 Strategy seems to be one of those words like innovation, web 2.0 and SaaS. It ends up being one of those words that people toss on their resumes, use in profiles, in meetings, emails and hope it helps them stand-out from others. Problem is everyone is doing it. Same with innovation, everyone is innovating or at least trying to innovate. Everyone has a web 2.0 initiative in place and claiming to have a SaaS platform available. Being strategic is no longer a differentiator. Question: How did being strategic become a differentiator?
The simplest definition of strategy is that it is a long-term plan for success. So as a stategic product manager you define a roadmap. Does that qualify you as being strategic? Maybe not, according to our definition. The roadmap needs to articulate a long-term plan for success. If your roadmap does not articulate what success is, you are not strategic. Perhaps we have identified the first step to being strategic. So what does success mean? The funny thing is that the definition of success is the achievement of a something planned. I think Excel calls this a circular reference. Ugh. Despite that, we press forward with defining success for our roadmap. Fortunately, for the product manager our success is usually defined by the Executives in the form of either a corporate strategy or business driver. Usually they take the shape of statements like grow revenue, reduce costs, increase efficiencies. We now know these are more drivers than strategies. Are the drivers listed in the previous sentence sufficient enough for for you to achieve success? These drivers are excellent at kicking off our exercise to define success but are they SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely)? For you to achieve success your definition will need to pass these 5 attributes. Once you have defined your success statement, you are ready to define your roadmap and well on your road to being strategic. Last thought, can your success statement change? Absolutely. We’ll discuss that later. We’ll also come back to the structure of a success statement and have more content on strategy later… for now you can begin to define what success is for your product. | |
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