Whether you manage a feature, a product, or a whole suite of products, you likely have some goals that you're trying to meet. But do you have a strategy? Strategy and goals are different. It's your strategy that allows you to make decisions that help you meet your goals in the first place. For example, if you want grow your revenue, your strategy may be to enter a new market - and you may decide to make your product stand out in that market by adding analytics. If you want to have an articulated strategy that you can use to make decisions, stay on-track, and meet your product goals, this is the webinar for you! Join Nils Davis, author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook, as he explains how you can get your team aligned to a practical product strategy.

1. Meet Your Goals with a Practical Product
Strategy
Nils Davis Hannah Flynn
With: Moderated by:
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Start With Why
Webinar Series

2. GoodData is on a mission to fundamentally change the way that businesses
make decisions. With 70,000 businesses, over a million users and a
massively scalable, secure & high-performance Insights Platform-as-a-
Service, GoodData offers the transformational technology and expertise to
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business processes.

3. More about GoodData
GoodData powers better decisions for 1.5M
users across 80,000 businesses in 157
countries. 50% of the Fortune 500 use
GoodData to transform their business with
better data and analytics.

4. What Makes GoodData Different
• Expert Insights, no Ph.D. required
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• Fast time to value
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unified platform that orchestrates data gathering, analytics creation
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• Analytics at massive scale
We scale analytics to all users, everywhere, right at where they
need them

5. Click on the Questions panel to
interact with the presenters
https://www.productmanagementtoday.com/webinar-series/start-with-why/

6. About Nils Davis
I think I was born to be a product manager. I like to have my fingers in everything, and I love working with people
and teams to help them achieve great things. I started in high tech as a technical writer. Some of my colleagues
suggested product management would be a better use of my talents for persuasion and communication, combined
with technical credibility.
I started doing enterprise software product management in that long ago time when there were no classes or
books on PM. I always wished I had the “secret” handbook about product management to help me get over the
humps. Instead, I was lucky to work with excellent mentors across my career, who taught me about finding
marketing problems, driving the creation of solutions, and taking the solutions to market effectively.
Product managers are ultimately responsible for delivering products that create value in the world. My ultimate goal
is to help us all create more value by ensuring every product is a solution to a meaningful market problem. And that
every team creating and selling products is as effective as they can be. In my new book, The Secret Product
Management Handbook, I’ve shared a lot of what I learned on how best to achieve this.
About Hannah Flynn
Hannah attended The University of Chicago, where she majored in Environmental Studies with a concentration in
Economics and Policy. She now works with Aggregage on social media strategy and webinar production on Product
Management Today and B2B Marketing Zone.
Start With Why
Webinar Series

7. 7Start With Why
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Agenda
Why are we here?
What is a strategy?
What are tactics?
The most important
rule, strategy or no
strategy
How does strategy
relate to product?
What if?

8. 8Start With Why
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Feature requests from customers and executives went into
the backlog, and every 2 weeks sprint plans would be
created based on the most urgent customer needs. The
product was being dragged along by momentary
customer demands and executive ideas, not led by a
coherent product strategy.

9. What’s
Wrong With
This?
Common situation
• Reactive
• Small picture focus
• Customer-driven
• Tactical
Desired situation
• Proactive
• Big picture oriented
• Market-driven
• Strategic

10. Poll

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What Is a “Strategy?”
Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, "art of troop
leader; office of general, command, generalship"[1]) is a high
level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of
uncertainty.
… tactics are the specific actions used to achieve those
strategic goals.

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High Level Plan To Achieve
Which Goals?
• Useful?
• Grow revenue
• Grow customers
• More useful
• Sell more to existing
customers
• Sell more to new customers
• Reduce customer attrition
• Increase market share

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Most Important
• The best strategy will
not work if…
• … no one wants your
product

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Turtles All The Way Down
Problem your product solves for the
market
Strategy for building and delivering the
solution
Tactics for delivering on that strategy
Tactics for delivering on those tactics
And so on down to product and feature
prioritization

15. 16Start With Why
Webinar Series
Goal: “Sell More to New
Customers”
• Our strategy might include
• Target a new market segment
• Grow our share of the current
segment
• Target a new geography
• Find a new problem to solve and
solve it

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Tactic: ”Start Selling
in Germany”
• Open sales offices in
Hamburg, Munich, and
Berlin
• Train sales people
• Create market launch
• Localize product in German

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Linking Corporate
Strategy To Product
Prioritization

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Some Prioritization
Techniques
• Trust your instinct
• “What's the worst thing that could
possibly happen?”
• Make sure that your boss's pet feature
is handled
• Strategy-based analytics
The Secret Product Manager Handbook 19

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• We have thousands of features we could add – which ones should we
add?
• The strategy – and the tactics – help guide us
• If the strategy is well-articulated, and not just “Grow” or “Be more
profitable”
Using The Strategy For Prioritization

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Analytics

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1. Localize the product in Japanese.
2. Localize the product in German.
• What’s the strategy?
• “Penetrate Germany”
• Which feature do we do?
Simplified Example: Two Features
Aller Anfang ist schwer

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• The actual strategy (for now):
• Penetrate the German market
• Address gaps against Competitor A
• Enable faster selling in the Financial Services market
• Address customer satisfaction issues
Life Is More Complicated – It’s Why We’re Here

23. 25Start With Why
Webinar SeriesTying The Features To
A Market Model
• What segment wants/needs this
feature?
• How does this feature align with
various market themes?
• Does this feature close a competitive
gap?
• Etc.
• Independent of the strategy, by the
way!

24. Poll
Strategy and Prioritization

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• Strategies combine
• Customers
• Market segments
• Market objectives or themes
• Features satisfy
• Customers
• Market segments
• Market objectives and themes
• (The feature’s “market model”)
How To Use ”Strategies” To Prioritize
The Secret Product Manager Handbook 27

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• Questions to ask
• Is it interesting to the customer who are important to my strategy?
• Does it help me achieve the market goals of my strategy?
• Will it help me be more successful with my target segments?
• Does it help close an important gap against a competitor? Or open a gap against a
competitor?
• All of these can be weighted by importance, and then “added up” to get a
“strategic score”
• Map strategic score versus cost in a scatterplot
“Quantitative Analytics” (Hint: Can Be Done
Qualitatively)

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The Secret Product Manager Handbook 29
Inexpensive and valuable

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Quantitative Analytics
vs. Your Intuition
• Analytics results should align with your intuition
• If they don’t
• Is it a problem with the strategy?
• Is a problem with your model of the
relationships or the strategy?
• Is it a problem with your intuition?
• What about the boss’s pet feature?
• You now have a framework for asking the boss
useful questions
• ”How does this feature align with the strategy?”

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Enables Better
Conversations
• “Why is this feature on the roadmap?”
• “Why isn’t my feature in the roadmap?”
• ”Please add this feature to the roadmap”

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Problem: Too Many
Well-Aligned Features
• Strategic alignment is a pruning
function
• But it can’t prune everything
• Example: Ten high alignment features,
but you can only do five
• Options
• Coherence – pay attention to
dependencies
• Decomposition – 80/20 rule

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• Common situation!
• Back to your intuition
• Even if the strategy isn’t explicit, you
often hear its main components “in the
air”
• You can model the strategy and use
it for analytics
Problem: Strategy Not Explicit Enough

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Three
Things You
Can Start
Doing
Today
Start creating a “market model” for
your features
• Customers, segments, competitors, themes
- at least as “notes” on the feature
Start
Use your organization’s strategy to
guide your prioritization, based on
your market model
Use
Learn to have the analytics-based
conversationsLearn

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What Happened With Radhika?
As Product Manager, you should be focusing on the pieces
of the strategy puzzle that affect your ability to deliver
value to your customers.

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• Strategies and tactics are hierarchical
• If you have a good market model for your features you can use the
organization’s strategy/strategic goals to prioritize
• You still have to use your intuition
• This doesn’t solve all our prioritization problems
Summary Slide

35. More From Me
• The Secret Product Manager Handbook,
available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle
• Or via secretpmhandbook.com
• Twitter: nilsie
• Blog: secretpmhandbook.com/blog
• Persuasion course:
secretpmhandbook.com/persuasion
• All The Responsibility, None Of The Authority
podcast: alltheresponsibility.com
• YouTube: The Secret Product Manager
Handbook

36. Q&A
Hannah Flynn
With: Moderated by:
Principal, NPD Associates
Linkedin page: /in/nilsdavis/
Twitter ID: @nilsie
Website: secretpmhandbook.com
Nils Davis
Site editor, Product Management Today
Linkedin page: linkedin.com/in/hannahmflynn
Twitter ID: @prodmgmttoday
Email: hannah@aggregage.com
Website: productmanagementtoday.com
https://www.productmanagementtoday.com/webinar-series/start-with-why/