Keeping your Strategy Simple

Ugh, 9:15 PM on a Sunday night and I am about to start a blog post with no crisp idea yet. This is going completely against my new strategy for writing to this blog. Rough start.

Couple weeks ago I asked for a list of strategies that would begin to make up your product strategy. One could say, I was overwhelmed by the response. In a moment of openness, I have no idea what some of them mean. I can make one guarantee, you don’t need all of them. Too much.

How can we keep this simple? If we scale back to the definition of strategy that I like to use…

“a long-term plan for success.”

… it will give us a framework for where to begin. For one, we need to know what the timeline is, so as to know how far out we need to plan. Also the success statement, our mission and goals will be guiding factors in determining the activities for our strategies.

We also know that your product strategy needs to be aligned with your corporate strategy and that each individual supporting strategy needs to be aligned with your product strategy (and corporate strategies if there are cross-functional components).

I’ll leave it to you to determine which strategies you need to define. To formulate this list you will want to consider your product, your supporting product network (i.e. embedded widgets, integrations, etc.) and the people involved in the construction and distribution of your product.

This is a good place to start, list all the affected parties. Once you have that done, we’ll work through what to do next. Bear in mind for some parties you will not be able to define the strategy, but you will need to be aware of it for your own planning.

NB: For your product a long-term may be 3 weeks or 3 years. It does not really matter as long as you communicate the length and plan for it.

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