In this article we’ve collated 15 real product strategy examples from operators and companies.
We’ve divided them into 3 categories
- Write ups: Tiktok, Stripe, Tripadvisor, the Financial Times & Civic
- Working documents: Gitlab, Tesla, Gov.UK, Equinor, the NHS
- Frameworks: Intercom, Gibson Biddle, Melissa Perri, Lenny Rachitsky & Hustle Badger
Real product strategy examples are hard to come by.
They’re competitive in nature, and reveal a lot about the culture and working practices of the company for which they’re made.
Good examples are even harder to come by.
We’ve done our best to collate high quality real examples, that come with sufficient context, share valuable strategy lessons, be it structure, logic or tactics and which are actually used. We've also put everything we found into a handy Product Strategy Examples Miro Board.
Let’s get into it now.
Product Strategy Examples List
The Hustle Badger Product Strategy Examples Miro Board
Write ups
This section includes product strategy write ups from experienced operators about how strategies were created, and share hard earned wisdom about how to do it well.
About this product strategy example:
Written by Zishuang Cheng, it profiles Tiktok founder Alex Zhu’s insights and principles that he used to pivot his unsuccessful edtech start-up into the global social media behemoth we see today. Tiktok is a UGC video streaming social media company.
This 2 part series about the history of Tiktok and how they set out to dominate social media is one of SVPG’s favourite product strategy examples.
It shares 10 key insights or lessons for anyone wanting to succeed in building a successful social media platform:
- Do not go against human nature: people like fun, addiction - don’t fight the tide
- Make it dead simple for your users to create content (or key action): consider the cost / benefit analysis for your users - how quickly can they get pay back for the investment they put in
- Focus on young people for social products: identify the most fertile market for your product using megatrend and societal analysis
- Social Platforms must have a connection to real life: social networks must retain the social aspect, i.e. human to human interactions
- Focus on a niche during the zero to one phase, then diversify use cases: solve one use case very well initially to gain traction before you broaden out
- Focus on utility, then build community: solve the cold start problem by nailing one key need, i.e. Snapchat & filters
- Gather user feedback: assiduously collect design feedback at every stage, and keep a community of users who will help you
- Make your early adopters rich, and the rest will come: create status rewards for evangelists to break status quo and create user envy dynamics
- For pivots, you have to change the value proposition: once you shift the product, you have to abandon your old use cases to build greater value
- Your users need to feel invested: create incentives to invest to accelerate the flywheel
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
Leaving aside societal concerns about the social utility and communal value generated by social media platforms, there’s no denying that Tiktok is an incredibly sticky and loved product.
The strengths of this product strategy example include:
- Real focus on user behavior: it’s peppered with examples of observation, human analysis and engagement with customers
- Focus on user reward systems: the value they gain from the product and how quickly they see ROI for every action
- Globalist perspective: the view from Silicon Valley is merged with Chinese product knowledge
“We have to stay really close to our users, different kinds of users, we call this Participatory Design. Involve the end users in the design process from the very beginning, actually we have hundreds of users on Wechat … We have daily conversations, not only conversations about the product and ideas, but what they think” - Alex Zhu, Founder of Tiktok, Designentrepreneur & Product Strategy at Bytedance
If you’re interested in more of Alex’s thinking, here’s Six & a Half Philosophies for Design, and Design Enlightened by Megatrends.
About this product strategy example:
Ravi Mehta is the ex-CPO of Tinder, VP at Tripadvisor, an advisor to many start ups, and has additionally worked at Meta and Xbox.
In this write up he shares his product strategy stack, a whole bunch of advice for assessing where you sit on a strong strategy spectrum, how to make time for strategy, plus an alternative goal setting framework to OKRs.
“You’ll sometimes hear: ‘Our strategy is to increase revenue by 5%’ or ‘Increase retention by 10%.’ That’s not a strategy, that’s a goal. It’s great if you can achieve that goal, but only if it’s actually part of a larger strategy that the company is trying to advance” - Ravi Mehta
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
Ravi includes 3 major useful lessons:
- Goals are not the same as a strategy: teams often conflate KPIs and strategy, but goals should support strategy, not the other way around
- Product strategy needs to be part of company strategy: product strategy is only meaningful if it supports company goals
- Strong strategy hygiene assists prioritization: the greater the clarity and discipline you have around what you want to achieve, the easier it is to say no
The product strategy stack itself is fairly intuitive: mission statement, company strategy, product strategy, product roadmap and product goals / KPIs. The value comes from the connection between product strategy and company mission and aims.
“Product strategy [is] the connective tissue between what a product team is doing day to day and what the ambitions of a company are…having a very clear understanding of what is the mission and the strategy of the company that you're a part of [is key].” - Ravi Mehta
Other useful things in this example include the fact that along the way he talks about how to build a product strategy deck, including user context and wireframes, which is useful if you’re struggling to communicate your vision convincingly in slide format.
About this product strategy example:
Stripe is a global payments platform that powers payments for many different internet businesses.
This write up walks through the strategic choices the payments team made to simplify Stripe implementation on other people’s sites, powered by their API design. The ease of installing Stripe is one key reason it’s so widely adopted.
“A few years ago, Bloomberg Businessweek published a feature story on Stripe. Four words spanned the center of the cover: “seven lines of code,” suggesting that’s all it took for a business to power payments on Stripe. The assertion was bold—and became a theme and meme for us…the ability to open up a terminal, run this curl snippet, then immediately see a successful credit card payment felt like seven lines of code.” - Michelle Bu, Stripe’s Payment’s API: the first 10 years
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
It’s a great overview of how a focus on ease of customer use drove development of a product over 10 years.
Michelle Bu of Stripe’s Payments Team talks transparently about how they worked to avoid technical debt as the complexity of their operations and the number of payment methods they accepted snowballed. Every payment method involved adding more code complexity, and at one point, they took stock, and decided to re-design their entire solution to ensure implementation remained competitive.
This included investing significant time in developing the best possible solution, and rather than iterating on what they had, taking the difficult decision to roll out a completely new API across existing users.
“We locked ourselves in a conference room for three months with the goal of designing a truly unified payments API…. A team of five people—four engineers and a PM—walked through every payment method we supported and we could imagine supporting in the future. We iterated on an API design that would be able to model all of them. We ignored all existing abstractions and thought about the problem from first principles.”
There’s some excellent advice here about investing in the best possible solution, how to stay focused on end goals, and how that team worked together to design the solution, including pacing their questions, consulting experts, documenting their ideas to stress test them and more.
About this product strategy example:
Civic is a decentralized personal identification and authentication company, founded with the aim of increasing governmental utility and trust.
South African entrepreneur and Civic co-founder Vinny Lingham takes inspiration from Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplans to describe how he and his cofounder backed out their product strategy from a longer term vision.
Elon Musk’s Masterplans are famous for setting out a grand future vision to be achieved in c.5-10 years time, and then detailing ~5 sequential steps to get there, increasing in difficulty with each step.
Vinny calls this product strategy methodology “recursive”, by which he means that the last step in the strategy calls on earlier, simpler versions of the same concept.
Example: step 1 of Tesla’s first Masterplan was to build a sports car, steps 2-3 were about reducing the cost of that car, and step 4 was to provide zero emission power generation options for those cars.
“To reference the approach, I’ll offer it a name: recursive product strategy. Here’s what I understand it to mean: to work back from an end goal — five, 10 or 50 years ahead — until you can hit inflection points that propel your company and its customers to the next stage, while ushering both toward the end goal.” - Vinny Lingham
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
“Recursive product strategy” can be a powerful framework to allow you to iterate in stages towards a concept.
However Vinny talks powerfully about how complicated it is to execute in practice. Most of us think about the next step, not enormous leaps, and failures of imagination can mean we struggle with ambitious product visions.
To walk through how it can be done he shares real examples of the types of discussions he and his co-founder had to get on the same page about what they wanted, and to shape both their vision and then back out a strategy from there.
He recommends reversing your way to the end result starting with
- Context: the unique understanding you set out with - what you know that no one else does
- Big issue: what the big problem is
- Goal: overcoming the big problem - what an ideal world would look like
- Desired end state: how you will achieve your goal, or the solution
- Getting there: backing out the stages that have to be achieved on the way to the desired end state (if we do this, we could do that, or we could only do this, if we achieved that)
To enable the big vision, he has some advice about how to think big, around selecting the right universe to dent, thinking about which wedges you can drive to dent your desired universe, and avoiding meaningless steps - driving value at each stage.
Finally for founders looking to deploy this method he advises you to be honest about what you want to achieve with your company, and what you personally want to get out of it.
About this product strategy example:
Debbie McMahon, Director of Product for the FT.com & Apps, later interim CPO, wrote up her experience of starting in her role and working to shape a product strategy to grow subscribers for the consumer business. She found herself in a context where there was a clear business goal, but no link to day to day team activities.
The Financial Times, or FT, is a newspaper focused on global, financial and business news.
Winning stakeholder engagement strategies | Debbie McMahon
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
Debbie walks us through joining the company in 2022, and realising her role was to make an existing high level goal an actionable strategy for the product squads reporting into her. She discusses how she uncovered key themes, organized them according to funnel stages, and maturity of business lines.
As it’s a write up, there’s a lot of detail about the process, and how she came to various conclusions, but less actual detail on the strategy itself, presumably for reasons of privacy.
The strategy output she shares is displayed cleanly as a one pager aligned to core themes. A concise visual like this can be incredibly powerful in ensuring your strategy is internalized by your team, especially when underpinned with more detail.
Product Strategy Course
Working documents
In this section you’ll find real product strategy documents which are being executed by organizations.
About this product strategy example:
The UK Government provides digital government services online, primarily via the government’s website, Gov.uk. A team exists internally to digitize common, high volume governmental services, according to the organization’s purpose.
“Our mission is to build a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone. Using our unique position at the centre of government, we will develop services that just work for the user, however complex the underlying systems.” - Government Digital Service: Our Strategy for 2021-2014
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
Strengths include:
- Eyes on the horizon: it’s for 3 years, with a clear articulation of the service’s overall purpose
- Describes context: where they are today, versus the past, including resourcing and positioning
- Clearly articulated missions: with steps to achieve them detailed by mission, or target outcome
- How they will do it: principles by which they will work
- What they won’t focus on: a list of exclusions, because what you choose not to focus on is as important as what you do
This is also a living document: a public blog post, which is routinely updated, and with an open comments section.
There’s another product strategy example available here outlining a strategy to enhance Retirement Digital Services. This one comes with some advice about how to write a strong strategy.
“If your strategy is not precise enough, then it is hard to challenge and difficult to measure. Check that you have been single-minded and specific. Strategies provide clarity, so use plain language. Ask people to read it and play back their understanding – does it match what you intended? Each element of the strategy should have implications for the following one, so that the overall story is coherent.” - Writing a great product strategy for great services, DWP Digital
About this product strategy example:
Gitlab, a DevSecOPs company, eat their own dog food when it comes to publicly hosted software development documentation.
As a result, they host a full 3 year business and product strategy, articulating context, investment, product and customer strategy online.
“Our challenge is to drive the right balance between breadth and depth by retaining a seed then nurture approach in new product areas while simultaneously improving existing product areas that generate usage and revenue. Shifting more focus to product depth will allow us to win and retain sophisticated enterprise customers.” - Gitlab Direction
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
It’s a fully integrated business and product strategy. Investment decisions follow strategy, and strategy is informed by knowledge of the landscape, clear eyed analysis of growth, user feedback, and internal understanding. Granularity increases as you work down the page.
Other strengths:
- Concise: 5 missions are articulated for the product organization within 1 single page
- Coherent: the logic and the focus is consistent from top to bottom
- Principles: what is driving the plan and where to come back to if anything is unclear
- Scope: is clearly delineated and exclusions are articulated
- Competitors / disruption: Gitlab explicitly calls out the competitive environment within which it operates, and includes beliefs around signals the company must react to if they occur in the market
Overall it’s clearly focused on user needs, user activation and conversion and user retention in a highly competitive market - which gives it a laser clear focus.
About this product strategy example:
NHS Digital is responsible for the underlying digital services which underpin the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), including patient data and clinician interfaces. The NHS is the UK’s public healthcare provider.
This is a public strategy and now, next, later roadmap which includes recently completed items.
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
It’s a public 1 year strategy with 4 key goals, which have example initiatives listed below them. It’s then supported by done, now, next, later roadmaps for each product group within the organization.
Strengths include:
- Strategy linked to execution: stated goals and the roadmaps exist in the same place and drive each other
- Public: in a decentralized, nationally owned service like the NHS, this offers many benefits
- Roadmap detail: Detailed tasks under each of the done, now, next, later sections
- Linked to organizational strategy: clearly states that the strategy and roadmap will be updated inline with the government’s 10 year plan
However as this is a public strategy, it’s pretty high level.
There’s no metrics, there’s no user feedback notes, there’s limited context for why they’re doing what they’re doing, and the organizational product groups don’t seem to clearly align to the stated goals.
Real Product Roadmap Examples | Miro Board with 5x templates
About this product strategy example:
Equinor is a large Norwegian energy company, predominantly dealing in oil and gas, but increasingly developing renewables, hydrogen and carbon capture technologies.
This strategy example covers their ambition to develop as an ‘API first’ company. API as a product was famously pioneered by Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and led to the development of AWS.
The rationale for this is to use modern APIs to manage the complexity inherent in legacy systems, modernize their architecture, make development more efficient and open up new business lines.
“A key factor to enable the evolution of an API platform is treating our APIs as products.” - Equinor’s API Product Strategy
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
This is a highly technical strategy hosted on Github so some characteristics differ to a more classic product strategy format.
However it does include:
- Context: why this makes sense for the business now
- Goals: what the strategy is intended to achieve
- User roles: the different characteristics of user groups the API platform has to serve
- Desired end state: what the API platform and portal should deliver
- Design principles: APIs as a product, consistency, focus on user experience, and ongoing iteration on an externalized product
About this product strategy example:
Elon Musk writes long form product vision and strategy plans for Tesla, which are publicly hosted on their site. Tesla makes electric cars.
They cover 5-10 year horizons, start from a big picture vision, provide context on the why, often supported by detailed data, and work backwards from the vision to break down achievement of the strategy into milestones along the way to the vision.
He’s published 3 so far and there’s rumours that a Masterplan 4 is on the way.
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
They’re clearly written, very logical, and often sit on top of significant supporting reasoning and detailed data.
They start from an ambitious end state, or product vision, and work backwards step by step as to how it can be achieved.
Steps are incremental and achievable within 1-2 year horizons and have value in themselves. Together they ladder up to the ambitious end goal.
Real Product Vision Examples, with Miro Board
Product Strategy Frameworks
In this section we’re covering the frameworks that companies and product leaders use to put together their strategies.
About this product strategy example:
This is both a podcast episode and a transcript, so you can choose how you consume it. It’s a conversation from 2019 between Paul Adams, CPO of Intercom, and Des Traynor, the co-founder of Intercom. Intercom is a chat based AI customer service company.
“If you’re building a product, you have to be great at saying no. Not “maybe” or “later”. The only word is no.” - Des Traynor, Product Strategy means Saying No
Des Traynor wrote an article back in 2013 about the critical importance as a product leader in saying no to feature requests, tactical builds and what stakeholders ask for, arguing that none of these matter as much as a great product that delivers for users.
This conversation builds on that article, and is an updated view on Des and Paul’s fundamental beliefs about product strategy, and the framework they’re using to shape product strategy at Intercom.
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
“If you think of a strategy as made up of lots of different activities, i.e. things you’ll do, then some of those activities should be unique to you, meaning that a lot of people don’t do them. And the reason for this is that you need differentiation. There must be something different about your product.” - Paul Adams, Intercom on Product: The Intersection of Company and Product Strategy
Heavily influenced by Michael Porter’s What is Strategy they lay out a product strategy framework, and how they think about each component.
The framework is as follows:
- Unique activities: core differentiators of your product that are defensible - unique and hard to copy advantages
- Similar activities: where there’s overlap in features with competitors where can you be better or add more
- Coherent: connecting the unique differentiator workstream with the competitive workstreams to have a joined up plan that is more than the sum of its parts
- Trade offs: stating clearly what you won’t do and what you will say no to
- Timing: the period that the strategy covers, ideally 12 months
- Measurability: the metrics which will show that you have achieved your desired outcomes
They then discuss how to spot a bad strategy, which they sum up as:
- Limited differentiation: lots of similar features to competitors
- So-called differentiators lack user need: users don’t care that much about the problem they’re solving
7 Powers, or Competitive Moats
About this product strategy example:
Gibson Biddle is the ex VP of Product at Netflix, a content streaming company, and CPO of Chegg, a study and homework company, who is now an educator and public speaker. He specializes in product strategy and has written a seminal series of product strategy essays with exercises on Medium which are well worth checking out.
His product strategy process works through a series of steps to come up with a robust strategy that can be refined over time:
- The DHM model: how your product will delight users in hard to copy margin enhancing ways. Using concepts like Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, and exploring different business models and pricing levers.
- Identifying DHM hypotheses to test: Taking your DHM ideas, and picking hypotheses or assumptions that underpin those to stress test. This allows you to go from ideation to strategy.
- Strategy / Metrics / Tactics lock up: Metrics are how you’ll measure the success of your hypothesis, and tactics are ways you can test them.
“Product strategy answers, “How will your product delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways?”” - Gibson Biddle
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
“Think about how your product delights customers now and in the future….How will your product build a hard-to-copy advantage?...How will your product generate margin? You’ll need profits to invest in innovation to build an even better product in the future.” - Gibson Biddle
The process outlined is robust when it comes to building differentiated products that drive real user and business value, especially when developing early stage products.
Many strategies focus on user needs, and competitive moats. However what makes this example powerful is the additional focus on business value. Companies need to consider their own lifecycle, and how they’ll gain pay back companies for their innovation investments.
His Medium essays can be read sequentially, and you can work through the exercises he sets (usually 2 or 3 per article) to iterate to a point where you have something useful.
He supports his theory throughout with useful real world examples from his time at Netflix and Chegg.
About this product strategy example:
Here at Hustle Badger, we provide 2 strategy templates. One template is for a Snap Strategy, or preliminary draft that you sketch out at speed in 1 hour. The second is a fuller, beefed up product strategy template for the final version. They’re both available in Doc and Notion formats.
We also provide a product strategy deck strawman for when you need a more visual format to present to stakeholders. You can find all of our product strategy materials on our Resources page.
Make a Snap Strategy in 1 hour
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
Our template works top down, end to end, incorporating more granularity and detailed thinking at each step of the process.
It includes 7 steps that cover vision, target audience, competitive advantages, pillars, impact measures and roadmapping.
How to write a great product strategy
It’s designed to be iterative and to prompt more investigation and validation at every stage, in order to build certainty and detail as you work through it.
We support our product strategy templates with courses, video coaches, how to guides, and further artifacts, such as Miro board to help design your product pillars, and work through opportunity solution trees.
It’s all intended to help you start drafting artifacts and collaborating with stakeholders to create a robust, aligned strategy.
About this product strategy example:
Melissa Perri is an author, board advisor and runs her own company, Product Institute. This write up and framework comes from a 2016 blog, called ‘What is Product Strategy?’. More of her insights can be found in her book, Escaping the Build Trap.
In this post she outlines a product strategy methodology which is based on setting a vision, articulating the business challenge you’re supporting and then identifying areas to investigate which you believe might help you get there. You then take a target area, measure your current state, and experiment with initiatives which help you improve that metric - all the while monitoring whether changing that number helps you achieve your business goal.
“We need to have a plan but the plan shouldn’t be “build feature x.” Our plan should be to reach our business goals. We need to switch from thinking about Product Strategy as something that is dictated from top to bottom, and instead something that is uncovered as we learn what will help us achieve our objectives.” - Melissa Perri, What is Good Product Strategy
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
It’s a clear and powerful articulation of the need to iterate towards your vision, using experimentation by design. It’s a similar methodology to product pillars and opportunity solution trees, and is based on the Toyota Kata process which uses lean value trees to ladder up to strategic goals.
Developing the pillars of your product strategy
What’s powerful about this process is that you measure, iterate and experiment your way towards success. You don’t build and then discover that your features didn’t deliver the required results.
“When we are building products, we have a threshold of knowledge. We cannot start on Day 1 and exactly plan to reach our vision. There are too many unknowns and variables. Instead, we set goals along the way, then remove obstacles through experimentation until we reach our vision.” - Melissa Perri, What is Good Product Strategy
About this product strategy example:
Lenny Rachitsky is an experienced product leader who shares a host of product content on his Substack newsletter. He and his guests in the product and founder community often discuss the topic of product strategy.
This is his own lean product strategy template in a simple word doc. It has 9 sections which cover everything from Mission, Current Goals, Opportunities, Proposed Solution and Initiatives.
Pros and cons of this product strategy example:
We’re a fan of the document format of product strategy over slides.
Strengths of this example include specific sections for the business mission, to help ensure product strategy remains aligned with company goals, a section on honest accounting, which is for acknowledging current product and tech hurdles, and a step by step plan to execute the strategy, including executive sign off, and resource allocation.
Wrap up on Product Strategy Examples
There’s some common themes across all of these examples:
- Company & product: Product strategy needs to ladder up to company strategy and goals
- Must be measurable: Strategies should include KPIs, and be clear on what success looks like
- The market matters: based on structural dynamics or user feedback
- Business and user delight matters: this is about extracting business value for the customer value you create
- Lack of a strategy is problematic: for prioritization and impact
There’s a couple of different ways to create strategies:
- Ambitious end goal: Start from a big end vision of how your company will change the world and work backwards
- Current company priorities: Start from company strategy for the next 3 years and work backwards
These all have different time frames: from 5-10 years, to 1 year, and relate to different company lifecycle stages. Newer companies tend to work backwards from an end goal, whereas more mature organizations tend to work off a shorter term vision.
Frameworks can help you structure your strategy, once the overall principles are understood.
