Agility 11

View Original

Five Steps for a Winning Product Strategy

To be successful as a Product Owner or Product Manager, you need to be the CEO of the Product. You’re much more than a tactical ‘backlog administrator’ — you’re the boss! You evangelize the vision and drive the strategy. In their book Playing to Win, A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin describe five key elements for strategy:

  1. Winning Aspiration: Your purpose; vision; BHAG, north star

  2. Where to play: Geography, customer segments, product categories, distribution channels

  3. How to win: unique value proposition; competitive advantage. E.g. should you pursue a Blue Ocean strategy?

  4. Capabilities needed: People, expertise, skills, technologies.

  5. Management systems required: Structures, policies, metrics, leadership traits, processes

If any of these levels is lacking or unclear, you’ve got some work to do as a Product Owner. You may consider some of these tools and techniques to guide your thinking for steps 1 to 3:

  • Value proposition canvas

  • Jobs to be Done

  • Opportunity canvas

  • Lean canvas

  • Value curve

  • Etc.

It’s important to note that a Product Roadmap is not a strategy: it’s merely a rough forecast of your delivery timeline. It’s derived from the strategy. Furthermore, your strategy is likely to evolve as you vaildate your product/feature hypotheses through customer feedback. That’s right - it’s a hypothesis that remains to be proven or disproven in the arena of the customer marketplace.

To get all that right, you need the right management systems - level five in the strategy model above. This is where Lean startup, disciplined Agile & adaptive processes come into play.


Develop your skills to be the CEO of your Product at our Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® training. You’ll learn more about the strategy framework and a toolbox of techniques to develop a winning product strategy.

For a limited time, we are offering 50% off our CSPO® + A-CSPO® bundle. Get two certifications for the price of one!

Contact us below to receive your 50% discount code for the CSPO + A-CSPO training package.

See this form in the original post