Over last many months, Productify seemed to have been finding its niche through high percentage of deep dives on product strategy. We started with All the strategy frameworks you need (April,2022) but then backed it up with many more: Advanced Strategy Frameworks (Oct,2023), What Stanford Teaches about Product Strategy (Sept,2023), Complete guide to product moats (July,2023), Spotify’s product strategy pivot (June,2023) and more.
But we are yet to touch upon a very important aspect of product strategy i.e how does the process or methodology to arrive at strategy (outcome) look like?
You might be happy about how strategy is arrived at in your company, or you might be completely bonkers hating it, but if you’re in the second camp, you’re not alone. Let us be honest, have we (as product community) ever been able to align on what is the scope and intent of product strategy? Sometimes it takes a shape of roadmap, other times it takes shape of bets without the how, and most other times it is something in between.
As Professor Burgerlman (Stanford) describes it: Strategy is the thinking that drives action to be successful in competition and collaboration.
But you can also learn a lot about strategy from actions of past historic figures:
As Napolean put it: "On s'engage et puis ... on voit," i.e First we engage, and then we shall see
and hence in today’s edition of Productify we focus on three important sections to make product strategy discussions and workshops better:
📖1.What’s wrong about how we run product strategy workshops today
🔒2.Loop framework: The iterative workshop approach to strategy discussion
🔒3.How to manage internal organizational resistance to Loop framework
Note that 📖 is for free subscribers, 🔒 is exclusively for paid subscribers. You can upgrade here:
What’s wrong about how we run product strategy workshops today?
10 commandments approach: One of the biggest problems in the way strategy discussions are run inside companies are that they are thought off as a one-time process that is deep, intensive and the team is expected to come out with 10 commandments of what we need to do next X years.
Most of the times this process runs at the end of the year, with an ambition to grow and improve on certain aspects next year. The problem with this approach is that it creates a perception in the organization that there is a document now (sealed and locked for eternity) that is to be executed upon next year, while the market continues to do what it does - act uncertain.
How much of your strategy workshop process allows for flexibility when it comes to down to change of strategy or certain aspects of it later in time? Do you build this mindset during strategy sessions that the strategy being decided will be reviewed and re-visited and hence it is a living document?Too vague to make sense or too narrow to allow for sense: Depending on the participants in a strategy exercise, your strategy can take multiple flight levels - in some cases it could be too vague and visionary (mostly run by vision-led individuals) that it allows your team to act in many possible ways or it could be too narrow that it allows your team to not apply their own brains at all (led by execution led individual)
Have you been ensuring that your workshops on strategy lead to right level of detail? i.e leave enough for teams to figure out and at the same time ensure your problems are well-defined and specific.Rigor and market focus lacking: By rigor, I mean the required attention to details and analytics behind ideas and bets. This can be derived from internal dynamics and data insights or this could be a result of external factors, which brings me to second aspect. Is your strategy addressing your internal ideas that you believe should work, or is it addressing market movements and ideas needed to address that market and needs.
Often, market is hard to measure and you go for macro factors and hearsay one-off anecdotes - which is often not enough to know the market well enough.
Have you been including market insights, market movements, competitor aspects and more in your strategy workshop sessions? If yes, how rigorous are you? and how much of that rigour is needed in workshops?Missing red seal of buy-in: If you have a good strategy in place and you believe this is what gets you to collaborate and win in the market, it would still not be effective if you fail to get organizational buy-in. Have you been including the right stakeholders in your strategy setting sessions? Have you been iterating during your strategy sessions to make sure all views internal and external are considered?
Have you and the management had an agreement on which big problems to solve? Do you also agree with other teams that these problems or bets make sense? Without a buy-in from others on your strategy, you will struggle when it comes to execution because every team will continue to execute on their own strategy. How many strategy outcomes do you end up with when doing workshops across your organization?
⭕Loop framework: The iterative workshop approach to strategy discussion
What I am about to introduce is not rocket-science, but it is another way and mindset to look at how you run strategy process in your company. Many strategy processes in companies are linear i.e that they have a start date (let us look at our strategy again!) and an end date (this is our strategy, let us communicate) and then the next many months go into bridging the strategy and execution gap without revisiting strategic aspects again.
Linear strategy processes have a big disadvantage. They reduce the impact and importance of strategy outcome and makes it rather a checklist in the huge list of corporate to-dos. Also, it makes the team think ‘strategy is done’ now it is all about execution - we need resources, we need people, we need tools and more.
In the loop framework of establishing strategy, setting the outcome and reviewing becomes a second nature to the organization, driven by an iterative looped approach rather than a linear process. Also, to make sure we don’t get lost in fancy jargons, I have tried to keep the steps in loop framework easy to follow. Here’s what it looks like:
