100 Product Strategies

What is like to set a strategy when your company is growing in headcount by 2x (or more!) per year? How do you identify the areas where the new joiners will be working? How do you balance new opportunity spaces versus focusing on the existing ones? How do you onboard new members on the strategy topics? Nicholas Goubert is working in one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, and has first hand experience with all these challenges. We talked about: How he created the strategy at Utopia music considering the high-growth conditions How he balances the delegation of strategy aspects with his product leadership team. How to take into account resource planning for the strategy process, very critical in a hyper-growth situation. How to make sure you still spend time in strategy, when conflicting with high priority sensitive activities like hiring and onboarding. Among many other things! You can find Nicholas on Linkedin, and see the open positions at Utopia Music career page. 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)

Over the last decade(s), many companies have started the different types of transformations, most of them going in the same direction: how to become more agile and make software-product development a first-class discipline they had to master. To achieve such a transformation, many things are required, starting at the top with monetary resources, leadership commitment, and patience. How is this related to 100 Product Strategies? Because Strategy is also needed to successfully complete such a transformation. In today’s episode, Sam McAffee tells us about the role strategy plays, and how in turn the different stages of the transformation effects the strategy. We talked about: Their “strategy stack” and how they describe the interconnection of 3 layers: business, product, and technology strategies. A definition for strategy, and how it centers on saying what no to, and picking how you deploy your scarce resources to achieve your goals. Sam’s article, The dreaded reorg, and how transformation is an investment that requires resources and time to be successful. The key role of strategy is calling out the huge project transformation is, and making sure that important investment is not “squeezed into” everything else we want to do. What changes in Strategy formulation in a company pre and post such transformation. We discussed advice for product leaders undergoing this transformation. The first thing is having patience with people, who would not only need new training but also time to emotionally and biologically adapt to the new situation. The importance of building an environment of trust and true collaboration to make this strategies and transformations work. Sam’s recommendation of The Hero with a Thousand faces. And many other things! You can find Sam on Linkedin or at StartupPatterns.com. Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com. 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 nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

Megan joined Hotjar two years ago, and had the challenge to create the strategy from scratch. But moreover, she has the opportunity to review with fresh eyes how the execution went and what she learned along the way. In this very interesting conversation we covered the journey, starting with very insightful tips on the initial strategy creation, how they communicated and aligned the strategy across the organization, and eventually what they learned while executing. We talked about: Considering that 70% of strategies are never executed due to bad communication, Megan decided *not* to fail for this reason and what she did about it. How Megan first aligned expectations by sharing what a strategy is not. Megan recommended strategy books: Blue Ocean Strategy, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Playing to win. How Megan used a trello board to divide all the “task” or all the information you need to put together for the strategy following the Good Strategy/Bad Strategy methods. Using Reforge’s “4 fits” to align on the market, the model, and the channel, and use it to discuss with stakeholders the fit of the product strategy. How to identify market insights through signals, patterns and trends. The role of product leadership in keeping an eye of those external trends. The high ROI of 1:1 strategy conversations. How Megan used Airbnb’s 11-start experience exercise, and the key result was that people find out that 5-star experience was not out of reach. Hotjar’s final strategy artifact was a 5’ video extracted from the original 15-pages document, making much more memorable, and easier to consume and understand. How Hotjar teams created ⅔ of the initiatives that were considered for execution of the strategy. How they learned that one of the strategic pillars was not relevant and what they did about it. And many other things! You can find Megan on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com. 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 nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

Sherpany is a B2B SaaS for meeting management. The space is so wide, that there can tackle endless opportunities, which it might in turn reduce focus and end up in a mediocre product. So, how do they define a strong and focused strategy in such a wide space? Nina is Chief Product Officer at Sherpany and she told me how they deal with this challenge and went deep into the very solid strategy formulation process they have. We talked about: A very clear walkthrough of Sherpany’s annual strategy process, from high level company goals all the way to key initiatives. “Sausage making”: Sherpany’s code name for the alignment between top-down and bottom-up strategy definitions. Why the diagnosis process is more internally focused, looking at internal. How sherpany uses KPI trees and opportunity solution trees to map their opportunities. How they do positioning, not comparing with others but looking at the touchpoints they want to deliver great experiences. The influence in strategy formulation of selecting a narrow user group and use case to enable growth. During the formulation, they leveraged what the product was good for and being used for, to become even better and expand from that existing strength. How Sherpany is using a version of Google’s 70/20/10 to explore a bet for future growth. Product plays an important role in facilitating discussions like what users should we focus on, that has an impact not only in product but also in other departments. And many other things! You can find Nina on Linkedin or twitter. Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com. 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 nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

In this episode, we spoke with Johannes Mayer, Director of Product at Kununu, the largest employer and salary review site in the DACH region. We explored how to create a strategy in a context where you have a user-centered product that relies on monetizing companies' premium services, and discussed how to balance and navigate the conflict of interests that may arise, and even how Kununu creates synergies to use those tensions to benefit both sides. We talked about: Kununu’s process to create its product strategy, starting from a broader view and advancing to details on a yearly basis. How the strategy combines the 5-years Vision, mission, and their JTBD (considering functional, social, and emotional needs) Using company level yearly objectives and JTBD as guardrails for the product strategy Johannes’ suggestion of avoiding the “ivory tower”: leveraging team collaboration and stakeholders, gaining feedback, and identifying synergies with other parts of the organization. The artifact they use for the strategy: a slide deck with ~20 slides with the Vision, Mission, JTBD, key findings, and objectives. That leads to the pillars of product strategy for the year, which in turn leads to the roadmap. How do they combine in their OKRs the user-centric impact with the B-side companies' impacts. The extra complexity of being a user-centered team, with another business unit doing the “selling” and monetization of the product. How Product values can help you navigate the conflicts between both sides of the product. The role product managers have in bringing people together and exposing the conflicts and potential impacts of initiatives to decide together what the best course of action is. And many other things! You can find Johannes on Linkedin or XING. Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com. 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 your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

In this episode, we spoke with Petra Wille, an internationally renowned Product Leadership Coach and author of Strong Product People. We explored how product people can become more strategic and how leaders can coach their teams to develop their strategic thinking. We talked about: How important is strategic thinking? Having coached companies in different situations, Petra explores the difference between empowered versus feature teams, and how that impacts the need for strategic thinking and the ability to grow it. The relation of Martin Eriksson’s decision stack and strategic thinking. How much strategy is needed? Many times multiple teams are working on the same product and strategy. Strategic coaching can be “demystification”: just start somewhere, draw it on a whiteboard. Learning more about how others do strategy by leveraging learning buddies: you show me yours, I show you mine. A litmus test for strategy: “walk me through it”. The storytelling needed to explain your strategy, communicating it with different amounts of time to see how many details and understanding we can add to it. You can use any topic to practice strategy: hobbies, daily life, or other products/industries. How getting better at strategy also means being able to handle bigger periods of time, being able to manage more uncertainty over time. What to do when there is no higher-level company strategy (or too many strategies!). Arne Kittler’s Collaborative Alignment framework. Among many other things! You can know more about Petra’s material and what she is doing at petra-wille.com Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com. 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 nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

Marc Abraham, Product Leader at Intercom, discusses how to approach product strategy by establishing a concrete vision and working backwards. They explore the use of the Kano model for sorting opportunities and the challenge of selecting which hurdles to tackle first. Tension arises from involving different perspectives and beliefs about strategy. The podcast also highlights the role of product in facilitating strategic conversations and the importance of explicit trade-offs.

Darrell Stephenson is Product Director at Zalando (and previously at SoundCloud). Being a really large corporation, Zalando has strategies at multiple levels that interact and intersect with each other. In this episode, Darrell has been extremely open and generous, explaining how product strategy creation works at Zalando, and how leaders face the challenge of the different interconnected areas and corporate goals. We talked about: How Zalando operates with multiple strategies at different levels in the organization and with different time horizons. How to identify at which level in the organization you should create your strategy (spoiler: at “Value proposition for the user” level) How high level strategy focuses on principles, and how do teams align to it. How Zalando focuses on cross-team collaboration to deliver “end to end” great customer experience, and the north-star they use to be aligned. What strategy is at Zalando, how it is created, and the different artifacts used. The interaction of different people to select the areas of investment, who is responsible for what. How research is integrated into Zalando’s strategy. How do they deal with strategy dependencies at such a large scale. Why Darrell recommends to Product Managers the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared M. Diamond And many other things! Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com. 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 nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

Hi! I'm Nacho Bassino.  Welcome to 100 Product Strategies! Let me briefly tell you what this show is about.  The goal of this podcast is to invite product leaders to share their real-life experiences creating and executing Product Strategies. Episode references: 100productstrategies.com Product Direction book - https://amzn.to/3J6AoMo