How about we make Product Strategy simple?

I’m not too fond of the articles out there on Product Strategy. Why? Because they often present a set of steps that sound great in practice but create a boat-load of noise for PMs. And this noise distracts them from making good decisions.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Product Strategy can and should be simple — ****’ing simple.

At Gousto, I’ve written or reviewed strategies across Signup, Refer a Friend, Account Management, Menu Experience, Personalisation, Retention, and Comms. I’ve seen them play out, for better or for worse. I’ve also advised early-stage startups on their product strategies. Over time, I’ve refined a simple process for creating a great strategy fast.

You don’t need to create a plan for the perfect product that is defensible for 1,000 years in some “meta-verse” like Oasis. You just need a simple program that’ll help your team navigate through learning about and solving valuable customer problems. Concentrate on building products customers love. And you can make the features fit together later.

Let’s make Product Strategy simple.

Strategy is one of the most overused words out there. “Oooooh, this project is strategic, it’s more important than yours”, or “OOOoooOOOoh, we’re not thinking strategically enough. What’s our STRATEGY”. Well bloody hell Bill, what do you mean by that?

In a nutshell, strategy is a focusing mechanism. It defines “what you will do” and “what you won’t do” to achieve a given goal.

So, let’s break it down:

1. Set the scope

First, you need to align on the playpen. I’ve got a few thoughts here. But you know what? I’m not going to share them… Others have done thinking here far better than me, and while this is an important stage, it is never the part where people fall down on.

• Define the customer experience(s) your team is responsible for
• Define the key metric(s) your team cares about

And move on…

2. Map the opportunities

This stage is the battleground where minotaurs are slain, and heroes are made. Thinking things through properly will be the difference between life and death.

But what weapon to take into the arena?

Get the RICE cooker…

This will take a little bit of faith

I used to doubt Intercom’s RICE framework. I didn’t like reducing opportunities to numerical assessments. I felt it would substitute critical thinking around making decisions.

But I’ve come full circle. I now am a RICE lover (with a few flavourful specs to get the most out of it). Its beauty is in its simplicity. You ask the only four essential questions about a given opportunity and avoid giant lists that confuse decisions. I have it with nearly all my strategic meals, and I recommend you do too. It won’t be the tool for EVERY strategy you create (ICE or other custom models sometimes better) but should be very useful for 90% of customer-facing teams.

In short, what are the highest impact changes you can make, that affect the most amount of people, that you have the most evidence for, that are fastest to do?

Simple, right?

Running an Airbnb example through the cooker.

In this blog, for fun(?) I’m going to use AirBnB’s core search experience as an example. And before you ask, I’m not looking for a job there (but I would like a gift card, please).

See the diagram below where I surface five big opportunities in the space.

I evaluate each with the RICE framework, but with the following super important specifications outlined in the table below… In particular, I separate out Effort from the calculation as it has a high potential to skew results too much at the opportunity stage as you can nearly always break solutions down/find lean ways to iterate. It’s detailed, but if you seriously want to deploy this framework I recommend a deep read. And making sure those that interpret your RICE scoring read it too.

Next to each RICE’d opportunity should be sharp rationales (3–5 bullets max) referencing data or assumptions you’ve made to assess Reach and Impact (not included here).

Those assumptions and interpretations of data will very likely be wrong (especially at early stages). But by surfacing them clearly you can then facilitate meaningful feedback discussions from everyone around the business, and deeply challenge your thinking.

Never forget, the power of this method is in the discussion of rationales (assumptions and data) and decisions you take, not in specific numbers or the table itself. The outcome is not a ‘perfect table. Aim to reduce cognitive load by shortening the table to the few big score opps for better discussion.

Over time, you’ll likely unpack further detail (like a classic opportunity tree) under your macro opportunities, and flesh out the depth in your strategy. (RICE scores everywhere!)

“How about variables like competition, strategic alignment, etc.?”

…You may ask. I think you can wrap nearly all of these considerations in Reach and Impact. For example, customers with highly-solved problems (by competition) likely would not represent impactful targets to go after. And an opportunities’ “strategic alignment” (the extent to which the opp is consistent with the broader company strategy) can be wrapped up in an assessment of ‘long-term impact’. It’s often very important to get alignment on whether you evaluate Impact in 1–2 years or 4–5 years as that may change scoring.

3. Prioritise and set the plan

Focus always helps product teams. So any good strategy will take the RICE’d opportunity map you’ve built above and make decisions with it. Typically, the two most important factors around decision-making are:

• What opportunity is the most valuable to build solutions for?
• What insights could we get to identify the next most valuable opportunity?

A strategy for our Airbnb team might look like:

We will work on ‘Seeing more relevant results’ first. At the same time, we’ll discover ‘I want to be excited…’ to build confidence as the next likely focus area

Crystallise these into succinct Now/Next/Later roadmaps for Delivery and Discovery. They will bring your prioritisation to life visually.

Definition of THEN: not anything you can do, but things you are discovering now with the intent to build, or something you have discovered and have deprioritised but expect to build in next 3–9mo.

4. Visualising greatness

Finally, you’ll want to pull all this great thinking together into 1–2 pages MAX to share with others for challenge, and eventually get them bought into the dream. The 1–2 pager is critical as a springboard for people to enter discussions on the RICE table. It also should reference other key parts of a strategy like a directional end state for the product.

This is an excellent time to introduce some narrative devices to juice up stakeholders and teams. I’m thinking things like ‘Fix the fundamentals’, then ‘delight the most important customer base’… Leadership teams love stuff like that. Rumelt’s framings of diagnosis + guiding principles + coherent actions are great too.

If you have an hour to spare, check out John Cutler’s excellent talk on one-pagers for guidance.

Never forget. Move fast, make decisions, and iterate

I deeply believe that product teams need to learn and make great decisions every week. So as you build your strategy, remember two things:

1. 70% rule. Getting a v1 draft strategy should not take longer than a full day MAX. Get it working and share ASAP, and begin using to make decisions. Don’t worry about one-way doors. They rarely exist in practice if you’re moving fast.
2. Prepare to iterate. Your strategy and early assumptions are likely to be wrong. That’s okay, strategies are living documents. Plan to revise them regularly.

Good luck! And also remember, no framework is a silver bullet ;)