PRODUCT STRATEGY

What is product strategy?

Product strategy

 defines what you want to achieve, provides context around the market that
you operate in, and guides the large themes of work that will help you
accomplish your goals. You want to align the organization around a
shared vision and keep everyone focused on the work that matters the
most.

A goal-first approach is a product manager's best path towards innovation.

Strategic planning should take place before you dive into the detailed work
of building your roadmap and developing new features. Done well, you will
be able to tie every feature back to a larger goal — so your work adds real
value to customers and the business.

Craft your own product strategy →

From capturing the big picture to determining KPIs for success, components
of product strategy include:

Foundation: What you want to achieve

 Vision
 Business models
 Positioning

Market: Your customers and the market landscape

 Persons
 Competitive analysis

Imperatives: The work you will accomplish

 Goals
 Initiatives

Foundation: What you want to achieve

Your strategic foundation underpins everything that you do. This is where
you visualize your strategic direction and tie it to business models and
positioning templates — all of which strengthen your product roadmap.

Vision

Product vision represents the core essence of your product and what makes
it unique. It should be something that everyone in the company deeply
understands — the "why" behind the product you are all responsible for.

Who exactly are your customers? What are the problems you are helping
them solve? What opportunities and threats do you face? Grappling with
these questions allows you to understand the true value of your product and
to craft a vision statement that is both accurate and aspirational.

A product strategy is a high-level plan describing what a business hopes to

accomplish with its product and how it plans to do so. The strategy should
answer key questions such as who the product will serve (personas), how it
will benefit those personas, and the company’s goals for the product
throughout its life cycle.

Why is Product Strategy Important?

Building out a product strategy before you begin development is necessary

because it serves three valuable business purposes.
1. A product strategy provides clarity for your company.

Your team will be in a better position to deliver their best work when you
draft and communicate a clear and well-thought-out strategy for your
organization.

Your developers will understand how the parts of the product they’re
working on contribute to the larger companywide strategic goals. Developers
can sometimes feel caught amongst all the details and lose sight of the
overarching purpose behind their work. A product strategy clarifies that for
them.

Your marketing and sales teams will be able to articulate the product’s
benefits and unique selling proposition. However, without a defined strategy
behind a product—generating anticipation and sales becomes difficult.

Additionally, your customer success team will better understand your

product’s use cases and provide better support for your users’ frustrations.

2. It helps you prioritize your product roadmap.

After you’ve earned stakeholder agreement for your proposal, it will be time
to translate that strategy into a high-level action plan and then build a
compelling product roadmap.

Unfortunately, many product teams skip the strategy-drafting stage and

jump right into listing themes and epics on their roadmap. Without a product
strategy to guide these decisions, the team may prioritize the wrong items
and find themselves misusing its limited time and resources. When you start
with a strategy, you have a clearer picture of what you hope to accomplish
with your product and translate it into a more strategically sound product
roadmap.

3. A product strategy improves your team’s tactical decisions.

No organization delivers a product to the market following the exact plan

drafted in the initial roadmap. Things change along the way, and product
managers need to be prepared to adjust their plans and priorities to deal
with those changes.

When you and your team have a clear product strategy as a reference point,
you can make smarter strategic decisions about adjusting your plans,
especially if you lose resources or need to change your estimated timetables.
A Product Strategy Template

Here is a template you can use to follow the three-step process above.

Define your vision.

Add bullets to describe each of the outer circles above—competitors,

personas, etc. During this exercise with your team, a picture should emerge
of the problem you hope to solve for your market, for example, and the
people and businesses it will help.

What are the Key Components of a Product Strategy?

Product management expert Roman Pilcher suggests a strategy should

contain the following key elements:

 The market for the product and the specific needs it will address.
 The product’s key differentiators or unique selling proposition.
 The company’s business goals for the product.

Another way to understand this is that a product strategy should include the
following three components:

1. Product vision
As we discussed above, product vision describes the long-term mission of
your product. These are typically written as concise, aspirational statements
to articulate what the company hopes the product will achieve. For this
reason, a product vision should remain static.

For example, Google’s early vision statement for its search engine was,
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.”

2. Goals

A product vision should lead to high-level strategic goals. These goals will, in
turn, influence what the team prioritizes on its product roadmap

Using SMART goals is the best approach to utilize when setting goals for
your product strategy. Like product roadmaps, goals should be specific,
measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

3. Initiatives

Initiatives are the strategic themes you derive from your product goals and
then place on your roadmap. They are significant, complex objectives your
team must break down into actionable tasks. (The product roadmap is, after
all, only the high-level blueprint.)

Examples of product initiatives include:

 Improve customer satisfaction

 Increase lifetime customer value
 Upsell new services
 Reduce churn
 Add customer delight
 Break into new industries or geographical areas
 Sustain product features
 Increase mobile adoption
Where Does Product Strategy Fit in the Development Plan?

The product strategy should bridge your product vision and the tactical steps
to fulfill that mission.

First, your team will develop the vision for the product. For example: “We
will help businesses unlock valuable information by making their data more
accessible and useful.”

(Note: Your team might also choose to draft a separate product mission at

this stage. But product vision and mission are both concise, high-level
statements conveying your big-picture aspirations for the product. You can
create just one if you prefer.)

After you’ve settled on this vision, you can then work on the product
strategy. This step will involve answering questions such as:

 Who are our persons for this product?(In the hypothetical above,
the answer might include business analysts and database
administrators.)

 What problems will our product solve for these persons?(One

example: the product will allow users to easily combine data sets from
multiple applications without having to convert formats or copy and
paste.)

 How will our product differentiate itself and win the market?
(We will give personas a visual interface, with charts and graphs, to
 help them make more sense of their data than they can with other
tools.)
o What are our near- and long-term goals for this product?
(Here, you might set a goal to sign up a certain number of users
within the first two quarters after launch and to capture a
percentage of the market within three years.)

After your team has built out the product strategy, it will be time to translate
it into an action plan by prioritizing the major themes on a product roadmap.

You will then use this roadmap to build a detailed plan, including a product
backlog, planning for the development team’s sprints, and developing a
project timeline.

Learn how to align your product strategy with customer feature request

PRODUCT MARKETING

Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. This

includes deciding the product's positioning and messaging, launching the
product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it. Product
marketing aims to drive the demand and usage of the product.

The thing is, product marketing doesn't stop once the product has gone to
market (if it did, well, product marketers at a one-product company wouldn't
have much to do after the product's launch). The process of marketing a
product lasts well after its launch to ensure the right people are aware of the
product, those people know how to use it, and that the needs and feedback
of those people are being listened to over the product's lifecycle.

Product Marketing Starts With Your Customer

A great product means nothing if it doesn't get the attention of the people
who would benefit from it. So, who's your audience for this product? How
(and where) are you reaching them, and what's the story you're telling to
present this product to them? When preparing to launch a product, working
with the rest of your marketing team to identify your customer and this
messaging is critical.
Seven Critical Steps of Product Marketing
 When product marketers know exactly whom their product caters to, the
marketing can begin. Here are seven things product marketers may do
before, during, and after their product enters the market:

1. Product Research: A helpful and well-made product isn't made in a

vacuum, and it also isn't marketed in one. In the weeks and months prior to
a product launch, product marketers work with the product's developers to
test the product both internally and externally through controlled beta
environments.
2. Product Story: Products are also brought to market in the form of a story.
What problem does the product solve? Who's facing this problem? How does
it solve this problem? What does it do that competitors don't?
3. Product-Focused Content: Product marketing's next stop is the desks of
the content creators. Here, product marketers may create and A/B
test various marketing copy, blog content, case studies, and landing pages
on their website -- all dedicated to literally describing the product.
4. Product Launch Plan: No product marketing team is complete without a
written launch plan, spelling out every last stage of the marketing
process and who's responsible at each point.
5. Product Launch Meeting: When the product is launched, everyone
involved meets the day it's rolled out. Much like a rocket launch, this is the
product marketer's finest hour -- it's the climax of a product marketing
campaign.
6. Community Engagement: As product marketing generates enough buzz
around the product within the industry, it's common for the marketing team
to capitalize on what the market is saying about them. This includes
reaching out to partners, influencers, and existing customers for
commentary.
7. Sales Enablement: As a product is being prepared for the marketplace, the
sales team is waiting in the wings to develop a sales strategy around this
new business opportunity. It's the product marketing team's job to meet
with sales staff before, during, and after the product is rolled out to the
public. This ensures the messaging created for this product is consistent all
the way through to the first sales call.

As you develop your product marketing team, and your product marketing
strategy, think about how the elements above might take shape, and who
you'll need to work with to make it a success.

INFORMATIONS NEEDED

1. Meeting users’ needs

A good product launch plan should always put consumers’ needs first and
satisfy them the best way possible. An effective way to do this is to survey
the market; answer the question, why would someone buy your product?
Figure out how your product could solve a problem, satisfy a desire or
improve someone’s quality of life. These are all reasons why people buy
things. What is your product worth to your customers? Not “worth” in the
way of monetary value, but how it adds value to their general state of living.
Understanding how your customers justify buying your product is how you
can begin a promotion strategy.

2. Know your competition

What sets your company and your product apart from a similar brand or
product? Why should consumers choose your product over the competition?
What is it about Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee that people prefer over Starbucks’?
The brand? The flavor? The price? Identify your company’s unique
advantages. How can you grab the attention of your audience so they trust
that your product will fulfill what other companies can’t?

3. Make a prototype and test it

To avoid the risk of investing in a product that is defective before it hits the
market, hire beta testers to try it so they can offer feedback on how to
improve it, if necessary. This will help your business dodge undesirable
customer reviews that may damage your credibility in the industry, causing
partners and investors to do damage control in having to justify their
involvement with your brand.

4. Reconfigure your product

Once you start testing your product and gain feedback from testers, friends,
family, colleagues, anyone who can help eliminate the kinks, it’s imperative
to adjust accordingly. Making subtle changes here and there can mean a
world of difference in the product’s quality. Some of your friends may ask
about a feature that you’ve never considered adding, or point out that
something isn’t quite working that you can eliminate. Ultimately, your
product should “spark joy” and interest; it should be something consumers
not just need, but want.

5. Run the numbers

It’s wise to establish your profit margins as one of your product launch
phases. Look at your existing products’ performance, if applicable, and
determine the number of products sold, total revenue generated, break-even
sales volume and net profit earned. Then, work backward to figure out what
numerical goals make the most sense. You need to decide what to establish
as a reasonable website conversion rate and then figure out how much
traffic you’d need to reach that goal. According to Campaign Monitor, on
average, ecommerce sites convert 2% to 3% of their overall traffic. Just
something to keep in mind.

6. Build anticipation by pre-marketing

A successful product launch plan is only as good as the work
your marketing department put into it. If you try to build anticipation
among your audience by promoting the product prior to launch, the
awareness will be more prevalent, helping drive more sales on a new
product.

A few clever ways to initiate a new product promo involves:

1. Create a landing page about the new product on your website

2. Create an email campaign that encourages signups to learn more about

the product with a CTA

3. Reach out to bloggers, journalists, and industry influencers that can help
create content that will tease the product

4. Reach out to PR reps to create an embargoed press release that will have
all media outlets talking about your product at the same time when it
launches

5. Depending on your budget, you should advertise in as many appropriate

places as possible that receive enough traffic to generate interest

6. Create the content early so you have perfected ad copy and images that
you can use when your product is ready to be presented

7. Build a solid supply chain

It’s important for business owners to take inventory of their products and
ensure they have enough to meet demand. The best way to do this is to
establish a manageable supply chain. Work closely with your vendors and
ask them what their maximum capacity is for how many units they can
provide at one time. Then, collaborate on how to scale production in the
event that your product launch yields more demand over supply.

8. Network and share your product

It’s time to launch! Once you’ve set a launch date, stick to it. This will
mitigate having to update the media, customers, vendors, anyone involved,
of any changes.

When it’s time, promote the new product on your landing page, your email
campaigns, and social media, and encourage your contacts to spread the
news as well. Don’t hold back, make sure you get the public’s attention on
every platform available. And if necessary, repost and share reminders in
the subsequent days of launching.

9. Reach out to the press post-launch

Once you’ve launched your product, and good reviews and feedback start
rolling in, reach out to the PR firms and media outlets that covered your
story pre-launch and ask them to share an update. Take your audience on a
journey from inception, to production, to commerce. People love to hear the
origin of a great product, especially if they started out as accidents.
According to Mental Floss, Corn Flakes, the Slinky, Silly Putty, Post-It Notes
and others were made unintentionally. Does your company have a great
product story? If so, we’d love to hear about it–feel free to post your story
on any of our social media channels including Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

10. Consider public feedback post-launch

Now that the product is available, brace yourself for customer reviews. Yelp,
Google and other sites made for customer feedback are the modern-day
consumer reports. No matter how successfully you’ve introduced your
product to the world via a comprehensive product launch plan, public
perception of your brand can be brutal if your organization overpromised
and underdelivered.

If you receive a negative review, be empathetic and always respond with a

positive greeting and provide a short-term solution to address the
consumer’s immediate concerns and a long-term solution to ensure future
customers won’t encounter the same issues. Addressing reviews and
feedback whenever possible demonstrates how invested you are in your
product and your customers’ happiness, which, in the end, will result in more
loyalty and devotion to your brand.

LOGISTICS

What Are Logistics?

Logistics refers to the overall process of managing how resources are
acquired, stored, and transported to their final destination. Logistics
management involves identifying prospective distributors and suppliers and
determining their effectiveness and accessibility. Logistics managers are
referred to as logisticians.

"Logistics" was initially a military-based term used in reference to how

military personnel obtained, stored, and moved equipment and supplies. The
term is now used widely in the business sector, particularly by companies in
the manufacturing sectors, to refer to how resources are handled and moved
along the supply chain.

Understanding Logistics in Management and Business

In simple terms, the goal of logistics management is to have the right
amount of a resource or input at the right time, getting it to the appropriate
location in proper condition, and delivering it to the correct internal or
external customer.