Product Strategy
You'll need a solid plan for success to get your business to where you want it to be.
What is product strategy?
A product strategy is an established plan describing your business goals, direction, product development, and management approach. Usually, it elaborates on your portfolio of products, what these products achieve for clients, the value proposition, your ideal customers, market differentiators, market analysis, and available resources. The plan also highlights how your company believes your product will change and evolve as customer demand changes. These changes could also address potential products you plan to add to your portfolio.
What is a product strategy roadmap?
A product strategy roadmap is a plan that showcases how you will get from where your business is now to where you want to be.
The purpose of developing a product strategy roadmap is to ensure that you and the business are thinking through each product development process. By thinking through the process, you can clearly identify how products relate to the needs of your ideal customers and whether those products support your overall business goals.
Without building a roadmap that includes this in-depth planning, you risk wasting time and money on developing products your customers don’t want and won’t buy.
What do I get from a product strategy?
Developing a product strategy can help your business validate if your product development processes are on the right track. The information gathered in your market research, competitive analyses, product positioning statements, and user research creates a comprehensive testing approach to verify that your products fit your market. Regularly referring back to your product strategy also allows you to adjust your products and the trajectory of your product portfolio if things fall out of alignment.
Product strategy can also establish product development priorities for your business. For example, if your product development team has a list of new products or features they want to pursue, you can measure those against the information gathered in the product strategy. Then, you can determine which new products or features align best with the business now versus those that align better with future positioning goals.
Building your product strategy roadmap also enables you to develop your single source of truth. By having all this information established, regularly reviewed, and updated, you set your business up for success by aligning product development with the needs of your users and organization. It creates a literal roadmap that everyone can refer to so all departments are on the same page.
What is a product strategy framework?
A product strategy framework will help your business stay organized and focused on your goals. Effective frameworks contain several components that provide detailed descriptions of business-critical information. At Steelhead Software, we often recommend including the following:
Product strategy benefits
How does Steelhead Software create product strategy?
We use a structured approach when developing product strategies for clients. Generally, we begin by thoroughly analyzing your target market, identifying customer needs, noting market trends, and highlighting potential opportunities. Next, we define your product vision and mission by clearly articulating what your product aims to achieve and how it aligns with your business goals. Doing so can help us identify your KPIs and key metrics that will help us measure what success looks like.
To verify market fit, we also perform competitive analyses to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Doing so allows us to identify the areas where your products can gain a competitive advantage.
We then begin building a detailed product roadmap that showcases the evolution of your product by breaking down the information into key milestones, timelines, and resource requirements necessary for bringing your product to market. Next, we include a projected risk assessment to note your product's challenges during development, how we plan to get around those challenges, and any related recommendations.
We present all this information in a finalized asset to give you an established product strategy you can take to your team and potential investors. Note that while this is an in-depth plan for delivering your product to market and improving your competitive advantage, the product strategy does not detail the actual build. You must go through a formal discovery process with our team to get that information.
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