INTRODUCTION: What is Product Strategy Integration?

This e-book presents a framework for cohesively integrating product strategy throughout a product development organization.

This e-book is primarily directed towards product managers seeking to elevate their impact and leadership skills. However, all of the ideas shared here are entirely relevant for anyone (design, data, engineering, etc.) directly contributing to product development.

The ultimate goal of this e-book is to maximize the success potential of product development teams by deeply integrating product strategy throughout all roles and processes.

Long-term product success requires more than serendipity; it requires a coherent strategy.

Product development organizations operate amidst uncertainty, constraints, and fierce competition. They must navigate complexity while minding budgets, ethics, and regulations. And all of these challenges are compounded by the constant evolution of business and market contexts.

While there is no shortage of thought leadership on crafting strong business strategies and product strategies as their extension, simply having a good strategy - in a single document, in a single leader’s mind, or at a single point in time - is still not enough.

A significant challenge lies in coordinating strategy across functional roles, collaborative processes, and time. Moreover, the intrinsic motivations of product development teams - things like tradecraft and problem solving - aren’t inherently self-aligning with business interests.

So, how does an organization DO strategy at scale without veering on to different wavelengths? How do you operationalize product strategy across diverse teams and roles? How do we ensure ongoing strategic alignment when decision-making is distributed across many tradecraft experts? And, most importantly, how can we avoid institutionalizing competing interests that erode cohesion and undermine progress towards our goals?

This e-book provides a practical guide to answering these critical questions through the lens of the product management role. It explores how to activate and operationalize product strategy at scale with a focus on empowering decision-making. Beyond this, it will showcase how to build systems and processes that enable the continuous optimization of product strategy.

The framework presented in this e-book will provide product managers with a practical collection of concepts and tactics to maximize product strategy integration at all levels of a product development organization and throughout the product development lifecycle. 

This framework is organized around three stages of product strategy integration: ACTIVATE, OPERATIONALIZE, and OPTIMIZE:

Before diving into the practices and concepts that enable strategy integration, let’s examine the tenets of a robust product strategy:

Product Strategy

The concept of “strategy” is typically understood as a plan of action and/or a decision-making framework. Roger Martin describes business strategy as a set of integrated choices intended to compel desired customer action - a definition I particularly like and agree with.

A “product strategy” encompasses a number of specific considerations and qualifications that are necessary for the success of developing a product. The key components are:

• A target market or audience

• A target problem or class of problems faced in the target market

• Unique insights gleaned from data and market interactions

• A vision for the unique, fully realized, value-added end state for the market using your product

• A clear, company-centric link to vision or "winning aspiration" that establishes or reinforces a motivating purpose

• A direction to arrive at a target market condition (the product goal) from the current state market condition

• Deliberate “no” choices about out-of-scope market segments and problems

• Methods for ongoing discovery and strategy refinement

• A framework for decision-making through change, uncertainty, and constraints

• A clear connection between product and business goals

• An economic model to sustain resources

• A sub-strategy for bringing the product to market

• A sub-strategy for selling and supporting the product

Strategy Pillars and Principles from Thought Leaders

Roger L. Martin's "Playing to Win" Strategy Choice Cascade:

• What is our winning aspiration?

• Where will we play?

• How will we win where we have chosen to play?

• What distinctive capabilities must be in place to win?

• What management systems are required to ensure the distinctive capabilities required to win are in place?

• ...and the most important strategy question: "What would have to be true?"

Amazon’s strategic principles:

• Customer obsession > competitive focus

• Passion for invention

• Commitment to operational excellence

• Long-term thinking

Spotify's DIBBs strategy framework:

• Data > Insights > Beliefs > Bets

Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy / Bad Strategy "Strategy Kernel":

• Diagnosis

• Guiding Policy

• Coherent Actions

"Empowered" by Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) describes:

• Willingness to make tough choices on what’s really important

• Generating, identifying, and leveraging insights

• Converting insights into action

• Active management without micromanagement

Roman Pichler's Product Strategy as a System:

• People (empowered product development team, stakeholders, etc.)

• Process (discovery, iterative validation, continuous strategy)

• Principles (value focus, collaboration, iteration, adaptation)

• Tools (measurement, vision, canvases, personas, story maps, jobs-to-be-done, etc.)

For the purposes of this e-book, we’ll define “product strategy” as:

Taking a moment to unpack that definition, we have:

[collection of product developments AND supporting activities]

…which implies that a plan for product developments alone is insufficient. A successful product strategy also requires supporting activities to interpret and apply strategy at many levels, make on-going decisions, and to continuously discover, validate, and optimize product strategy over time.

[to reach a desired end state]

…which captures a sense of vision and direction, qualified by:

[yield the most positive outcomes against 1) your market’s needs and 2) your own business goals]

…which implies that a good product strategy has the challenging task of optimizing for two separate, but related, sets of "problems" simultaneously. The notion of market/customer value is captured in “your market’s needs”, while “your own business goals” is some specific combination of: product/business model validation, economic outcomes, and/or corporate valuation. More on this in parts 1 and 2!

“Product Strategy Integration”

How do we being thinking about what it means to "integrate" product strategy across organizational roles, decision-making processes, product development activities, and the change that occurs across time?

We can start by drawing a comparison to another form of integration: strategy integration is the decision-making counterpart to “people and process” operational integration.

Strategic decision-making is indeed less tangible and measurable than operational process. It's a rather abstract notion. Frankly, it is both more difficult and less intuitive.

Nonetheless, in a complex product development environment that is characterized by highly distributed decision-making (think: software products with pods of engineers continuously developing parts of a common solution), the burden of strategy integration is exponentially greater. It's also that much more critical to success.

Two characteristics define the process of product strategy integration: that product strategy is integrated in both an iterative and adaptive manner. Lets zoom in on those two key ideas.

Iterative

Strategy must be iterative because there is an interactive relationship between your constantly evolving solution and the many dimensions of evolving context (market, business, customer, architecture, etc.) the solution exists within.

Said differently, the moment you stop iterating on product strategy is the moment you create de-integration risk. Contributors across the business and within product development will veer on to different paths if they say "heads down" and out-of-sync too long.

This idea is completely intuitive in other contexts. For example, you wouldn't hike into an unfamiliar forest, off-trail, towards an unfamiliar destination, without periodically stopping to check, "am I still on track?" or "is this still the best route?".

There is a subtle but defining implication in that analogy: that product development, just like hiking through forest, faces an element of unknows, or complexity. Lots more to come on the notion of complexity in part 3...

Adaptive

Strategy must also be adaptive because there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all strategy for all dimensions of a product development. Each tradecraft expert must continuously adapt the broader product strategy to their respective area of decision-making.

The “high level” strategy you develop to answer questions like “why should our product exist in this market?” doesn't also resolve questions like “why should we use this specific piece of technology to solve this fine-grain engineering problem”. Similarly, a robust architectural strategy doesn't answer every question about how to design a user experience. And yet, we all understand that technical architecture and user experience are highly interactive dimensions of a solution.

Returning to the hiking-through-the-forest-without-a-trail analogy: it's completely intuitive that you must adapt to changing or unexpected conditions. A deep, washed out trench that wasn't obvious on your topo map might require a route modification. A sow brown bear with cubs crossing your path might cause you to reconsider life and hiking choices. If you decide on a new route that is a mile or two longer to avoid bear and trenches, you might also need another stop by the babbling creek for more water and rest.

Whether it's navigational, circumstantial, or resource related, you iterate and adapt the route strategy accordingly!

Strategy Integration Objectives

The process of strategy integration seeks to accomplish three objectives:

We use relative words like "minimize" and "maximize" here because the reality is that there is no such thing as “perfect” strategy integration - only degrees of better and worse.

On the one hand, accomplishing absolutely no iterative and adaptive strategy integration all but guarantees failure. On the other hand, a relatively high degree of strategy integration maximizes the success potential of a product development team.

Several articles have explored the concept of “bridging the gap” between strategy and execution from a theoretical or corporate operations perspective. Some notable works are:

• The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution published by Harvard Business Review explores which factors matter most to “strategy execution” - factors like information access, decision authority, motivators, and organizational structure.

• Pertaining more directly to product management, Brian Joe wrote “How to Cross the Strategy-to-Execution Chasm” which provides an insightful picture of the multi-dimensionality of both product strategy and corporate organizations and discusses how challenging it can be to accomplish the right overlay.

• John Utz wrote about the importance of crossing the strategy-execution chasm through the lens of the product strategist role.

• Finally, Shikhin Agarwal wrote a two-part series outlining a collection of concepts and tactics describing “An Integrated Approach to Product Strategy” (paywall). His articles are probably most closely related in spirit to the content of this e-book.

These articles are noteworthy in their recognition of the importance and the difficulty of cohesive strategy integration. They touch on many relevant concepts and even a few practices. Yet, none provide a comprehensive, continuous framework for product managers and product development teams to employ.

The Line Between "Strategy" and "Execution"

Decision-making is inherently strategic.

If the "execution" of a contributing role requires expert tradecraft decision-making, then strategy and execution are arguably two sides of the same keyboard.

I believe the more pressing question is: "how do we cohesively integrate our distributed decision-making functions?".

Enabled with the right skills, product managers are uniquely positioned to support the ongoing integration of product strategy throughout all contributing roles and processes in a product development organization. This e-book is their playbook.

What this e-book covers:

The framework described in this e-book will guide a product manager through all levels of strategy integration: from the biggest picture of product narratives and product-market fit to the smallest implementation decisions; from senior executives to the newest, most junior member of the product development team; and from the first feature to the last bug fix.

The three parts of this e-book are organized around three stages of product strategy integration: ACTIVATE, OPERATIONALIZE, and OPTIMIZE. Here is a quick preview:

Part 1

1. Explore how to most effectively ACTIVATE product strategy across a product development team using a [narrative container] + [system of stories] approach to articulating and evangelizing strategy

2. Learn how to use the Product Narrative Canvas to create compelling product narratives and frame product strategies

3. Discuss how to build out the system of interrelated and synergistic stories that represent your immediate strategy for action through outcome-oriented and objective-organized roadmaps

4. Review OKRs and KPIs

Part 2

1. Explore how to most effectively OPERATIONALIZE product strategy by embracing a new mantra

2. Review the customer > product > business outcome chain and the relationships among them

3. Understand how to commence discovery activities, synthesize insights, and identify opportunities

4. Learn tactics like problem statement generation for effective context framing

5. Employing decision-making frameworks like the North Star Metric framework

Part 3

1. Understand the difference between complexity and complication in software development endeavors, how to parse them, and how to react accordingly

2. Establish measurement and collaboration constructs to continually harness emergent “Product Truth” and harvest strategic insights

3. Learn how to continuously OPTIMIZE product strategy by answering iterative "pivot or persevere?" questions