Building a Product Strategy by Microsoft Sr PM, Sinduja Ramanujam

What is Product Strategy

The most important thing a company cares about is their own company mission or company vision statement. A company's mission statement evolves as the company grows or shrinks.

The core under that is the company's strategy for how they are going to deliver on that mission statement.

The company strategy includes your product strategy. And this is the place where the edge of the problem or topic is located. And it's very product specific. Once you know the product, you come up with your product roadmap, thinking about meeting your success metrics for the product.

5 key pillars to product strategy

1. Customers

  • Target segment

  • User Lifecycle Map

  • User Research

Building a user persona - who uses my product? - your target segment:

First time home buyer

  • Age

  • Couple Vs not

  • Demographics

  • Income

Seasoned home buyer

  • Age

  • Couple Vs not

  • Demographics

  • Income

Lets build a user story - what does a day in a lot of my user look like? - your user research

You have a user story now what? - your customer journey

Create a walk-through desk - as thorough as you can be the better

2. Solutions

  • Solution space

  • Feature Ideas

  • Competitive landscape

Customer journey mapping

2 forms of new ideas

  • User journeys and customer interviews

    • Improve an existing feature

  • Persona definition and future feature investments

    • Invest in a new growth area / build a new feature

Can use the same methods to validate

How do I know if my idea can be done?

  • Does it fit into your product strategy?

  • Does it affect the metric your organization has signed up for directly/indirectly?

  • How does it compare against other things that your Org. could be investing in - opportunity cost.

  • How many resources and how long would something like this take?

3. Prioritization

  • Tradeoffs

  • Stake holder feedback

  • Timeline of releases

4. Hypothesis Generation

  • Experimentation setup

  • Geographic definition

  • Roadmap of experiments

5. Metrics

  • Data Analysis

  • Hypothesis Validation

Identify experiments and form a roadmap

AA VS AB Testing

How can I validate my hypothesis

Product Experimentation:

  • Customer visits

  • Survey questions

  • Focus Groups

  • User Interviews

One sentence Strategy

FOR (target customer), WHO HAS (customer need), (product name) IS A (market category) THAT (one key benefit). UNLIKE (competition), THE PRODUCT (unique differentiator).

Sinduja Ramanujam, PM @ Meta