How to Define Your Product Strategy
This is the foreword to a twelve-part series on product strategy.
Early in my career as a product leader, I learned to execute quickly, leading to success in building games and children’s software. However, two things reinforced the value of strategic thinking for me. One good, another bad:
- The Good. I learned to accelerate progress by thinking strategically. In building children’s software, I anticipated the value of brands and signed many of them to long-term exclusives. I also learned to appreciate the value of grade-based positioning (Elmo’s Preschool, Reader Rabbit’s 1st Grade) and the emerging internet opportunity.
- The Bad. I was a co-founder of Creative Wonders, which we sold to The Learning Company (TLC) and then to Mattel for $3.5B. But two years later, Mattel spun TLC back out of the company for one-tenth of its value. We had failed to build long-term, enduring value.
Fast-forward to 2005, when I joined Netflix. I shifted my focus from satisfying customers to delighting them. I also learned about the balancing act of delight and margin and what makes products hard to copy. And I learned to articulate a product strategy—a set of hypotheses for delighting customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways.
In 2010, I applied these approaches at Chegg, a startup that offered textbook rental and homework help. Today, Chegg is a public company with a market cap of $10B. I expect Chegg to grow in value just as Netflix did over the last ten years.
Crisp execution and high-cadence experimentation are critical, but having a clear product strategy supercharges your efforts. Strategic thinking enables you to think ahead, to effectively “skip quarters,” and to build enduring value.
What follows is a series of short essays that provide a step-by-step approach to defining your product strategy:
- Intro: How to Define Your Product Strategy
- #1 “The DHM Model”
- #2 “From DHM to Product Strategy”
- #3 “The Strategy/Metric/Tactic Lock-up”
- #4 “Proxy Metrics”
- #5 “Working Bottom-up”
- #6 “A Product Strategy for Each Swimlane”
- #7 “The Product Roadmap”
- #8 “The GLEe Model”
- #9 “The GEM Model”
- #10 “How to Run A Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting”
- #11 “A Case Study: Netflix 2020”
- #12 “A Startup Case Study: Chegg”
- #13 “TLDR: Summary of the Product Strategy Frameworks”
I hope you find these essays helpful. Click below to read the first essay:
Best,
Gib
Gibson Biddle
November 2024 Update: Sign up for my new 3-hour virtual “Product Strategy Workshop” on Maven. (Monthly cohorts from 9–12 am PT.)
Read my daily “Ask Gib” newsletter about Product Management on Substack.
My Other Product Management Articles on Medium:
- How to Define Your Product Strategy
- Netflix’s Customer Obsession
- How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting
- Hacking Your Product Management Career
- Leaders Lead
- How to Find a Great Job
Click below to:
- See all my articles & videos: www.gibsonbiddle.com.
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- Connect with me on LinkedIn
- Click here to purchase my self-paced Product Strategy Workshop on Teachable for $200 off the regular $699 price. The course includes recorded talks, PDFs, my essays, and pre-formatted Google Slides so you can complete your product strategy independently. You can also “try before you buy” — the first two modules are free.
