To create a good strategy, you need a vision. If the vision is inspiring and drives a significant purpose, chances are you have stronger bases to build a motivating strategy. Simone started her product career in gambling! In Canada the government provided the service, which already had some nuances for strategy. At some point she felt the calling to do something more purposeful, that eventually led her to work on renewables, and finally at an ONG. In this episode, we talked about: How Simone used ProduxLabs Strategy Canvas to keep things visual and simple. How politics,risk tolerance, and current success of the business model affects strategy and its stability or time horizon. How organization size affects strategy creation speed, and the level of information required for decisions. How ONGs think about and understand the user and the competitive landscape differently. Beyond prioritization frameworks: how it all boils down to collecting “evidence” and making sure people “get it” when talking about why something is a priority. And much more! You can find Simone on linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

The key drivers of your strategy can be radically different in nature: are we optimizing on a well known topic? Are we doing a new big bet into uncharted territory? Unfortunately, many times we are not conscious of the type of decision we are making, and how this affects the strategy “health”, risk, time horizons, and execution process. Luckily, Alessandro doesn’t fall into that trap. He has a well established Playbook, that he uses with the team to balance the strategy and communicate the proper level of uncertainties and how they plan to reduce it. On top of that, he has a very structured approach to uncover opportunities using a combination of Jobs To Be Done and Opportunity trees that we explored at length. In this marvelous episode, we talked about: The inputs to start thinking about your strategy How to map the opportunity space from a JTBD perspective How to make the entire company contribute to the opportunities and better influence the roadmap How he uses the strategy playbook at Amenitiz. And much more! You can find Alessandro on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

Depending on your product, a team’s mission can be very clear (a checkout page for e-commerces) or a bit fuzzier. Going back to the old “painkiller” versus “vitamin” problem, many companies will have across their portfolio teams that are an integral part of their core proposition, and others that add value “around” it. Our guest Diogo was in such a situation, in a very successful product: Adidas Running. Leading the “social” vertical, their contribution to the product experience and value was unclear, and they lacked strong input from upper management. Yet Diogo wanted to create a solid strategy, finding a purpose and a strong value proposition. In this episode we explored how he managed to do so, and his advice is certainly valuable for those looking for purpose as well as for those who have it and want to express it more clearly. We talked about: Where to start when your team's purpose is unclear? How to dig insights for products that are not the core value drivers of the user experience? How to decide where to focus on, in a very broad problem space? How they decided the best KPIs, type of users and critical success criterias when formulating the strategy. How the strategy was communicated, shared and discussed across the company. The role of "principles" and guiding questions in the execution of the strategy. And much more! You can find Diogo on Linkedin and check https://tractive.com/en/hr/jobs for their open positions. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

The “shape” of the opportunity space can greatly influence how we approach strategy creation. Some opportunity spaces are straightforward, and the work revolves around optimization and improvements. Others are completely unknown and require a much more exploratory approach. Interestingly enough, complex spaces are not only reserved for “new fields” like the Metaverse. Alasco has the mission of “Digitalizing the 2nd biggest industry in the world”, construction. As an industry, we can think of it as old and well-known. But the opportunities for digitalization are definitely varied and complex. In this episode, we talked about: Julia’s approach to strategy, starting by defining how the strategy will be created! Using generative and evaluative approaches to identify and size opportunities How they collect and organize all the insights for strategy The responsibilities of UX and Product in driving the opportunity space The differences between Vertical and Horizontal SaaS when thinking about strategy. A few links of our discussion: ProductBoard Radical Candor by Kim Scott Most used tool: Notion And much more! You can find Julia on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

There are many challenges for the collaboration of Product and UX on the strategic level. As a product and design trainer and consultant, Sol Mesz works with both teams to make this collaboration more successful. She shared with us many tips and tools that can help any leader get the most out of both “sides of the table”. In this episode, we talked about: How product and design can come closer for strategic decisions. How Sol uses her Insights template to help translate user research resulto into actionable insights for product and business decisions. How Sol uses her Full Loop Analytics framework to integrate the user, product and business perspectives. And much more! You can find Sol on Medium or on her website. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

Description: many of us work on consumer products, or B2B SaaS, or other products where the business model and the value proposition is strong and clear. But there are products and industries that need to connect a variety of different players, creating not only complex problems but also complex structures where the needs of different groups need to be constantly prioritized and considered to be successful. Over his career, Jason Boast has had more than one of this situations, and he shares valuable tips (that are applicable also to our “simpler” worlds), and war stories of the challenges he faced and how to solve them. In this episode, we talked about: Starting with the fundamentals: How to, as a new product lead, you need to start by understanding everything before making strategy decisions, and how to do that when everyone in the company gives you a different answer. The power of making things simple, and over communicating. The importance of understanding the basics in complex marketplaces to be able to define a strategy. The importance in complex business of keeping all teams aware of the high level goals and how they contribute, preventing silos. And much more! You can find Jason on LinkedIn. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

It can be hard to create a strategy for innovation. But if we are talking about B2B enterprise innovation, especially when hardware products are involved (like climate and energy tech), it truly is challenging. Furthermore, if you are looking for advice, few have actually “been there and done that”. Daniel Elizalde is one of those. Furthermore, he has codified his approach in the B2B Innovator’s Map, a 6-step framework, whose initial steps are all about strategy definition. While there are a lot of B2B examples, I would argue there are lessons here for product managers in any product. In this episode, we talked about: How to do Strategic Alignment with stakeholders in early phases How to do Market discovery properly (and quickly!) For new products, how to interact with your potential initial customers (or Champions, as Daniel calls them), to understand their needs. The differences in process between B2C and B2B, and new products versus adding on top of existing products. And much more! You can find Daniel on danielelizalde.com, as well as his Blog, Podcast, and much more. You can find the B2B Innovator’s Map on Amazon, or download a free chapter on Daniel’s website. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

We all know different products and contexts require different strategic thinking. B2B SaaS and subscriptions is an important product category, and John Pearce has been working on it for a long time. In this episode, he shared: The framework he has been using at Chargebee to build their strategy The differences with strategies for consumer products. How to integrate, balance and align sales inputs to the strategy And much more! You can find John on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

One challenging topic about product strategy as organizations grow, is “how many product strategies” should we have, based on how many products we have on our portfolio (or “sections of a large product, or business units, or any other organization slice we may have). It is also related to the question “who should we involve” to define the strategy, and how PMs, Heads of Product, VPs, and the different hierarchy levels contribute to the process. In this episode, I spoke with another strategy enthusiast, Alberto Barcelos from Taxfix, who has a strong view on what sort of contribution and strategies PMs should create. We discussed: How strategy is related to storytelling and shared beliefs At what levels we define strategy and how they influence each other How do you balance top-down strategy definition with these bottom-up plans How do PMs collaborate with stakeholders for their strategy definition And much more! You can find Alberto on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

Startups and Enterprise operate very differently. Product management is done quite differently. What about product strategy? What are the differences (and similarities)? What do we need to pay attention to? What is important to consider if we are moving from one to the other? In this episode I spoke with Jonathan Rodriguez, Product Lead at Flieber, a growing startup in the logistics industry. Before he was a lead at Eventbrite, a multi-business, multi-national, enterprise sized company. With this transition, Jonathan has a very interesting view of how strategy is done differently in these opposite contexts. We talked about: Enterprises deal with unique multi business unit conflicts. Strategy is negotiated, and many times difficult to communicate and propagate. How Eventbrite increased their strategy practice, and how the different levels of the organization contributed (executives, managers, individual PMs). How larger companies need to generate high-level goals and discuss how different teams need to contribute to that goal. In startups, how to handle the high-involvement of the CEO at the tactic levels. What is the “right frequency” of strategic discussions in startups, given the fast-paced learning How they moved from weekly decisions to a two years strategy Strategy meetings: why they should be more frequent in startups, and how Jonathan aligns the product teams on the updates of the strategy meetings Among many other things! You can find Jonathan on Linkedin, and he is open to mentoring others. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)