2 min read

Depending on who you ask, strategy means different things:

• “The long-term goal or roadmap for an organization, and how it plans to reach them” — IMD
• “It outlines a company's strategic vision for its product offerings by stating where the products are going, how they will get there and why they will succeed” — MaRs
• “The roadmap that's used to develop your product or feature” — Hubspot

It’s simultaneously a roadmap, vision, and a reason for why a product will win.

Let’s break it down a bit better:

1. Elements in Strategy

Jackie Bavaro’s breakdown of a product strategy is simple. A good strategy contains:

1. Vision: what the future looks like
   • Listen to relevant signals — so many inputs exist (asks from the CEO, stakeholders, investors, existing users) that taking on every need is a recipe for failure, as PMs familiar with scope-creep can attest to.
   • Visions need to be produced through alignment, and achieve alignment:
     • Have conversations with your CEO to check if the vision supports overarching business goals.
     • Allow inputs from your product team to make sure their knowledge is reflected in the decision.
2. Framework: market bets, pillars, principles, user
   • These are the concrete pillars that will derive product success: market trajectory, competing products, and analogous experience
   • Strategic frameworks are opinionated — if principles for success were clear, everyone would be winning. It isn’t, which is why choices here can make or break products.
3. Roadmap: a loose plan for achieving the vision
   • See: Mastering the Roadmap

2. Strategic pivoting

The market changes all the time: Regulatory shifts, new competitors, user preferences changing… everything can strengthen or weaken your strategy…

Which is why pivoting is such a big deal in the modern business environment.

When you’re sure you’ve found something that undermines the overall strategy, you need to pivot as quick as possible. This is a core feature built into agile teams, and why having agility in general is so crucial for product teams, especially in nascent industries.