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About this book

There is one feedback that many junior product managers get pretty often: „You need to be more strategic!“. But what does that actually mean? And what is the product manager supposed to do with this feedback?

I have heard this feedback quite a lot during my career - and quite frankly still hear it from time to time. Management is always looking for candidates with strong strategic thinking.

Let’s think for a minute about the opposite. To be less strategic primarily means to be stronger in short-term operative work. Similar to when learning to drive a car. In the beginning, you focus on what is directly in front of your vehicle and your near surroundings. Once you get more experienced, you will ingest this information more subconsciously, and your view will expand further towards the horizon. Finally, you focus on the overall picture a few hundred meters further down the road, and try to anticipate when other vehicles will slow down or probably turn. This narrow focus is totally understandable and part of the journey.

But quite often, this is not what management actually means when it demands more strategic thinking. Strategy is often seen as the opposite of process and methodology. Product managers with strong process focus are automatically regarded as less strategic. Managers and executives are looking for the silver bullet. The golden ticket. Someone that magically knows the answer to what the future of the product should be. The visionary genius who provides the shortcut to everything.

That person does not exist.

Good strategy and strategic thinking are always hard work, regardless of genius and talent. So would you rather hire someone who got lucky a few times with his gut feeling or someone who knows the process of strategy development by heart and can recreate success again and again?

This book sets out to provide this strategy process and everything that you need to create incredible product strategies - again and again, and again.

Who should read it?

Obviously, this book is intended and written for product managers. If you are just starting out in product management the proposed blueprint of a strategy process will hopefully save you some of the above mentioned feedback of not being strategic enough. In addition, I included perspectives of other experts and also my own practical experience. This book could very well kickstart your career and help you skip a few years.

If you are a more experienced and senior product manager, this strategy framework will bring a new perspective to what you are already doing and will allow you to clear your current process from practices that are not really creating value. In addition, it will spark some fascinating and necessary discussions about the vision and strategy of your product. Think of this book as your personal coach, asking the uncomfortable questions about your product and your work.

And if you are currently CPO or VP Product in a larger organization, this book will hopefully help you communicate and teach what strategic product management is all about. Use it to double-check your own beliefs and mental models.

Development teams

If you are a designer, business analyst, or software developer, this book could be equally valuable to you as well. In the end, you are the driving force that actually builds the product and pours hour upon hour each day into it. If you have been in this industry for some time, you probably know how frustrating it can be to work on something you don’t believe in. To work on a product that you know does not fit the user problem. You know that most roadmaps are designed by management based on quick ideas the CEO had in the shower and fancy technology trends popping up every once in a while.

The laid-out product strategy framework can give you the background to articulate these issues to your product manager and management. Then, hopefully you can turn things around - for both yourself and your organization.

Non-product people

Many people are only indirectly involved in product development and product management but are still affected by it. This book is four you if you are working in software sales, customer success management, support, consulting or similar areas! It is your chance to get a solid background in product management without learning all the concepts of daily operative work or disciplines like user experience design. This book provides the bigger picture and connects all the dots. Think of it as your compass and map to navigate the product process and talk to product management at an eye level.

In most organizations, you are more involved in user communication and have your finger more on the market’s pulse than the product manager. And after the next release, you get to support and sell it. So make sure you understand this process and keep your product managers accountable for how they are moving towards the product vision.

Senior management

When your organization grows, management won’t have time or expertise to read every user story, release notes and test every software increment themselves. Senior management is about purpose, communication and alignment. I, therefore, urge every member of the leadership board and senior management to familiarize themselves with these strategic product management principles and the strategy framework. You don’t need to care whether the teams are working in Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe processes. But you should care what the product vision and current strategy are and how they are created. So don’t let your product manager off the hook with some visionary fluff mission statement and a prioritized list of features and projects. And don’t be that kind of manager that hands down their half-baked shower idea cause you heard about blockchain on a podcast…

Navigating the book

I will take you on the journey of defining and shaping your product vision and strategy. In the following chapter, you will learn about the holy trinity of product management and better understand the big picture and the connections between all artifacts. No technique presented in this book is meant to stand alone, and everything comes together in an intertwined framework.

Then we will dive into the most basic and essential building block and the guiding North Star for everything to come, your product vision. You will learn how to cut unnecessary fluff from your vision or mission statement, how to formulate an indeed user-centric vision and why you should have a measurable North Star metric.

The link between your long-term vision and your short-term roadmap is your product strategy. This is where the magic happens and where awesome products are born and separated from mediocre offerings. You will learn what good strategy separates from bad strategies and the thought process of developing a rock-solid strategy.

Next, we will focus on roadmaps. You will see why the most commonly used roadmaps are actually hindering your success and how you can turn them into something incredibly useful with themes and a focus on outcomes over outputs.

Following, we will deep dive into the structure of such a roadmap theme to make this concept much more tangible. Here you will see why user stories are not the way for most teams and how to replace them with something in the sweet spot between a well-defined concept and room for iterative customer feedback and your team’s own experience.

Lastly, we will put everything together and bridge all before mentioned concepts. We will talk about the process blueprint behind the strategy framework and how to connect all the dots. Regardless of the actual development process, you will get some new ideas for valuable team practices and ceremonies. I will also explain how to scale product management roles and the framework in larger organizations.

Industry expert insights

While I am proud to have shared what I know about product strategy with you, I am even prouder that I got some of the industry’s best experts and leaders to share their insights as well. Throughout the book, you will find several articles highlighting specific techniques or topics relevant to product strategy. I hope these will expand your horizon even further and really make this read worthwhile.