453: Creating an effective and motivating product strategy – with Bob Caporale

A four-layer framework to create a winning product strategy Today we are talking about creating product strategy. Our guest is Bob Caporale. Bob is the author of the book Creative Strategy Generation. He is a strategic practitioner, having spent 20 years leading product, marketing, and business functions for large international corporations. I first heard of Bob when he was the president of Sequent Learning, the product management training company. He has since founded and leads the Strategy Generation company. Bob believes that strategy is derived from a combination of experience, insight, and creativity. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:09] What is product strategy? Strategy is a plan to achieve a set of objectives under a set of anticipated conditions. What makes strategy strategic is anticipating the situation you’re going to be in and putting a plan in place within that context. Product strategy is doing that at a product level. The job of product managers is to take the company’s bigger strategies and objectives and break them down to their impact on product. They put together a strategy that details what they need to do for their product to contribute to the overall business strategy. The product strategy is still at a big-picture level. Often, companies approach me asking for help with their product strategy and they’re really focused on the roadmap. While the roadmap and choosing features is the last step of product strategy, it’s not the whole picture. If you’re just focused on what features to build into the product, you could still take a lot of random actions that make no sense because you don’t have the bigger picture. [9:00] Who is responsible for developing product strategy? Whoever is responsible for the P&L (profit and loss) of the product is ultimately responsible for the product strategy. I’m a big proponent of developing strategy with a team, but there does need to be one person accountable for it. The P&L owner varies from business to business. In some businesses, the product manager own the P&L and is accountable for the strategy. In small businesses, the general manager or owner may be responsible for the P&L and they would be accountable for the strategy. [11:03] How is senior leadership involved in product strategy? If there’s any problem in alignment between the product team and senior leaders, that’s a better problem to have than leadership not being involved in product strategy at all. Especially in larger companies, one of the biggest deficiencies I see is that companies don’t have a verifiable and disciplined product strategy process. Strategy can easily fall to the back burner because product managers are doing so many other things, most of them reactive. If you aren’t required to build a product strategy, you might not. I like to see leaders involved in product strategy, asking product managers to update the product strategy on a quarterly or annual basis and present it to them, because this ensures some level of alignment. As long as there’s a process where product managers are responsible for developing strategy, a negotiation will happen. In lieu of product strategy, the leaders will tell you what you need to do with your products, and some of that might not be right. The best-case scenario is an organization that has a disciplined strategy process between leadership and product managers. [14:24] Share your Strategy Generation framework for developing product strategy. Download the framework. The framework has ten steps in four layers in a circular framework. When you build a strategy, you will go through the strategy in steps, so the steps are numbered. However,