E87 - Mastering Product Strategy with @RomanPichler

Could you maybe elaborate on what are the signals which you are looking at to know there has to be something that needs to be changed in your product strategy? People sometimes miss in product management that we were so, in a way, focused on discovery, we were so focused on making the right solution-based decisions and discovering the solution and discovering the right features and prioritizing those features that we lose sight of the big picture and we don't spend enough time on the strategizing piece. What are the typical mistakes product managers need to avoid when they're thinking about strategy? A strategy should be based on empirical evidence. It's important to take the time, just enough time to test it, validate it, address the key assumptions and risks. So I read about the product vision board that I think you kind of touched a bit. Can you briefly talk about that, how product managers in real world can leverage in their day-to-day work? Anybody who is a product manager should also, you know, be able to formulate those core elements of a product strategy and the product vision board can help you with it. Hello everybody, welcome to our podcast, Everything Product. So we talk about latest technology and product management concepts here. So we are super excited today to welcome Roman Pichler. So he's the author of the book Strategize here. And Roman is a renowned product management expert specialized in product strategy, leadership and agility. Roman has also pioneered agile product management practices and he has developed a lot of range of models methods and tools to help create better products. So I welcome Roman onto the podcast here and Roman why don't you give us a brief introduction about yourself and also your journey into product management. Yeah sure so it's lovely to be here thank you for having me. So how did I get into product management? To a certain degree by accident. I was part of a team called in to help an organization with a new product development effort. And while initially my job was more on the technology side, I ended up working with the product manager. And I really enjoyed the experience and I learned a lot about product management during that process. And that's really, in a way, what got me started. That was in 2001, a little while back. I initially focused more on the Agile space and Agile product management, product ownership. And then at some point in time, discovered as helpful as it is to write effective user stories and prioritize a product backlog and test out ideas for features and feature enhancements with users. So what people would refer to as product discovery these days, as useful as that is and as important as it is, it's not quite enough. And so I started to take an increased interest in product strategy. and then product leadership. And so I've been working on product strategy now for at least 10 years. I think I started running public strategy workshops about 10 years ago. So yes, in my book Strategize, which you kindly mentioned, the first edition came out in 2016. So yeah, it's been an important part of my work for quite some time. Yeah, sure. And we want to pick your brain on product strategy a lot more. So why don't we, you know, Get started right away. So, you know, in your one of your recent articles, right? You emphasize the importance of a validated product strategy and also, you know, tying that to product discovery. Could you maybe elaborate that and talk more about what it is and you know, how important is it to link strategy and also product discovery together? Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, that's a that's an important question, really. And in order to answer it, it's maybe helpful if I say a few words about what a product strategy is, or at least, you know, what I think a product strategy should be. So for me, a product strategy is a high level plan that describes the approach that we've chosen to achieve product success and realize something like an overarching vision, an aspiration for our product. And so there are four elements that I like to capture in a product strategy. The first one is... who are the users and customers, which market, market segments, target group should the product address. The second element is why would people want to use or pay for the product? So what's the value proposition or what are the needs that the product should address? And the third element are the business goals. What's the impact that the product should create for the company developing and providing it? So what are the desired business benefits? And the fourth one, which I find is particularly important for commercial revenue generating products, are the standard features that differentiate the product from its competitors and encourage people to choose it over competing alternatives. So those are four elements. And I really encourage generally all product managers to describe those elements for their products. I think it's super important to to be able to describe them, to formulate those four elements, target group needs, standout features and business goals. Now, it's one thing to describe these elements and capture an initial product strategy. It's another thing to be confident that the strategy is likely to result in a successful product. Or I should say that implementing the strategy is likely to achieve product success. I've seen strategies that were based on the highest paid person's opinion. I've seen strategies that were based on gut feeling and past experience. And while it might not be such a bad place to start with, if that's really what the strategy is founded in, it's not enough. I mean, you risk that implementing the strategy is not going to achieve the desired results. So I really like to encourage people to validate their strategy. And that starts by spending as little time as possible initially to create the very first draft strategy, but making sure that the initial strategy is good enough, that it's specific enough so we can then test it. And then systematically going through the statements and identifying key assumptions and risks. And so, you know, maybe... we're not 100% sure that we've chosen the right target group or that the market is big enough, or maybe we're concerned that the market might be a little bit too heterogeneous, too diverse. Maybe we are thinking about offering, I don't know, you know, generative AI technology or using generative AI technology in our products in order to meet the user needs, but we're not quite sure if that technology is going to work out. So in both cases, it'd be good to investigate those pieces of uncertainty, be it by doing some user surveys or interviewing users, observing users, or be it by creating throwaway prototype spikes. And so... By doing that, you'd iterate over the strategy and by iterating over the strategy, you'd change and you'd correct it. You might make smaller changes, incremental adjustments to your strategy, or these might be bigger changes. But the idea is that after, in some cases, a few days, in other cases, a few weeks, you have a strategy that is based on empirical evidence on data, and that is a solid foundation then for any further work. that needs to happen in order to essentially transform that strategy into a successful product. Yeah, so how do we then build the bridge between strategy and discovery? There are various ways how you can do it and ultimately it depends on the specific product discovery approach that you choose. You mentioned an article I wrote not long ago about connecting. the product vision board, which is the tool that I've developed to capture an overarching vision and product strategy with a tool that Teresa Torres has created, Opportunity Solution Trees. And so an Opportunity Solution Tree is a very popular product discovery tool. The root nodes are the top. of the tree. If you essentially take a tree and you turn it on its head, so that the top, and to be more precise, the root node will be the desired business impact that we want to create the outcome. And then we look into opportunities that we can address in order to meet that desired outcome. And these opportunities essentially are user needs, which are then being refined and broken down. And eventually that allows us to derive the right solution, discover the right features. or feature enhancements and make the right decisions about the desired user experience. And so one of the things, if you follow this specific discovery approach, one of the challenges is to come up with the initial outcome, the initial business goal, and ensure that you've chosen the right one. Another challenge I feel is then to come up with the top tier opportunities and really say like, okay, you know, these are the user needs that we should focus on. And I believe that if you have done some strategizing upfront and you have a validated product strategy in place, then the business goals in that strategy provide you with a great input for the outcome on your opportunity solution tree. And the needs in your strategy, they help you choose the right opportunities, the right user needs on your tree. So, you know, I'd argue, in fact, that it's very difficult to build an effective opportunity solution tree. And you may have to do a lot of work and rework if you don't have a validated product strategy in place. So, and it's one of the things that I feel, you know, we sometimes miss or people sometimes miss in product management that we were so in a way focused on discovery was so focused on making the right solution based decisions and discovering the solution and you know discovering the right features and prioritizing those features that we you know we lose sight of the big picture and we don't spend enough time on the strategizing piece yeah uh so i had a quick follow-up right when you were mentioning the product strategy piece so um you know you do this product strategy but you keep tweaking it as you you know find certain signals right could you maybe elaborate on what are the six some signals which you are looking at to know there has to be something that has that needs to be changed on in your product strategy yeah that's a great question so with the initial strategy validation in my goal is to maximize the chances that the strategy will result in a successful product And that means that the strategy will result in a product that is desirable, that is feasible, that is viable and that is ethical. So the first three are factors that come out of design thinking. The fourth one is a factor that I've suggested in a number. In fact, a number of other people have suggested as well. I think Marty Kagan also talks about the needs to ensure the digital products are ethical. And so you can use those factors, those success factors as guides when you do your strategy validation and say like, okay, you know, are there any assumptions around desirability? So, you know, do we have, have we chosen the right market? And is the market big enough, but not too diverse, for instance? And do we have data that backs up, you know, our statements in the strategy? And you do the same thing for the other success factors. The idea is really just to address the main assumptions and the key risks, you know, and sufficiently de-risk the strategy and essentially iterate over your strategy. And that iterative validation process is based on Lean Startup, on the idea of build, measure, learn. You know, one of the things that I found really fascinating when I first came across the work of Eric Ries is that he took agile techniques. and essentially move them to what some people used to refer to as the fussy front end, you know, the early stages of an innovation process. And I thought, like, what an amazing idea. And so, yeah, I think that's great because it saves us from having to invest many weeks and months as it's traditionally done in big upfront market research. Instead, we only do the... the sheer minimum we can do to come up with an initial strategy. But of course, then we have to spend some time with the validation work doing just enough just-in-time research, but in a very goal-focused manner, focused on addressing a specific assumption or risk. However, you know, I didn't want to give the impression that you do a strategy once and it's validated and this is great, and all we have to do is execute it. That'd be a risk. It's another, that'd be a mistake. In fact, it's a mistake I see people make. As Eisenhower once said, plans are nothing and planning is everything. So you could say, well, the product strategy really in a way is nothing. Strategizing is everything. And hence, I called my book Strategize, not product strategy, because a strategy is just a plan. It's based on the knowledge we have at a given point in time. And obviously, as the world changes, as the competition changes, as new technologies emerge, as we learn more about the value that our product creates for the users. As user needs and expectations change, we have to adapt the strategy. And the whole point of working with a strategy is to be proactive and avoid that we're being called out, that we're being surprised. And so by being proactive, we have choices and we can see opportunities at an early stage and equally threats and respond to those threats. But that means that we have to continuously, in a way... monitor our strategy, not only our strategy, but we have to continuously be in touch with users. We have to continuously do some competitor research and competitive analysis, and we have to continuously look out for trends, be they technology trends, regulatory trends and consumer related trends. Think about in recent times the cost of living crisis that we've experienced in many, many, many countries. So in a way, you can think about strategizing as a workflow or work stream that runs parallel to a discovery stream and feeds that stream and guides that stream and at the same time, you know, uses insights generated from discovery and delivery to evolve the product strategy and update the strategic decisions. So, yeah, I don't know if that picture makes sense. And maybe a final thought about this. just to not to make it sound too abstract. You know, if you think about it, this is nothing new and this is nothing amazing. This is nothing, nothing, I don't know. Yeah, it's nothing new. So if you take an everyday activity like walking or running or cycling, you know, we do the very same thing. You know, I like, I'll take cycling as an example because I like to cycle. So when you ride your bicycle, you have to... kind of execute and you could say, you know, be in the right here, right now and, you know, do the delivery stuff and some discovery stuff, you know, where you push the pedals and you keep your balance and you shift gears, right? And professional cyclists spend a lot of time on developing a very even pedal stroke, a very efficient, very even pedal stroke. But if that's all we do, sooner or later we're going to crash, right? Because we're going to miss a corner, a turning. We're going to overlook an obstacle. And I've crashed a few times on my bikes, and it was always painful. The same is during product management. So, you know, we always have those two things. You know, quite often in life, we have like a forward-looking, more strategic workflow, you could say, or element aspect. And then we have a more execution-oriented... focused aspect or workflow and we have to attend to both and and and i feel the same as i say the same is true in product management uh yeah absolutely i think you know i i i see that mistake every time a lot of people do right like they set the product strategy in stone and then they execute and then maybe it is revisit one year back or year and a half back which is not the right way to do it actually i have a question I have a quick question on that. So when we think about product management, right, and when I think about our audience too, we have a lot of folks who are starting into product management or been in product management for some time. And we have folks who are like CPOs, VPs in our podcast. So when I think about the early folks, right, many times they're just stuck in execution and they don't come to the part where they do a strategy. Can you talk about how people can, like, continually like go into that phase of defining their strategy while doing the execution like what tips should someone take yeah thank you for asking that question i think you know that's another great one i think ultimately it's down to how product roles and responsibilities are designed and There's a school of thought in product management that product strategy and strategic product decisions really should be owned and should be made by the head of product or VP of product management, director of product management, the various terms that organizations use for this term, but the person who runs the product management group, who is the people manager of the product managers, essentially. Now, personally, I would disagree. And, you know, I feel that the head of product should really coach and mentor and empower, enable the product managers to take full ownership of their products and make the right strategic decisions for the assets. Now, again, that's not always the case. In some organizations, product managers are more discovery or even delivery focused. But I think what you can do as a product manager in that situation is to educate yourself about product strategy and product strategy related topics. And I'd include product road mapping and I'd also include business modeling. Because what that does is it increases what is referred to as your expert power. So, you know, the more expertise you have, the more likely are people to trust you and the more likely is management willing to give you the authority to make at least some of the strategic decisions. I remember a conversation I had a while back with a product manager who sort of, you know, in a way, you know, said to me that, you know, they'd love to be able to. take charge of their product roadmap. And so, you know, I said like, Oh, you know, how come, you know, you're not in charge and what's, what's preventing you from doing it. And, you know, and the answer was like, Oh yeah, my, my manager and management doesn't allow me to. And, and then, you know, I asked the person, well, you know, have you, if you create, have you done any product roadmap? Have you created a product roadmap? Are you confident how to create, you know, what I would call a modern outcome-based product roadmap? And they, they said to me, no, no, why? And I said, well, you know, it's a tricky one. Of course, it'd be nice if your management was supportive and kind of encouraged you to take charge of the product roadmap of your product. But at the same time, if you lack kind of the understanding and kind of the core expertise, it'll be hard for them to trust you. So maybe in your case, the best thing to do will be to read up on product roadmaps or watch a few videos. I mean, there's so much. I mean, there's a lot of information available these days about everything, but I would argue, you know. There's a lot of good quality information out there about product management topics and say product road mapping practices. So, you know, if you do a little bit of research and a little bit of reading, you know, that puts you in a great position and maybe you then want to go and create a roadmap for your product and present it to your boss or to management and again, show them that you're eager and that you're capable. That was great, actually, because when I was thinking about the roadmapping, typically what happens is you get to know like, hey, these are the issues that your operations team is having. These are the issues that your marketing team is having. So let's go build the features. But rather take a step back, think about what is the outcome that you're driving towards and building a roadmap that basically fits to that, that basically delivers the value to the customer. Yeah, that makes sense. Absolutely. I love that. And, you know, I like to, again, say that a strategy or a validated strategy is. a great foundation for them making the right road mapping decisions. And my preferred way really to bridge the gap between something like a product backlog and then specific detailed product decisions, which might be captured as say user stories and a higher level product strategy is the product roadmap. So I position the product roadmap between a product strategy and the product backlog. And if you work with an outcome-based goal-oriented roadmap, then you can take the needs, essentially the user and customer goals in your strategy and the business goals, and derive sub-goals, break them into sub-goals, and capture those sub-goals on your outcome-based product roadmap. And again, that puts you in a great position to make the right detailed decisions about functionality and specific features, I find. So I read about the product vision board that I think you kind of touched a bit. Can you briefly talk about that? product managers in real world can leverage in their day-to-day work? Yeah, yeah, sure. So I created the Product Vision Board quite a while back because I was looking for a concise way to capture product strategy and I couldn't find a tool that was doing the job that I liked. And, you know, I'd come across the business model canvas by Alexander Osterwalder. And some of the work by Stephen Blank and both really kind of excited and inspired me. And so, yeah, I drew up essentially a little canvas and that became the product vision board. And, you know, for me, it's natural when I work with a new client to ask. people, you know, what are your products and, you know, who are the beneficiaries of your product? What's the value the product creates for your users? What are the business goals you expect? And, you know, for commercial products, what makes the product special or give it a competitive advantage in one way or the other? So, you know, and that those are essentially the key elements of a product strategy. And as I mentioned earlier, I think anybody who manages a product, you know, you should be able to answer those questions. And so I would I would argue that Anybody who is a product manager should also be able to formulate those core elements of a product strategy and the Product Vision Board can help you with it. I mean, there are other tools out there and I think to a certain extent it's about trying out the different templates and tools and to see what works best for you. For those people watching, listening, who'd like to try out the Product Vision Board, you can download it for free from my website. And I've also created a checklist that guides you in filling out the different elements, capturing the different pieces of information, just to maximize the chances that the tool is effectively applied. Is there anything that folks need to keep in mind, like their product managers will be working on? like internal products versus the customer facing or external products. I know you have this competitive landscape also as one of the components. So just curious, is there anything that replaces for internal product managers who work on internal products? Yeah, I think it's another great question. So I don't really significantly differentiate between internal products and customer user facing products. apart from when it comes to product strategy, apart from the standout feature. If you manage an internal software platform that encapsulates shared assets like persisting data to somewhere, wherever it might be, or managing transactions securely, or handling exceptions, those kind of things. infrastructure functionality, then you probably don't have to worry too much about standout features. Excuse me. I mean, it might still be worthwhile doing a buy versus develop analysis. But generally speaking, if you feel that it is beneficial, that it kind of reduces development costs, cognitive load of the developers and increases productivity and maybe can even shorten time to market by building this internal software platform, then it's just important to understand who are the users, who are the beneficiaries. you know, what job does it do for usually the development team members and what are the desired business benefits? I've mentioned a few like reducing cost, for instance. The interesting thing about internal products is that their strategies are typically affected by other products. And so you get strategy dependencies. And if I use a very simple example, then maybe that becomes clearer. Say, you know, we're looking at a bank. And so, you know, any bank? usually has some revenue generating, not usually has some revenue generating products. Any business has some revenue generating products. In the case of a bank, it might be an account or it might be a loan. So let's take a loan. And in order then to provide that loan, access that loan and manage that loan. You know, the bank also provides something like a banking app, a mobile banking app, right? And so the mobile banking app is an end user facing app, but it's not revenue generating. It's a supporting app. And then, you know, usually banks have other internal pieces of software, like, for instance, an internal software platform. that then supports the end user facing supporting product. So we have these three different types of products. And so the strategy of the Loin will influence the strategy of the mobile banking app and the strategy of the mobile banking app will influence the strategy of the internal software platform. And so, you know, the people who manage those products will have to talk to each other. So that's important to be aware of. But in terms of strategy and strategizing. I would still recommend that for internal software assets, as long as they're products, you formulate the strategy and you continue to monitor and evolve that strategy on a essentially continuous basis. Makes sense. That's wonderful, Roman. Like overall, what we are trying to say is make sure like whatever you're building is like customer. driven like be it internal product be it external product at the end of the day you need to make sure you're building something that's valuable for the customer and there could be multiple levels that you need to look at absolutely right so any product has to create value for a group of people and for the business so you know and if that's not the case if that's not the case for an asset for a piece of software then it's most likely not a product that's what i would say Makes sense. I want to also ask about the mistakes, right? So many times what people do is they get a template to say, hey, this is our product strategy should look like. They'll start writing details about it based on what they know. End up saying that, okay, they might not have data, etc. What are the typical mistakes product managers need to avoid when they're thinking about strategy? Yeah, yeah, great question. So I think we've... kind of touched upon a few. The first one is not to validate your strategy and just base it on past experience or, you know, what your boss or the big boss tells you or what sales says or what marketing says. I mean, these are all important partners and, you know, it's worthwhile to listen to what they have to suggest, what they have to say. But ultimately, as we've briefly discussed, a strategy should be based on empirical evidence. It's important to take the time, just enough time to test it, validate it, address the key assumptions and risks. Another mistake I see people make, again, touched upon it already, is not to continuously evolve the strategy, but do the strategy once and then you're done for the next 12 or 24 months and all you have to do is execute. And then what can happen is that you experience nasty surprises and find yourself with your back against the wall being leapfrogged by a competitor. So again, the whole point of... working with a strategy is to be proactive. So I really encourage the sense of continuous strategizing, of establishing a continuous strategizing process. And there are two practical ways how you can make that happen. The first one is you schedule quarterly strategy reviews, and those are bigger reviews. And I'd like to suggest inviting key stakeholders to those reviews, as well as the product team. And then the second measure is to do a little bit of strategizing every week and spend at least half a day per week on reviewing the strategy, looking at any data that's available on a weekly basis, speaking to users. So you don't necessarily have to speak to users every single week in my mind, but on a regular basis. You shouldn't go longer than a quarter without speaking to at least selected users. looking at what the competition is doing, looking at trends, particularly technology trends for digital products, so that a little bit of strategizing, and of course, I've mentioned the KPIs, the key performance indicators, the value that the product is creating. So doing a little bit of strategizing every single week and ring fencing that time and not sacrificing it for more urgent but less important work, because otherwise you kind of end up in a situation where you don't want to be, where you don't strategize enough. impossibly overlook opportunities and threats. So those for me are some key ones. Another thing I guess I should add is confusion about the strategizing level. So I've worked with organizations where the product strategy really wasn't a product strategy, but a portfolio strategy, a product portfolio strategy. And I've seen people create strategies for their for product features. So for me, creating a strategy for a product feature is just not beneficial. A product strategy really should sit at the product level. And so, you know, features shouldn't need their own strategy unless a feature is a product. But then, you know, then it's not a feature, I would argue, you know. And it can be very helpful to have a product portfolio strategy. But, you know, that strategy is likely to be different from a product strategy. So you can use a structure like the Product Vision Board to capture your portfolio strategy. I recently wrote an article about this, but it's likely to be more high level due to the fact that a portfolio is a group of products. Those products may be related, as in the case of a product family, or they may not be closely related. And so you end up with a strategy that has to be more high level, less specific than what I would expect with regards to a product strategy. So it's important to get the right flight level. And again, not confuse portfolio strategy, product strategy and not go too low and create a feature strategy, which again, I don't really find beneficial. It just creates a lot of overhead. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks, Roman. Thanks a lot for digging into all of the product strategy stuff, the vision board and also some of the mistakes and all of that stuff. So, you know, before we close, if anybody wants to reach out to you or review any of your resources, right, where can they find you? Yeah, thanks for asking. So the best place to go is my website, romanpischler.com. So you can download, say, the Product Vision Board from my website, the number of other templates and frameworks that I've created that you might find helpful. I regularly write product management articles, so you might want to check out my articles, my blog. I've got a podcast. I've got videos there. You can check out my books. And of course, I offer public training courses. So, you know, maybe that's something that is interesting for some listeners and viewers. So, yeah, check out my website and see if there's any useful stuff for you. Sure. Yeah, thank you. And we'll mention all of the links for your book and also your website and all of the resources which we have talked through in the podcast in the description below for anybody. Please go and check it out there. Also, it was a pleasure having you, Romanyo. Thanks a lot for digging into all of the insights and valuable experiences in product strategy. Thanks a lot. You're very welcome. It was nice to be on the show. Thank you for having me. And yeah, I hope what I had to offer was a little bit helpful for everyone who watched and listened. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.

⚡️ Unlock the Secrets to Crafting a Winning Product Strategy! 🔑 In this power-packed episode, renowned product management expert Roman Pichler shares his invaluable insights and proven strategies for creating a successful product vision board and aligning it with product discovery.

Find Roman Here:
Website: https://www.romanpichler.com/
Strategize: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993499244
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/romanpichler/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/romanpichler

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
1:15 Roman Pichler's journey into product management
3:13 Importance of validated product strategy and linking it to product discovery
6:02 What is a product strategy?
10:25 Signals to look for when tweaking product strategy
13:37 Continuous strategizing process
17:03 Tips for early-stage product managers to define strategy
21:52 Leveraging the Product Vision Board
27:34 Common product strategy mistakes to avoid
32:12 Resources and where to find Roman Pichler

Highlights for Product Managers:

🚀 Learn the 4 key elements of a compelling product strategy that drives success.
💡 Discover how to validate your strategy with empirical evidence and avoid costly mistakes.
⚡️ Understand the importance of continuous strategizing and adapting to market changes.
🔍 Get insights into bridging the gap between strategy and product discovery tools like Opportunity Solution Trees.
🧠 Gain tips on how to build expertise and take ownership of strategic decisions as a product manager.

Don't miss this opportunity to level up your product strategy game! Hit that 'Subscribe' button and turn on notifications to never miss an episode. 🔔

Where to find Phani
Linkedin - ([https://www.linkedin.com/in/phanivuyy...]

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Where to find Srinath
LinkedIn - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/skotela/]

💎 Here are more resources for you 
🚀 The Ultimate PM Launch Pad - Blast Off Your Career Now! 🚀
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0KSCr65RCTOupMjArBvrML5VWUGzaKqt

🧰 Master the PM Toolkit - Equip Yourself for Success! 🧰
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0KSCr65RCTM4acJOjQYFvOVMzfiEFlqE

⚡️ Stay Ahead of the Tech Curve - Charge Your Knowledge Now! ⚡️
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0KSCr65RCTMvYe4lAYpfdbDoNdPbA33o