As we’re talking about creating a product strategy for a team, or several teams, there are a few extra points here to help this result in effective work:
- One objective per team – each team should only have a single objective at a time. If you have multiple objectives then the team will split its focus between them, its priorities won’t be clear and progress overall will be slower. This often requires hard prioritization choices. No one said being a leader was easy.
- Every objective has a metric – give each objective a single metric to measure progress against. This will help you understand over time whether you’re getting closer to your goal and will also provide a common currency to evaluate the impact of pillars and actions and prioritize them. You might want to give pillars and actions their own metrics to measure progress, but this is less important than having metrics at the objective level.
- Size the buckets – just because you’ve grouped your work into logical buckets doesn’t mean that those buckets will deliver impact. You still need to estimate the size of the work you have planned to know it’s worthwhile. The benefit of the pyramid structure is that you don’t need to size each and every feature idea that you have though. You can size a pillar or an opportunity and use that to guide your prioritization.
- Update frequently – product strategies are never static. You’re always gaining new insights as you ship features and do more discovery. These learnings will often change how you think, and should be reflected in updates to your strategy. For example, experiments will inform the estimated value of the opportunities they fall under, and the relative priority you are giving to them.
