Product Strategy as a Living Conversation

How to choose the right problems, empower teams, and achieve meaningful outcomes

Product Strategy couldn't be more important yet most teams get it wrong. If you're reading this, you're probably one of them. Is everything a ‘top priority’? Have you taken on too much? Are you struggling to make meaningful progress? Are you focused on shipping features instead of realising value?

If you're involved in product strategy creation, or a victim of it being done badly, we can help you. The authors of this article have created many product strategies across industries, from startups to global enterprises, and in challenging environments. We’ll reveal how to think about product strategy, how to create one, and how you can leverage it to make the change you want.

How we define Product Strategy and Why it's important?

Product strategy is selecting the right problems to solve and breaking them down into actionable opportunities with measurable objectives.

Let’s unpack that...

• 'Right problems' because we must prioritise, we can't solve everything at once

• 'Problems' not solutions, so teams have the freedom to discover solutions themselves

• 'Actionable opportunities' so teams know what to do next

• 'Measurable objectives' so teams focus on outcomes and can learn from results

Strategy is focus. Product strategy purposefully narrows attention to prevent distraction. By aligning limited resources toward a single focal point, we dramatically increase the odds of meaningful breakthroughs.

The purpose of Product strategy is to create clarity at the team level. It shifts conversations from "what do stakeholders want us to build?" to "how do we solve the problem we all agreed was most important?". Framing expectations as expected outcomes helps to empower teams.

Together with leadership the team agree the most important problem to solve and how to measure success. The team are then given the freedom to explore whatever solutions they see fit - in exchange for taking ultimate accountability for the result. This outcome-driven approach beats the alternative output driven approach which can deteriorate into a painful exchange of ever more detailed requirements… which reduces the flexibility of the team, increases the burden on leadership and ultimately reduces the chance of success.

Give teams context, not requirements. Trust them to find solutions and act in the organisation's best interests. (If you don't trust your team to that degree, it's important to fix that first.)

Product Strategy also helps leaders balance autonomy and alignment across the organisation. When each team's priority is clear and transparent, alignment becomes easier while teams maintain autonomy. This accelerates organisational velocity. Interdependencies create a challenge, so aim to reduce them overtime by carefully structuring your organisation and technology to encourage the flow of value.

What’s the essence of Product Strategy then?

The essence of product strategy is a clear strategic intent that answers three questions:

• What are you trying to influence?

• What's your hypothesis for influencing it?

• How long will you give the team to make progress?

Example: Q2 Focus: Increase 90-day retention by 5% by raising the percentage of new users who send 10+ messages in their first 10 days from 30% to 50%.

Let’s break that down...

• Retention is prioritised over other possible goals like acquisition or monetisation.

• The problem is defined tightly as “new users aren’t sending enough messages early on”, but the team has autonomy to discover how to encourage this behaviour

• The hypothesis “if more new users send 10+ messages in 10 days, retention will rise” provides a clear direction for experiments and next steps. A strong product team wouldn’t have a problem coming up with ideas to improve this metric.

• The measurable target (“increase 90-day retention by 5%”) ensures focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Providing us a checkpoint to asses our progress and the efficacy of our approach.
  

You can add context, evidence, and narrative for stakeholders, but never present a strategy without a clear statement like this at its core.

Where we think Product Strategy Starts and Ends

Product strategy is positioned between business strategy and execution. Inputs to product strategy include; the organisation's mission, vision, and strategy, along with product insights, market insights, and customer insights.

Outputs from product strategy typically consist of defined objectives and outcomes, success measures, hypotheses, and actionable framing for teams. Downstream from product strategy, one finds roadmaps, requirements documents, and feature specifications. While detailed artefacts may not always accompany product strategy, clear direction is essential for effective implementation.

Defining Product Strategy:

How the industry gets it wrong

Up to this point, nothing we’ve outlined should be controversial — yet we often find ourselves diverging from industry commentators and so-called ‘best practices’. Here’s where they get it wrong:

Focusing on distant horizons. Mission and vision statements are nice-to-have, but are too distant and vague to guide daily work. Focus your product strategy on this quarter's objectives.

Operating at too high an altitude. Generic business goals (20% growth for 20 years) don't help product teams. Product strategy is an internal communication tool, pitch it at the product team level.

Obsessing over perfect connections. Leaders often try connecting everything to their strategic vision, creating unnecessary overhead. Worse, teams retrofit existing work to match strategic objectives without real alignment. The result: poor outcomes when investments fail to shift key metrics. A better approach is to design initiatives that genuinely advance your strategy while being realistic about available resources. If you lack the right people, discuss team restructuring or expanding capacity and capability in key areas.

Prioritising artefacts over understanding. Product managers often obsess over what roadmap template to use. Roadmaps and narrative docs though, can create a false sense of security. What matters is that every team member knows what they're trying to achieve, why it matters, and what evidence supports this direction. Set a clear strategic intent and make sure everyone knows what they can do to help achieve it.

Five Warning Signs Your Product Strategy Isn’t Working

1. Everything is a ‘top priority’. When everything is high priority, nothing is. Good strategy and discovery unlock easier prioritisation conversations. The alternatives (stakeholder wrangling and internal politics) result in worse outcomes.

2. You’re Spread too Thin. When you take on too many objectives, you spread your teams too thinly (colloquially known as peanut butter strategy). It makes it harder to progress on each objective because in addition to dividing your effort you're introducing more context switching and research overheads.

3. You're Feature-Focused. Stakeholders and users both love a feature roadmap, but for a product team it can become a trap. It feels great to ship and move on, but our attention needs to be on outcomes and the relentless pursuit of value. Give teams problems to solve and measure success instead.

4. Your Strategy changes before your success metrics do. A strategy needs to fit the current reality, but you also need to give your team time to make a difference. Flip-flop with strategic priorities too often and your team won’t have time to achieve anything, let them cook for a quarter. Get the permission you need to tackle problems proactively not reactively. Use leading metrics to validate product strategy as quickly as possible.

5. Disciplines aren’t aligned. If engineering, product and design are working toward different priorities and talking past each other you have a problem. Product strategy is a communication tool for aligning teams, if folks aren’t aligned then something went wrong with strategy creation and communication.

Principles of Great Product Strategy

Before we talk about how to create a product strategy, lets establish the characteristics of great Product Strategy:

Focus resources - Concentrate more resources than strictly necessary at a focal point to increase the odds of a breakthrough. Topple the first domino.

State problems, not solutions - Leave space for teams to discover and experiment with solutions.

Make it actionable - Teams should know exactly what problem they're solving, and what they need to do next. Strategy should provide enough direction, such that even when the solution is unknown, the next research step is clear.

Make it falsifiable - Frame strategy as a hypothesis with clear assumptions. This enables organisational honesty, makes progress visible, and gives you permission to course correct when things aren’t working.

Focus on humans - Frame desired changes in user behaviour. Doing so will help you with solution ideation and later measuring success. Example: "We want segment X to do action Y, Z% more often."

Enable multiple bets - Focus on a single outcome, but encourage the team to place multiple bets. Users are unpredictable; portfolios of bets increase the odds of success.

Make it memorable - Strategy is a communication tool, the best are memetic. They spread throughout the organisation because they’re simple to grasp, recall and relay.

Make it achievable yet aspirational - Set teams up for success with goals that are within reach but CV-worthy.

Start Where you Are - You Can Create Your Product Strategy Today

It's important to give your team a clear direction, especially during times of uncertainty. As a product manager, your job is to help the team stay focused and aligned despite the ambiguity around them.

Don't wait for perfect information - start with the insights you have today. Your strategy will evolve as you learn more. Be transparent about knowledge gaps and view them as opportunities for discovery.

While creating strategy without complete information may feel daunting, taking that first step is crucial. Setting a direction, even an imperfect one, sparks valuable discussions, welcomes healthy challenges, and enables continuous improvement.

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3 Simple Steps to Create a Product Strategy

Many Product Manager’s want to follow a step-by-step process to create their product strategy. The templatization of Product Management (think Business Model Canvas) has become big business after all. Product Strategy creation though requires deep thought, a kind of tacit sub-conscious noodling and back and forth that's hard to articulate. That said, we don’t shy away from tough questions, so here's a simple 3 step process, that if you take with a pinch of salt, should help you create a product strategy.

1. Gather information, connect the dots, get to insights

A good product strategy starts with strong situational awareness. Begin by gathering all relevant information in one place to build a clear understanding of; your users, product performance, business opportunities, challenges, and market landscape. Dive into analytics, research findings, and stakeholder conversations. At this stage, collect as much information as possible. Follow the evidence, and be mindful of your personal bias.

When you collate everything about your market, business, customers and product into one place, something funny happens. You become painfully aware of what you don’t know, you discover knowledge gaps. That's OK - close them later by commissioning research over time, but don't let gaps delay your progress.

Start connecting the dots, you’re looking for patterns or trends in the data. Pay more attention to themes that are evident in both qualitative insights and quantitative data.

Keep an eye out for contradictory signals too, such as when customers say they do one thing, but actually do another.

You’re searching for a needle in a haystack, the signal in the noise. You’re working towards identifying the most valuable problems and opportunities our product could address.

Consider inviting other members of the business to share your new vantage point.

2. Select the most important problem or opportunity, distinguish the signal from the noise

Once you’ve gathered your insights, it can feel overwhelming if there’s no shortage of problems to solve or opportunities to explore. But product strategy is about setting focus, so in this step, we zoom in on the most important problem or opportunity - the one that will create the most value for both your users and the business.

Find those that offer the most value by looking for problems or opportunities that are both evidence-backed and high impact, rather than being pulled towards edge cases or isolated complaints. Consider each insight through the lens of desirability (do users care?), feasibility (can we build it?), and viability (does it support our business goals?). If the answer isn’t obvious, you can use basic tools like a confidence vs. opportunity size matrix to help prioritise and visualise trade-offs.

It’s also important to consider strategic alignment. Are we confident this is something we can and should influence? What makes this worth solving now? Is it supported by data, user insight, and the direction of the wider business?

By the end of this step, you should have one or a small number of clearly defined, high-value problem statements or opportunities, rooted in evidence and ready to be framed into a strategy for the team and stakeholders.

Example: Clients complain about price inconsistency “the price shown on the app is different from the price charged” (Source: appstore). Users uninstall the app and leave low ratings and bad reviews. Metrics show increased churn, uninstalls. Negative ratings are impacting # of new downloads too.

3. Frame for the team

Once you’ve selected one or two hero insights, you need to shape them into a product strategy. This is the where we move from a something fluffy to something concrete.

Try framing your strategy as a hypothesis. What is your goal? How will you know when you’ve succeeded? Often represented as a lagging metric. Then think about what you need to change to make that possible? How are you going to influence that? How can you measure along the way? How long will you need to make it happen?

Most product strategies can be framed in terms of human behaviour. Doing so makes measuring success and solution ideation easier. What user behaviour are you trying to influence? E.g. We want customer segment X, to do action Y, Z% more.

Commit to making progress inside a given time period. We’d recommend quarterly for most organisations, but smaller startups should be moving faster.

This makes our strategy measurable and falsifiable. A clear hypothesis makes ideation for experiments and solutions easier too. Framing as a problem gives the team room to discover the most effective solutions.

Now we have the kernel of a strategy its’ time to test it with the team. Strategy is a communication tool. Do your team find it easy to understand and remember. Strategy is designed to guide the team. Does your strategy make the next move clear? It could be more discovery, small experiments, solution ideation or solution definition. But the team should feel empowered and unblocked.

We stop short of defining solutions, but frame the problem such that the team can place multiple bets against the specific outcome.

Lastly, we want our strategy to motivate the team. To do that it has to be both achievable and worthwhile. Base the magnitude of the change you seek on evidence (what competitors do, or the impact of similar changes in the past). Then think about the CV test - is what you’re going to achieve over the next few months going to be a CV worthy achievement for everyone? If not, up the ambition.

Example: Q2 Focus: Increase 90-day retention by 5% by raising the percentage of new users who send 10+ messages in their first 10 days from 30% to 50%.

Tell the Story to Stakeholders

Once you’ve articulated the core of your product strategy - think about how best to communicate it. Storytelling is an important part of product strategy, especially in larger organisations. Sometimes visualising things (e.g. product/ solutions space) in a new way is the key to unlocking alignment. To do either of these well, you need to know and understand your key stakeholders. Tailor comms to key individuals, sit down with them if you can. Without being dishonest, tweak how you present your strategy to each stakeholder. Have empathy for their goals and challenges. Balance active listening and openness with defending your approach with evidence and by showing your work. Communication is easier once you’ve built strong relationships, and built some trust and credibility.

Only produce artefacts (Product Roadmaps, PRDs) if they’re the best communication method for the end-user you have in mind.

Maintaining Focus

Product strategy is about choice: deciding what to do now, and what not to do. The gold-winning British rowing team at the Sydney Olympics had a simple motto: “Will it make the boat go faster?” If the answer was no, they didn’t do it — even skipping the opening ceremony.

The same principle applies to product strategy. Focus doesn’t maintain itself; it decays unless reinforced through daily rituals and decision-making. Business-as-usual work will always exist, but it must be tracked and prioritised ruthlessly to avoid distracting from what really moves the boat forward.

Validating Product Strategy

It’s important to be bold and trust your instincts. Strategy is about placing bets after all. But what separates Product Managers’ from ‘wishful thinkers’ is that we seek evidence to validate or invalidate our approach as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Testing your Product Strategy’s viability quickly is tough but achievable. Rather than waiting a full year for slow-moving lagging metrics to emerge, focus on identifying early positive indicators or warning signs.

So how do you know if your product strategy is working? The progression below shows how to move from early intuitive indicators you can check immediately to hard data that validates long-term market fit.

• What can you learn from the initial reactions of your team and key stakeholders?

• Do early customer interviews and assumption tests confirm that you're solving a real, urgent problem people actually care about?

• Do the team generate a large number of high-quality ideas during solution ideation?

• Do initial technical spikes and prototypes eliminate major feasibility risks and prove core functionality is achievable?

• Do results from the first small scale experiments look promising?

• Can you observe meaningful shifts in user behaviour and leading indicators from low-percentage A/B tests or pilot programs?

• Are you hearing unprompted positive feedback, feature requests, or competitive concerns that suggest you're addressing something valuable?

• Are other teams, executives, or external partners showing interest in collaborating or investing more resources in your strategy?

• Does cohort analysis demonstrate that the behavioural changes you're seeing actually translate into improvements in your target business outcomes? (this is the gold standard)

• Are your core KPIs and north star metrics trending positively, even if the changes are still small?

Pivot or Persevere

Product development demands resilience. While breakthrough moments happen, most strategic progress comes through iteration and sustained effort. The critical skill for Product Managers is knowing when to push through challenges versus when to change direction entirely. This challenge is compounded by the fact that your product doesn’t exist in a vacuum, you operate within dynamic environments that can shift dramatically. No framework can make decisions for you, but we've found this distinction useful:

• Persevere when struggling with execution. Assuming you’re solving a real problem, if your product changes aren't driving the human behaviour shifts you expected (either in direction or magnitude) it's typically worth pushing harder through more user research, experiments, and solution iteration.

• Pivot when succeeding at the wrong thing. If you've changed user behaviour but it doesn't translate to business outcomes, develop a new hypothesis about what drives value.

• Adapt when facing genuine disruption. Major regulatory, competitive, or market shifts that alter your value proposition warrant strategic adjustments. In consistently volatile environments, consider shortening your development cycles, building more flexible architecture, and maintaining closer customer feedback loops to stay responsive.

• Stay focused during normal fluctuations. If you find yourself constantly pivoting based on stakeholder requests, competitor announcements, or industry headlines, you're likely overreacting to predictable turbulence rather than responding to meaningful strategic threats.

Execution problems need better tactics, strategic misalignment needs new assumptions, and genuine disruption requires agility, but constant course-correction often signals weak conviction rather than smart strategic choices.

In Summary

Product Strategy is about creating focus, alignment and momentum for your product team. It’s about identifying the right problem to solve, committing to that and learning and adapting as the evidence unfolds. Most importantly, treat strategy as living conversation, aiding in decision making and helping drive organisation velocity. When it’s done well, it transforms uncertainty into clarity, empowering teams and leaders to deliver real value.