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How do product and strategy relate?
- Product connects customer needs with business goals, to produce goods and services that people use and buy, enabling the company to compete. As a field, it has become significantly more important to effective competition within the past few decades, particularly as the tech industry has risen.
- Strategy considers the external and internal landscape to identify market gaps and opportunities, enabling the company to compete. As a field, it’s often held close to the executive team.
Product and strategy aim to fulfill a company’s why. Product begins with the what. Strategy begins with the how.
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Your life is curated
The coffee you’re drinking, the videos you’re streaming, and that pair of Converses you’re wearing — all your choices were driven by what was available and desirable. But who put those options there?
Product managers (PMs) and strategists drive such decisions and thus shape your world. Both choose which problems to solve and which goals to go after. Both turn grand visions into tangible goods and market realities. But at the moment, their worlds are disparate
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Breaking into the market
- Product managers find gaps of unmet needs using customer research. They identify problems with the strongest market impact by prioritizing the list by highest pain or widest reach.
- Strategists find gaps in the market via competitive analysis. Strategists determine which opportunities can produce maximum new customer and/or business value.
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Breaking through to the top of the market
- Product managers win by addressing important unmet needs or addressing met needs better than all their competitors, to the point that they drive customers to switch products.
- Strategists win by capturing opportunities in unique ways. They have figured out how to sell the same things cheaper (e.g. through strategic partnerships or complementary revenue streams) or how to create new value from what they’ve already got (e.g. by addressing new markets).
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Scaling success
- Product managers scale their solutions by meeting the needs of wider audiences. As their products are adopted by more diverse customers, they adapt their products to these new customers, who have different needs. This is known as the Technology (or Product) Adoption Curve.
- Strategists scale their solution by improving their business model to undercut competitors and create new value. They might forge new partnerships to cut costs, identify new marketing channels by which to reach customers or find new revenue streams for the same opportunities.
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Maintaining a competitive advantage at the top of the market
- Product managers continue to create new or complementary features and products to address evolving customer needs.
As competitors catch up and markets reshape and customer expectations change, PMs evolve their products, continuously searching for today’s most relevant needs. To advance, adaptability is key. - Strategists continue to find new ways to create value for the business and for customers as competitors, markets, and customers change. To advance, flexibility is key.
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Reconciling product and strategy
Some companies, particularly within tech, have figured out how to leverage the best of both worlds.
- Facebook has arguably mastered the balance of product and strategy, crafting solutions that empower their business by solving problems for their customers.
- Amazon is (perhaps controversially) another elegant example of this balance. Customers' needs are met in the best way possible through a strategy that is incredibly difficult to replicate: their commitment to passing profits back to customers in the form of low prices gives it a strategic advantage almost impossible to crack.
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IDEAS CURATED BY
Heidi Thompson's ideas are part of this journey:
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