100 Product Strategies: Recent Episodes
Nacho Bassino
100 Product Strategies features conversations with product leaders sharing their real-life experiences creating and executing product strategy. The host Nacho Bassino digs for practices and examples in very different company sizes, company cultures, regulation challenges, structure challenges, monetization challenges, and more diverse contexts. By understanding how others solved a challenge, hearing details about how they faced a difficult situation, we will gain tools that -with the proper adaptations- we would be able to apply in our daily work.
Your product vision is a position you aspire to have in the future: be the best solution for a problem a set of customers care about. That should drive your strategy. And I had the fortune of discussing positioning in detail with April, the biggest guru.
We started in a very controversial way: you should not base your strategy on your positioning! Wait, what?
- Positioning is an exercise to formulate how your current product is the best for a specific customer need.
- Strategy is not about your current product! It is about the value you want to create in the future.
Confusing those can get you in trouble.
But there is a catch. Product Strategy is about “how you will achieve your Product Vision.” However, if your vision potentially goes 3, 5, or 10 years into the future, your 6, 12, 18 months strategy is getting you closer to smaller milestones that still need to be differentiated and sellable!
These milestones have a “positioning thesis,” and your strategy needs to build a product that can deliver on the promise you aim to make.
Resources
- AprilDunford.com
- April’s newsletter and podcast
- Obviously Awesome book
- Sales Pitch book
Strategy and its role in connecting vision to execution is one of those n-dimensional problems that is hard to think about, let alone describe in a chart.
Fortunately, Martin Eriksson, the author of the decision stack, did just that. In his work, he describes a mental framework for navigating this challenging space and how you can think about connecting the decisions and artifacts of your vision, strategy, objectives, and opportunities.
In this episode, we navigated the hard questions about this mental model: common pitfalls, what to do as a PM if you don’t have a Vision or Strategy, what is the right level of strategy definition to enable empowered teams, and much more!
Find the Decision stack at: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/
Alignment is one of the hardest challenges of strategy. Conflictive goals, every department fighting for their priority, opposed world views and interpretations of how the future will unfold…
Luckily, Bruce McCarthy is an expert on the topic, and in this episode, he shares many tactics and tips on how to surface these conversations, use the right artifacts, and create alignment.
Resources
- New Book: Aligned
- ProductCulture.org
- Follow Bruce on Linkedin / X
We all know Strategy is complex, cumbersome, and foggy. We strive to navigate and make strategic decisions in this environment, which usually leads to opinionated battles and stakeholder misalignment since we can all interpret the signals in different ways.
Remarkably, Dan Olsen, my guest in this episode, created simple tools and one-pagers that help you crystalize your thinking, find the opportunities that can truly make a difference, and have more meaningful conversations with stakeholders.
I’m amazed by how Dan brought complex situations down to their essence and explained how framing and structuring them can truly make these daunting challenges approachable and almost easy to resolve.
Important note: In a few moments, Dan shared a screen, so if you can watch while you listen, it could be helpful to get a visual reference (but it is not required to understand the concepts discussed).
You can find Dan at dan-olsen.com
Ready for some strategic wisdom? In this episode, I had the honor of delving into the depths of product strategy with Marty Cagan, a true luminary in the field. I asked the hardest questions and tried to explore topics beyond what you would normally find in Marty’s writing. From the pitfalls of neglecting strategy to the necessity of ongoing adaptation, Marty's insights are a game-changer for product leaders.We explored controversial topics, such as why strategy trumps discovery and the critical role of top-level input in shaping successful product strategies. But that's not all—we also discuss the significance of understanding team scope, capabilities, and experience, the role of strategy in budget allocation, and the importance of seeking guidance from experienced mentors.Every part of the episode has actionable advice, which Marty very eloquently shares.Where to Find Marty’s Work:
- svpg.com, where you can find the newsletter
- Transformed is Marty’s newest book, and Empowered contains many topics we explored in the episode.
There are infinite ways to define strategy. Most involve finding a critical challenge and defining the big strokes of how to solve it.
This can be an intimidating task to any leader! Furthermore, if we spend the high effort involved in putting it together, and communicating it as our brilliant strategy for the next 12 months, chances are that the organization will not be super receptive to feedback, learning and iteration on this critical strategic bets.
This is a very complex and nuanced topic, but I had the fortune to speak with Jeff Gothelf, not only an expert in the topic, but someone who can articulate complex problems in simple ways.
We covered how Jeff defines a “lean” strategy, how connecting strategy to OKRs help you learn fast about your hypothesis, and how leaders should take a more humble (and smarter!) approach to explicitly calling out uncertainty and willingness to learn.
Where to find Jeff:
- JeffGothelf.com, where you can find the newsletter
- Jeff’s upcoming book, “Who does what by how much”
Strategy is messy. It’s happening simoulteaneously at different levels, with different lenses, different time horizons, among many other stakes at play.
My guest in this episode, John Cutler, has a remarkable ability to bridge the world of theories with what we actually face down the road when executing. Together, we unravel the intricacies of the 'messy middle,' that challenging space between lofty company aspirations and the day-to-day grind of teams.
The conversation was extremely valuable to me, because it brought actionable ideas to complex topics like:
- helping team think bigger and wider,
- what is important to define to have a solid strategy,
- how to (or not to) align,
and many more topics.
We often talk about strategy diagnosis and insights as if they were something we go through in isolation when defining the direction of our product.
However, those insights come (or should come) from our discovery efforts. Unfortunately, this connection is often missing, and to be fair, it can be pretty messy.
That’s why I had a wonderful conversation with Teresa Torres, one of the top voices on product discovery, and we went deep into the hard questions of connecting these two worlds:
- How involved should leaders be in Discovery?
- How do we validate our strategic assumptions with users?
- How do discovery at different levels interconnect?
and much more. Teresa shared multiple tips on tactics to overcome the typical pitfalls.
Where to Find Teresa’s Work
- Product Talk - Hundreds of valuable articles and resources.
- Product Talk Academy - All training options.
- Continuous Discovery Habits book
- To join the product leaders’ monthly sessions, email support@producttalk.org
While strategy is always difficult, large corporations add complexities into the mix: dependencies, politics, complex budgeting processes, and more.
In this episode, I spoke with Phil Hornby, a Product Coach with vast experience in different contexts, and we discussed his experience with the product strategy for a business unit within Continental, a large German automotive company.
Phil shared great examples and tips on how to gain alignment, deal with politics and dependencies, handle risk, and much more!
More takeaways at https://productdirection.substack.com/
Where to Find Phil’s Work
- Phil’s site: For Product People
Few elements wield as much influence over a company's fate as the art and science of monetization. And I know from personal experience that this is a hard-to-master topic for product people.
Consider the multiple complex questions that may arise: do we go for a subscription or pay-as-you-go model? How many tiers of subscriptions? What’s the right price? Do we include ads? How frequent? How intrusive?
At the core of all these questions is the value exchange: how much are users willing to pay (in money or attention) in exchange for the value we provide? Solving it correctly can be the difference between success and stagnation.
Megan is a seasoned product leader with vast experience solving these questions in multiple industries and multiple monetization models. We explored real-life challenges, frameworks, and tips that you can apply to your strategies.
You can find Megan Hughes on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganhug1/
Find all the details and more episodes in:
https://productdirection.substack.com/
Frequently, strategies are about finding avenues for growth. We often think about that as directly impacting the core company metrics.
But when developing platforms that allow integrations to the core product, the strategy is more complex: we enable entry points that enable 3rd party developers to solve “edge but valuable” use cases adopted by users who only then increase the core product metrics.
In this conversation with Frank Harris, VP of Platform Product at Slack, we discussed how they formulated a strategy in this complex landscape and the nuances and challenges of the growth journey.
You can find Frank on Linkedin or X.
When doing expansion strategies, we need to come up with insights about what markets we can penetrate and win. Combining that with product-led growth thinking, you can review the pull from existing users to come up with underserved needs and sizing opportunities.
That can be easier said that done, but in this episode of 100 Product Strategies, Markiyan Matsekh, ex-Director of Product at Vimeo, shared the steps he took to conquer the enterprise segment.
Besides the very insightful strategy story, he shared the fundamentals and the importance of Vimeo’s positioning and differentiation to win in a crowded market.
And of top of that, we closed with an interest story of an unsuccessful strategy, that failed for the same reasons the other one succeeded, reinforcing the importance of these concepts.
You can find Markiyan on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markiyanmatsekh/
Why do we create strategies?
To focus on the most critical problems or opportunities which will help us get closer to our vision.
And the first step of putting that focus into action is concentrating our resources there.
This is easier said than done, and the complexity becomes more evident when we have more than one product, at different maturity stages, and with very different strategic paths ahead of them.
While this problem can fall into the Portfolio Strategy space for larger corporations, startups also face this challenge when expanding.
In this episode, I had the chance to speak with Iryna Struk, who is running product management at HandsHQ, a startup with a mature product and another trying to find product market fit.
We discussed not only resource allocation but also a broad set of topics, starting as usual with how they create strategy, how they handle context switch, and how they balance the different levels of uncertainty when planning.
You can connect with Iryna on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/irynastruk/
You can also find more info on:
https://productdirection.substack.com/
Many of us work in complex environments where the set of opportunities we can potentially pursue to impact a desired outcome is very wide.
As you can imagine, at Google, you can find both very complex and large environments, and opportunities to innovate in multiple directions.
In this episode, I spoke with Stefan Schnabl, who works in the education space at Google, with the potential to cover very different audiences, problems, and solutions.
He shared many tips and stories, from how they align on direction down to how the team does research and experimentation in the space to identify strong opportunities.
You can find Stefan on Linkedin, and the pilot post in his blog.
Most companies' strategies are “roadmap on steroids”: large plans of multiple big ideas to implement, which usually have not been validated.
To differentiate and create thoughtful and successful strategies, you must start with evidence-based insights.
But how do we collect that evidence? How do we gain confidence and compare opportunities? After selecting opportunities, how do we keep validating the strategy through the multiple solution ideas we may pursue?
I had the pleasure of speaking with the evidence-guided guru, Itamar Gilad, and we explored the practices, tools, and challenges you will use and face to make your strategy more robust relying on solid evidence.
Itamar has been helping teams with tools and resources I strongly recommend, like the confidence meter, and ICE Scoring. He recently published his fantastic book, Evidence Guided, which is a must for all product managers and leaders.
TL;DR: Platforms are everywhere, and their challenges are hard to understand and impact even non-platform products. Thor is an expert who shared his learnings building the Miro Marketplace and, previously, the Google Maps Developer’s Platform.
Many times when discussing strategy, we focus on the most typical scenarios: consumer apps, B2B SaaS, media, etcetera.
But platforms are continuously emerging, and even if you are not working on one, they are probably impacting you: app stores, social media integrations, etcetera.
The challenges they present for strategy are quite nuanced, ranging from defining complex success metrics to understanding how to align with the larger company strategy.
Understanding how to think differently about their strategies is critical. Thor Mitchell is the Product Director for Miro’s platform teams, has a long history of working in this field, and shared his process, journey, and challenges in developing their latest strategy.
You can connect with Thor at Linkedin or Twitter.
Startup challenges change as they grow. The focus and needs of the product strategy also change, as the company moves through funding rounds and product maturity stages.
What are the critical factors leaders should consider at each stage? How does collaboration among different areas evolve? What’s the impact of funding rounds on focus areas?
In this episode of 100 Product Strategies, we spoke with Lily Smith, CPO at BBC Maestro and co-host of the Product Experience podcast, who has been taking product leadership roles at startups at different stages.
We discussed the strategic implications of technical scalability, user experience improvement, and business expansion. Lily compared how challenges evolve from pre-market-fit stages to the scale-up period.
You can find Lily on Linkedin!
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
We all love good strategy stories. What is better than good strategy stories? The ones that are simple and that we can derive lessons to apply elsewhere.
In this episode, Saeed Khan shares his stories and thoughts collected over 25 years of product management experience.
Different from other episodes, in this one, we started with the core elements of strategy, which Saeed simplifies as building hypotheses on how you can achieve certain objectives. Making some mapping to the Playing to Win framework, he simplified the result of strategy as a set of Goals connected with Measures, which are connected to Actions.
We also reviewed some examples so you can apply these simple steps to your products.
Over the last 18 months, I have interviewed 29 product leaders, inquiring about their strategy formulation and challenges.
We covered different industries, customer types, company scales, product types, and geographies.
As I shared in the podcast intro, after writing Product Direction, I felt we didn’t have enough examples out there of how people do strategy work and what challenges they face.
My secret project all along was to compile a list of different examples and also tag them accordingly so product leaders could listen to stories they felt were related to their context.
Let's review my takeaways and where you can get the summary of all past episodes!
If you create a great strategy and communicate it properly, and have good people to execute it, what can possibly go wrong?
Well, as you can imagine, multiple layers of complexities can get in the way.
In this episode, Randy shared two stories where different company intricacies made good strategies fail. The learning will help you view your strategy process from a wider perspective, and help you avoid these pitfalls.
Randy is the author of What Do We Do Now?, host of The Product Experience podcast by Mind the Product, and Coach and Consultant at outofowls.com.
In this episode, we talked about:
- 2 stories about good strategies failing
- The complexities of funding your strategy
- Build or Buy decisions in strategy
- High-level stakeholder alignment
- How to build trust for decision-makers
And much more!
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
The world is full of hard problems, which led to opportunities to tackle them using groundbreaking innovative products.
Bigger companies are in an interesting position: they can invest in exploring new problems related to their core mission, but which can be years ahead in terms of helping them expand their business. Yet, for many reasons, they fail to innovate. And the first problem is how they strategize in this context.
Luckily, in this episode, Andrew Skotzko shares a great story about such a situation and what we should do when facing it.
I previously wrote about the differences in execution for this type of strategy, but Andrew gives a great example from the trenches, full of details and advice you can leverage if you feel your strategy needs to be more far-fetched.
You can find Andrew’s content and services on https://www.makethingsthatmatter.com/, and subscribe to his daily 2-min tips at: https://www.productleadershipdaily.com/
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
If you are a product leader joining a new organization, or if you have recently been promoted within your organization and are tasked with creating a strategy, where should you start?
How do you align on what strategy is?
How do you collect the existing knowledge and past decisions and combine them with new trends and goals?
Besides years of product leadership experience, Tobias has helped many organizations and leaders create their product strategies and answer these questions.
In this episode, we talked about:
- What are the symptoms of lacking strategy?
- How do different artifacts (objectives, strategy, vision) play together, and what should go first?
- Diagnosing your current situation.
- What is inside a good strategy?
- The written narrative approach.
- How to test your strategy, and what to with conflicts?
And much more!
You can find Tobi on Linkedin or on his website: https://www.tobiasfreudenreich.de/.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
How do you navigate the intricate balance between the rapid-paced weekly sprints of agile software development and the long-term planning cycles inherent in hardware components?
In this episode, I spoke with Dominik Busching -Head of Product at Tado- and unveiled how they create innovative solutions that not only enhance user satisfaction but also contribute to the sustainable transformation of the energy industry.
In this episode, we talked about:
- What are the challenges of Strategy in the intersection of Hardware and Software.
- How they went from a tacit strategy by their founders to a fully-fledged Product Strategy using written narratives.
- How they identify trends in a complex space.
- How they test hypotheses in the hardware world.
And much more!
You can find Dominik on Linkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
In this episode, I spoke with Nils Janse, CEO and co-founder of Delibr, a tool to help Product Managers organize and structure decision-making across the entire product flow. We covered amazing insights, going from crafting a value proposition, followed by how to select the focus areas and how to be stubborn on the vision while flexible on the execution based on customer feedback.
Pay special attention to Nils’ definition of the “three interacting trees” (minute 20 approx). He uses three interacting models: an opportunity solution tree for specific outcomes, a higher-level JTBD-tree, and a Product-tree focused on the components. Amazing discovery to balance all the different opportunities you may need to handle.
The conversation was a bit “meta” since we discussed their process and, at the same time, Delibr’s strategies to support the process!
In this episode, we talked about:
- How Delibr made its way to a Product Management tool, starting as a tool for “structured decision making.”
- How to differentiate in the product management tooling space
- Starting your strategy by identifying your ICP
- How to mix the “upstream” vs. “downstream” opportunities
- Not trying to fit all your opportunity space into OSTs, and other trees can be used.
- How LLMs can be extremely helpful in so many text-intensive PM tasks
And much more!
You can find Nils onLinkedin, and do check out his book Epic Alignment. You can check Delibr and ask for a demo.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
The role of strategy in pre-market-fit startups can sometimes be unclear. How would we focus or double down on a path when we have so much uncertainty and risk? We would likely pivot many times before finding what we need to double down on, and doing a deep strategic exercise is a waste of time.
But when we neglect strategy, the consequences can be worse. Not having clarity on what we are trying to achieve and testing random things has crashed many startups.
Luckily, there is a middle ground. In this episode, I spoke with David Pereira, an experienced product leader and strategist, who told us (with very detailed examples!) how to create strategies that help startups find Product-Market Fit and connect them to an iterative execution that drives success.
In this episode, we talked about:
- Where to start when defining strategies in the seed-stage startup context
- How to find the right problems in a new or unknown market
- How to align on the expected result
- How a strategy for a seed-stage startup can look like
- How to connect strategy with the fast-paced execution of a startup
And much more!
You can find David on LinkedIn, and read his material on dpereira.substack.com
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
Playing to Win is a strong framework, but it can create some confusion during its implementation, like making your winning aspiration “be the #1 of X”.
I spoke with Stuart Congdon, a strategy veteran, who has used it many times and walked us through a complete example with my typical annoying questions to get to the root of their strategic decisions!
In this episode, we talked about:
- A real implementation of the Play to win framework
- Using Customer Journey and Service Blueprint to identify opportunities
- How to find your niche for the “where to play”
- How to differentiate and don’t make a strategy that could be the same as any competitor
- Recommended Book: Superstrings. A Theory of Everything
And much more!
You can find Stu on Linkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
Many strategies come from a need to grow, or start by reviewing many opportunities to find the ideal ones. But what if we have a unique asset that we can leverage to create a strategic advantage? A recent example could be how Disney used their unique IP to create a winning streaming platform in an already competitive market.
In this episode, Joe Jenvey from Sedex shared a more “down to earth” example: using their unique supply chain data to create new value propositions for their customers.
Joe explained (among many other things) how they started from the business need and did a discovery process to understand the customer problem they could solve and how to solve it.
We talked about:
- How their process started with a business need and developed into a product-led customer discovery.
- How they interacted between different areas of the business
- The tools they used to collect and share data
- How they validated their strategy
- How do they manage vision, roadmap, goals, and checkpoints
And much more!
You can find Joe onLinkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
Strategy in B2B has serious power dynamics. There often seems to be a fight between PMs and Sales, when in the end, hopefully, they are trying to do what's best for the company. Adam Thomas has used multiple hats in the past and brings some advice on working with the different sides of the organization to create a trusted and focused strategy, and how to keep validating your strategic investments with survival metrics.
In this episode, we talked about:
- How to formulate portfolio-level strategies
- How Product and Sales interact, why we always struggle, and what to do about it
- The importance of focus (and consequently trade-offs) for strategy
- The but - therefore storytelling rule
- Survival metrics
- How “Product Strategy” roles interact with Product leaders and teams
And much more!
You can find Adam ontheadamthomas.com, and also on Linkedin or Youtube.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
One of the key elements of a solid product strategy that generates growth based on your product success, is building and sustaining strong differentiators. But finding, validating and aligning on that differentiation is hard work.
In this episode we explored strategy creation with Leah Tharin, Head of Product at Jua.ai and Product Led Growth expert. We covered many aspects of strategy creation, starting with the importance of determining your target user, how to identify opportunities that you can later select for your differentiation, and all the way down to how to summarize it in an inspiring one-pager.
In this episode, we spoke about:
- How Leah strives for a strategy one pager
- The importance of defining your audience and unique value proposition
- How she explores the opportunity space and decides what to focus on
- Selecting based on facts rather than opinion or influence
- What is needed for a Product Led Growth strategy
- Recommended book: The Earned Life
And much more!
You can find and connect with Leah’s content onleahtharin.com.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
To create a good strategy, you need a vision. If the vision is inspiring and drives a significant purpose, chances are you have stronger bases to build a motivating strategy.
Simone started her product career in gambling! In Canada the government provided the service, which already had some nuances for strategy. At some point she felt the calling to do something more purposeful, that eventually led her to work on renewables, and finally at an ONG.
In this episode, we talked about:
- How Simone used ProduxLabs Strategy Canvas to keep things visual and simple.
- How politics,risk tolerance, and current success of the business model affects strategy and its stability or time horizon.
- How organization size affects strategy creation speed, and the level of information required for decisions.
- How ONGs think about and understand the user and the competitive landscape differently.
- Beyond prioritization frameworks: how it all boils down to collecting “evidence” and making sure people “get it” when talking about why something is a priority.
And much more!
You can find Simone on linkedin.
You can find the B2B Innovator’s Map on Amazon, or download a free chapter on Daniel’s website.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
The key drivers of your strategy can be radically different in nature: are we optimizing on a well known topic? Are we doing a new big bet into uncharted territory?
Unfortunately, many times we are not conscious of the type of decision we are making, and how this affects the strategy “health”, risk, time horizons, and execution process.
Luckily, Alessandro doesn’t fall into that trap. He has a well established Playbook, that he uses with the team to balance the strategy and communicate the proper level of uncertainties and how they plan to reduce it.
On top of that, he has a very structured approach to uncover opportunities using a combination of Jobs To Be Done and Opportunity trees that we explored at length.
In this marvelous episode, we talked about:
- The inputs to start thinking about your strategy
- How to map the opportunity space from a JTBD perspective
- How to make the entire company contribute to the opportunities and better influence the roadmap
- How he uses the strategy playbook at Amenitiz.
And much more!
You can find Alessandro on Linkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
Depending on your product, a team’s mission can be very clear (a checkout page for e-commerces) or a bit fuzzier. Going back to the old “painkiller” versus “vitamin” problem, many companies will have across their portfolio teams that are an integral part of their core proposition, and others that add value “around” it.
Our guest Diogo was in such a situation, in a very successful product: Adidas Running. Leading the “social” vertical, their contribution to the product experience and value was unclear, and they lacked strong input from upper management. Yet Diogo wanted to create a solid strategy, finding a purpose and a strong value proposition. In this episode we explored how he managed to do so, and his advice is certainly valuable for those looking for purpose as well as for those who have it and want to express it more clearly.
We talked about:
- Where to start when your team's purpose is unclear?
- How to dig insights for products that are not the core value drivers of the user experience?
- How to decide where to focus on, in a very broad problem space?
- How they decided the best KPIs, type of users and critical success criterias when formulating the strategy.
- How the strategy was communicated, shared and discussed across the company.
- The role of "principles" and guiding questions in the execution of the strategy.
And much more!
You can find Diogo on Linkedin and check https://tractive.com/en/hr/jobs for their open positions.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
The “shape” of the opportunity space can greatly influence how we approach strategy creation. Some opportunity spaces are straightforward, and the work revolves around optimization and improvements. Others are completely unknown and require a much more exploratory approach.
Interestingly enough, complex spaces are not only reserved for “new fields” like the Metaverse. Alasco has the mission of “Digitalizing the 2nd biggest industry in the world”, construction. As an industry, we can think of it as old and well-known. But the opportunities for digitalization are definitely varied and complex.
In this episode, we talked about:
- Julia’s approach to strategy, starting by defining how the strategy will be created!
- Using generative and evaluative approaches to identify and size opportunities
- How they collect and organize all the insights for strategy
- The responsibilities of UX and Product in driving the opportunity space
- The differences between Vertical and Horizontal SaaS when thinking about strategy.
- A few links of our discussion:
- ProductBoard
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott
- Most used tool: Notion
And much more!
You can find Julia on Linkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
There are many challenges for the collaboration of Product and UX on the strategic level. As a product and design trainer and consultant, Sol Mesz works with both teams to make this collaboration more successful. She shared with us many tips and tools that can help any leader get the most out of both “sides of the table”.
In this episode, we talked about:
- How product and design can come closer for strategic decisions.
- How Sol uses her Insights template to help translate user research resulto into actionable insights for product and business decisions.
- How Sol uses her Full Loop Analytics framework to integrate the user, product and business perspectives.
And much more!
You can find Sol on Medium or on her website.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
Description: many of us work on consumer products, or B2B SaaS, or other products where the business model and the value proposition is strong and clear. But there are products and industries that need to connect a variety of different players, creating not only complex problems but also complex structures where the needs of different groups need to be constantly prioritized and considered to be successful.
Over his career, Jason Boast has had more than one of this situations, and he shares valuable tips (that are applicable also to our “simpler” worlds), and war stories of the challenges he faced and how to solve them.
In this episode, we talked about:
- Starting with the fundamentals: How to, as a new product lead, you need to start by understanding everything before making strategy decisions, and how to do that when everyone in the company gives you a different answer.
- The power of making things simple, and over communicating.
- The importance of understanding the basics in complex marketplaces to be able to define a strategy.
- The importance in complex business of keeping all teams aware of the high level goals and how they contribute, preventing silos.
And much more!
You can find Jason on LinkedIn.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
It can be hard to create a strategy for innovation. But if we are talking about B2B enterprise innovation, especially when hardware products are involved (like climate and energy tech), it truly is challenging.
Furthermore, if you are looking for advice, few have actually “been there and done that”. Daniel Elizalde is one of those. Furthermore, he has codified his approach in the B2B Innovator’s Map, a 6-step framework, whose initial steps are all about strategy definition.
While there are a lot of B2B examples, I would argue there are lessons here for product managers in any product.
In this episode, we talked about:
- How to do Strategic Alignment with stakeholders in early phases
- How to do Market discovery properly (and quickly!)
- For new products, how to interact with your potential initial customers (or Champions, as Daniel calls them), to understand their needs.
- The differences in process between B2C and B2B, and new products versus adding on top of existing products.
And much more!
You can find Daniel on danielelizalde.com, as well as his Blog, Podcast, and much more.
You can find the B2B Innovator’s Map on Amazon, or download a free chapter on Daniel’s website.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
We all know different products and contexts require different strategic thinking. B2B SaaS and subscriptions is an important product category, and John Pearce has been working on it for a long time. In this episode, he shared:
- The framework he has been using at Chargebee to build their strategy
- The differences with strategies for consumer products.
- How to integrate, balance and align sales inputs to the strategy
And much more!
You can find John on Linkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
One challenging topic about product strategy as organizations grow, is “how many product strategies” should we have, based on how many products we have on our portfolio (or “sections of a large product, or business units, or any other organization slice we may have). It is also related to the question “who should we involve” to define the strategy, and how PMs, Heads of Product, VPs, and the different hierarchy levels contribute to the process.
In this episode, I spoke with another strategy enthusiast, Alberto Barcelos from Taxfix, who has a strong view on what sort of contribution and strategies PMs should create.
We discussed:
- How strategy is related to storytelling and shared beliefs
- At what levels we define strategy and how they influence each other
- How do you balance top-down strategy definition with these bottom-up plans
- How do PMs collaborate with stakeholders for their strategy definition
And much more!
You can find Alberto on Linkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
Startups and Enterprise operate very differently. Product management is done quite differently. What about product strategy? What are the differences (and similarities)? What do we need to pay attention to? What is important to consider if we are moving from one to the other?
In this episode I spoke with Jonathan Rodriguez, Product Lead at Flieber, a growing startup in the logistics industry. Before he was a lead at Eventbrite, a multi-business, multi-national, enterprise sized company.
With this transition, Jonathan has a very interesting view of how strategy is done differently in these opposite contexts.
We talked about:
- Enterprises deal with unique multi business unit conflicts. Strategy is negotiated, and many times difficult to communicate and propagate.
- How Eventbrite increased their strategy practice, and how the different levels of the organization contributed (executives, managers, individual PMs).
- How larger companies need to generate high-level goals and discuss how different teams need to contribute to that goal.
- In startups, how to handle the high-involvement of the CEO at the tactic levels.
- What is the “right frequency” of strategic discussions in startups, given the fast-paced learning
- How they moved from weekly decisions to a two years strategy
- Strategy meetings: why they should be more frequent in startups, and how Jonathan aligns the product teams on the updates of the strategy meetings
Among many other things!
You can find Jonathan on Linkedin, and he is open to mentoring others.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
What is like to set a strategy when your company is growing in headcount by 2x (or more!) per year? How do you identify the areas where the new joiners will be working? How do you balance new opportunity spaces versus focusing on the existing ones? How do you onboard new members on the strategy topics?
Nicholas Goubert is working in one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, and has first hand experience with all these challenges.
We talked about:
- How he created the strategy at Utopia music considering the high-growth conditions
- How he balances the delegation of strategy aspects with his product leadership team.
- How to take into account resource planning for the strategy process, very critical in a hyper-growth situation.
- How to make sure you still spend time in strategy, when conflicting with high priority sensitive activities like hiring and onboarding.
Among many other things!
You can find Nicholas on Linkedin, and see the open positions at Utopia Music career page.
Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)
Over the last decade(s), many companies have started the different types of transformations, most of them going in the same direction: how to become more agile and make software-product development a first-class discipline they had to master.
To achieve such a transformation, many things are required, starting at the top with monetary resources, leadership commitment, and patience.
How is this related to 100 Product Strategies? Because Strategy is also needed to successfully complete such a transformation. In today’s episode, Sam McAffee tells us about the role strategy plays, and how in turn the different stages of the transformation effects the strategy.
We talked about:
- Their “strategy stack” and how they describe the interconnection of 3 layers: business, product, and technology strategies.
- A definition for strategy, and how it centers on saying what no to, and picking how you deploy your scarce resources to achieve your goals.
- Sam’s article, The dreaded reorg, and how transformation is an investment that requires resources and time to be successful.
- The key role of strategy is calling out the huge project transformation is, and making sure that important investment is not “squeezed into” everything else we want to do.
- What changes in Strategy formulation in a company pre and post such transformation.
- We discussed advice for product leaders undergoing this transformation. The first thing is having patience with people, who would not only need new training but also time to emotionally and biologically adapt to the new situation.
- The importance of building an environment of trust and true collaboration to make this strategies and transformations work.
- Sam’s recommendation of The Hero with a Thousand faces.
And many other things!
You can find Sam on Linkedin or at StartupPatterns.com.
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
Megan joined Hotjar two years ago, and had the challenge to create the strategy from scratch. But moreover, she has the opportunity to review with fresh eyes how the execution went and what she learned along the way. In this very interesting conversation we covered the journey, starting with very insightful tips on the initial strategy creation, how they communicated and aligned the strategy across the organization, and eventually what they learned while executing.
We talked about:
- Considering that 70% of strategies are never executed due to bad communication, Megan decided not to fail for this reason and what she did about it.
- How Megan first aligned expectations by sharing what a strategy is not.
- Megan recommended strategy books: Blue Ocean Strategy, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Playing to win.
- How Megan used a trello board to divide all the “task” or all the information you need to put together for the strategy following the Good Strategy/Bad Strategy methods.
- Using Reforge’s “4 fits” to align on the market, the model, and the channel, and use it to discuss with stakeholders the fit of the product strategy.
- How to identify market insights through signals, patterns and trends. The role of product leadership in keeping an eye of those external trends.
- The high ROI of 1:1 strategy conversations.
- How Megan used Airbnb’s 11-start experience exercise, and the key result was that people find out that 5-star experience was not out of reach.
- Hotjar’s final strategy artifact was a 5’ video extracted from the original 15-pages document, making much more memorable, and easier to consume and understand.
- How Hotjar teams created ⅔ of the initiatives that were considered for execution of the strategy.
- How they learned that one of the strategic pillars was not relevant and what they did about it.
And many other things!
You can find Megan on Linkedin.
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
Sherpany is a B2B SaaS for meeting management. The space is so wide, that there can tackle endless opportunities, which it might in turn reduce focus and end up in a mediocre product. So, how do they define a strong and focused strategy in such a wide space?
Nina is Chief Product Officer at Sherpany and she told me how they deal with this challenge and went deep into the very solid strategy formulation process they have.
We talked about:
- A very clear walkthrough of Sherpany’s annual strategy process, from high level company goals all the way to key initiatives.
- “Sausage making”: Sherpany’s code name for the alignment between top-down and bottom-up strategy definitions.
- Why the diagnosis process is more internally focused, looking at internal.
- How sherpany uses KPI trees and opportunity solution trees to map their opportunities.
- How they do positioning, not comparing with others but looking at the touchpoints they want to deliver great experiences.
- The influence in strategy formulation of selecting a narrow user group and use case to enable growth.
- During the formulation, they leveraged what the product was good for and being used for, to become even better and expand from that existing strength.
- How Sherpany is using a version of Google’s 70/20/10 to explore a bet for future growth.
- Product plays an important role in facilitating discussions like what users should we focus on, that has an impact not only in product but also in other departments.
And many other things!
You can find Nina on Linkedin or twitter.
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
In this episode, we spoke with Johannes Mayer, Director of Product at Kununu, the largest employer and salary review site in the DACH region.
We explored how to create a strategy in a context where you have a user-centered product that relies on monetizing companies' premium services, and discussed how to balance and navigate the conflict of interests that may arise, and even how Kununu creates synergies to use those tensions to benefit both sides.
We talked about:
- Kununu’s process to create its product strategy, starting from a broader view and advancing to details on a yearly basis.
- How the strategy combines the 5-years Vision, mission, and their JTBD (considering functional, social, and emotional needs)
- Using company level yearly objectives and JTBD as guardrails for the product strategy
- Johannes’ suggestion of avoiding the “ivory tower”: leveraging team collaboration and stakeholders, gaining feedback, and identifying synergies with other parts of the organization.
- The artifact they use for the strategy: a slide deck with ~20 slides with the Vision, Mission, JTBD, key findings, and objectives. That leads to the pillars of product strategy for the year, which in turn leads to the roadmap.
- How do they combine in their OKRs the user-centric impact with the B-side companies' impacts.
- The extra complexity of being a user-centered team, with another business unit doing the “selling” and monetization of the product.
- How Product values can help you navigate the conflicts between both sides of the product.
- The role product managers have in bringing people together and exposing the conflicts and potential impacts of initiatives to decide together what the best course of action is.
And many other things!
You can find Johannes on Linkedin or XING.
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
As companies grow and expand their services, they need to localize their product. In some industries, where each region has very different needs and regulations, there is high interaction between the need for a global strategy, and the needs of each region to succeed.
Jesus Cagide, Product Leader at Intuit and ex-Paypal helps us explore how this can be handled in companies and industries where the local need has a critical role.
We talked about:
- The role of fintech and money in people’s life.
- What are highly localized products? The difference between the global mission and the needs of each region to achieve the product mission.
- The 3 attributes you need to consider in a geographical basis: bargain power of customers, tech access and channels, and regulations.
- How understanding opportunities at a local level affects the global strategy.
- Besides your global strategy, you need to understand your strategic intent in each geography (and how to evaluate it based on the local diagnosis).
- The importance of considering each geography the existing set of tools and to clearly communicate your value proposition according to each market.
- Making market assessments per country: the lifecycle of the product, competitive intensity, and reach or size. How the lifecycle of your product actually varies by country.
- Assessing your strengths in the country, from your brand power to your core capabilities.
- How Paypal manages top-down vs bottom-up initiative proposal and assessment.
- How adding services at a global level requires an impact analysis in a multi-year horizon (versus local initiatives related to the adoption of existing services in the portfolio).
- The complexity of the product structure when combining global and local roles.
- Jesus's last advice about strategy: “don’t bite more than you can chew”. How much time this global strategy exercise takes.
- Recommended book: Rise of the robots.
Among many other things!
You can connect with Jesus on Linkedin or follow him on twitter.
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
In this episode, we spoke with Petra Wille, an internationally renowned Product Leadership Coach and author of Strong Product People. We explored how product people can become more strategic and how leaders can coach their teams to develop their strategic thinking.
We talked about:
- How important is strategic thinking? Having coached companies in different situations, Petra explores the difference between empowered versus feature teams, and how that impacts the need for strategic thinking and the ability to grow it.
- The relation of Martin Eriksson’s decision stack and strategic thinking.
- How much strategy is needed? Many times multiple teams are working on the same product and strategy.
- Strategic coaching can be “demystification”: just start somewhere, draw it on a whiteboard.
- Learning more about how others do strategy by leveraging learning buddies: you show me yours, I show you mine.
- A litmus test for strategy: “walk me through it”. The storytelling needed to explain your strategy, communicating it with different amounts of time to see how many details and understanding we can add to it.
- You can use any topic to practice strategy: hobbies, daily life, or other products/industries.
- How getting better at strategy also means being able to handle bigger periods of time, being able to manage more uncertainty over time.
- What to do when there is no higher-level company strategy (or too many strategies!). Arne Kittler’s Collaborative Alignment framework.
Among many other things!
You can know more about Petra’s material and what she is doing at petra-wille.com
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
In this episode we spoke with Marc Abraham, Product Leader at Intercom and author of Managing Product = Managing Tension and My Product Management Toolkit.
We explored where are the biggest tensions when creating a product strategy, and discussed how to deal with them and the role of the product leader in navigating the different tradeoffs.
We talked about:
- How Marc approaches the strategy problem: having a concrete vision, establishing where you are now, and working backward identifying the problems and opportunities you need to overcome and in what order (with a nice hurdle race analogy).
- Sorting opportunities with the Kano model.
- The challenge of finding criteria to select which hurdles to take first: Marc believes that ultimately you need to take a stake in the ground
- How tension increases as you involve more people from different perspectives.
- To tackle the tension that arises when discussing how “valuable” each opportunity is, clearly expose the facts or expectations for each initiative.
- Tension arises not only from discussing the strategy topics but also from the different beliefs that people have about what strategy is (and the role of the product leader in clarifying it).
- Where are we going to play, how do we think we can win, and what choices are we going to make.
- Why product is in a very good position to facilitate the strategic conversation.
- The importance of being very explicit in calling out the necessary trade-offs. How to apply decision frameworks to drive a decision among different stakeholders.
- How the time horizon of the strategy can affect how much time and effort we invest creating it.
- Align everyone before the meeting by having them express their one goal. Not everyone would have it clear!
- When to go for sessions with multiple participants versus discussing in 1-on-1 sessions. The impact of the size and politicness of the organization.
- How to effectively ask stakeholders to disccuss and make a decsion when the strategy hits a roadblock.
- Marc’s recommendation of Never Split the Difference
And many other things!
You can find Marc on twitter, Medium, Linkedin, and marcabraham.com. And check out Marc’s books!
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
Darrell Stephenson is Product Director at Zalando (and previously at SoundCloud). Being a really large corporation, Zalando has strategies at multiple levels that interact and intersect with each other. In this episode, Darrell has been extremely open and generous, explaining how product strategy creation works at Zalando, and how leaders face the challenge of the different interconnected areas and corporate goals.
We talked about:
- How Zalando operates with multiple strategies at different levels in the organization and with different time horizons.
- How to identify at which level in the organization you should create your strategy (spoiler: at “Value proposition for the user” level)
- How high level strategy focuses on principles, and how do teams align to it.
- How Zalando focuses on cross-team collaboration to deliver “end to end” great customer experience, and the north-star they use to be aligned.
- What strategy is at Zalando, how it is created, and the different artifacts used. The interaction of different people to select the areas of investment, who is responsible for what.
- How research is integrated into Zalando’s strategy.
- How do they deal with strategy dependencies at such a large scale.
- Why Darrell recommends to Product Managers the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared M. Diamond
And many other things!
Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.
If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs
You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)
Hi! I'm Nacho Bassino.
Welcome to 100 Product Strategies! Let me briefly tell you what this show is about.
The goal of this podcast is to invite product leaders to share their real-life experiences creating and executing Product Strategies.
Episode references:
- 100productstrategies.com
- Product Direction book - https://amzn.to/3J6AoMo