going, why, and how. It builds on 9 earlier activities: Product Vision, Company Foundations, 3 Horizons, Zone to Win, Uncontested Market Strategy, Competitor Strategy + SWOT, Megatrends, Porter's Five Forces, Strategic Options.
- Roadmap then turns the strategy into a prioritised roadmap, and Now, Next, Later lays it out by rough timing rather than fixed dates.
The homepage follows Vintum, a fictional company that rents furnished homes in Lisbon to people on work assignments, from a link to a strategy.
Two limits, said plainly. Scaffold owns the judgement, never the backlog: the roadmap it ends in goes into whichever tool your team uses for delivery. And it does not choose the strategy for you. You still have to explain it, so you still have to believe it.
When this is not your job
One product manager should not write a separate strategy: the one in a very early startup whose CEO runs the strategy hands-on. There, the job is to execute that strategy faithfully. Everything in step 2 still helps: knowing where you are makes the execution better. But the principles are the CEO's to set.
In short
- Understand the strategy you inherit before writing your own, and do not rush it.
- Where you are is domain knowledge: customers, competitors' strategies, industry trends.
- Where you are going is a vision people can picture, cascading from the company's.
- The strategy is the principles that link them, and good principles rule things out.
- Present vision and strategy before every roadmap, and say "not right away" instead of no.
- Take the time from tactical work, with AI's help, and never adopt a strategy you cannot defend.
Look at the last roadmap you presented. Could you name the principle behind every item on it? If not, that is where to start this week.