Dear subscribers,

How do you define a product strategy and get buy-in for it across your company?

Jackie Bavaro wrote two of the most popular PM books ever in Cracking the PM Career and Cracking the PM Interview. She was also head of PM at Asana.

I spoke to Jackie about:

1. Why product strategy matters

2. How to define a great vision and strategy

3. How to communicate your strategy

Strategy is an key skill for PMs who want to level up. Jackie breaks it down below.

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Why product strategy matters

Welcome Jackie! Do you have a personal anecdote on why product strategy matters?

Yes, I joined Google in 2007 as an APM in the developer org working on data APIs.

If you asked me then, "Why does your org exist?" I would say that we supported the creation of great websites which would lead to more web searches and ad revenue. My team had a roadmap but I didn’t have a clear picture of what the world will look like if my roadmap succeeded.

A PM who took over my team had a better vision. He wanted to build the “operating system for the internet” by making our infra broadly available to any developer. That was a wake-up call that I hadn’t been thinking big enough.

Amazon Web Services started around the same time as Google App Engine. We were too focused on small developers and didn’t take a step back to explore how we could support big websites and change how apps are built while turning a profit. 

App Engine became Google Cloud, which has always lagged Amazon since.

I love that story! What are the core components of a great strategy to you?

A great strategy has three components:

1. Vision: This is your inspiring view of the future. It’s a picture of what people’s lives might look like if your product is wildly successful. 

2. Strategic framework: This is your target market and the product pillars and strategic principles that it’ll take to win.

3. Roadmap: This is the high level steps you’ll take to achieve your vision in a fixed time frame. It’s a reality check for whether your vision is achievable.

I think too many PMs jump into strategy without understanding the 3 Cs (customer, competition, company). How do you know when you’re ready to define a strategy?

Yes! It’s critical to take a month or two first to understand:

1. What users want. Talk to at least 10 users to identify patterns on who your core customer is, what their problems are, and what existing solutions do they use.

2. What the data is saying. Look at existing usage metrics to explore how your product might fit into your core customer’s lives.

3. How your company works. Get to know your key stakeholders and your company’s culture and planning timelines.

How to define a great product vision

Let’s go deeper into each part of product strategy, starting with the vision. What’s the difference between a mission and a vision?

Here’s my definition of each:

1. Mission: This is your team’s purpose, it’s the big bet of what you are trying to do. For example, LinkedIn’s mission is to “Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”

2. Vision: This is a picture of what the future looks like if you succeed. For example, LinkedIn’s vision is to “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.”

Mission and vision can sometimes be combined, but vision usually requires painting a more detailed picture to inspire your team.

How can you bring your product vision to life beyond a one-line statement?

To bring your vision to life, you can include:

1. “Day in the life” narrative. Describe the life of your customer with your product.

2. North star mock-up. Create a picture of what the future might look like.

An effective vision also has emotional resonance. Infomercials have a bad reputation but they do a great job building up a problem and then introducing the right solution.

How do you know when you have a good vision? 

A great gut check is whether people are excited about your vision:

• If you tell teammates, do they want to bring the vision to life?

• If you tell job candidates, do they want to join your team?

• If you tell customers, do they ask how soon can we have this?

Excitement isn’t perfect but it’s a great signal. Working for 3 years towards a vision that no one's excited about. That’s a terrible way to spend your time.

What’s an example of a compelling vision?

At Asana, our early vision was that Asana would be your team's brain. Like how the human brain coordinates your hands while playing guitar, Asana would help teams work together effortlessly.

Imagine coming to work knowing exactly what to focus on. As you complete tasks, Asana updates to ensure that everyone stays aligned. This reduces time spent sharing updates and eliminates unnecessary work and status meetings.

Building the strategic framework

Let’s move on to the strategic framework next. Can you explain what that is?

A great strategic framework has three components:

1. Target market: Who are your customers and what problems do they have? Why are existing solutions not good enough?

2. Product pillars: What areas do we need to invest in to win and why?

3. Strategic principles: What are the values that we’ll use to make decisions?

Can you share an example of the above components?

Here’s a quick example from Asana’s early days:

1. Target market: People who didn’t train to be project managers, but realized they need to do some project management to succeed at their job. Their status quo is handling things over email.

2. Product pillars: Recall our vision is to be the team brain that effortlessly coordinates work across people and teams. A good brain needs to:

   1. Know all the info: Tasks, Projects, People, Teams.

   2. Draw insightful connections: Calendar, reporting, schedule suggestions.

   3. Always be with you: Mobile apps, stability.

   4. and also…love: Humans aren’t robots. People need to love Asana (e.g., usability, delight) and feel loved (e.g., likes, task celebrations).

3. Strategic principles:

   1. Fast is better than features

   2. Easy to use AND powerful

How did this framework help you make a product decision?

At Asana, we debated whether to build for large companies or startups. We decided to cater to large companies after applying our "easy to use AND powerful" principle.

Large companies require powerful collaboration features and support for unique email domains and single sign-on.

If we built for the less demanding group (startups) first, it could block us from serving the complex needs of larger companies later. Therefore, we first focused on powerful collaboration tools for large companies, knowing we could simplify for startups later.

This approach ensured that we didn't design ourselves into a corner.

Great example. You know, there are alot of strategic frameworks out there, but ultimately I think it just comes down to picking the right focus. I’ve worked at companies where the Chief Product Officer would say “We have 9 strategic priorities!” which I think is way too many.

I think it depends on the size of the company. When we adopted Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) at Asana, we initially did it bottoms up and ended up with 56 OKRs.

We found that it was better to set a few company objectives first. Each team could then pick key results that tied back to a company objective. This drastically reduced the number of OKRs.

Let’s say you have 3 objectives or product pillars for your team. Do you work on all three at once or do you try to sequence it?

I like to think of a team roadmap as a charcuterie board. 

When you’re building a board, you don’t stack rank your meats vs. your cheeses. Instead, you first decide at a high level that you want your board to be 70% meat and 30% cheese.

A roadmap works the same way. First, decide how much of your team's resources to allocate to each strategic pillar based on your team size and productivity levels.

1. If you've got a big team, you can probably go after a few of these at once.

2. If you’re smaller, then you might want to sequence the pillars.

I think focus is particularly important when you’re trying to introduce a new product to a competitive market. You have to pick one differentiator to avoid playing catch up the whole time.

Absolutely, having a feature checklist is usually unproductive for new entrants. Instead, they should focus on a specific use case that they can serve better than the competition.

At Asana, our goal was to serve multiple functions in a company. In the same team, you could have one function wanting more power (e.g., software engineers) while another wanting ease of use (e.g., marketing manager).

Most competitors either chose power (e.g., JIRA) or ease of use (e.g., Trello). We believe that this is a false dichotomy and invested in a design that offered powerful functionality without sacrificing usability.

How to communicate your strategy

Let’s talk about getting buy-in for your strategy. I think people feel more ownership over a strategy that they contributed to. How do you involve your team early?

I have a particular way of doing this.

First, I draft the vision and strategy by myself for a day. My goal is to get my own perspective down on paper first. 

Now that I have a point of view, I schedule a team off-site to get everyone involved in creating the strategy. In this meeting, you don’t want to be just a facilitator. You want to use your doc to surface your point of view and the most important trade-offs.

I find this approach to be a good balance between doing your own thinking and getting key people involved so that they believe in the strategy and support it.

How do you get buy-in with executives? How do you avoid walking into a big product review to present a strategy that they end up hating?

If you can, schedule 1:1s with executives before the review.

Preview your strategy and ask them to share any opinions and concerns upfront. This way, it feels less like you're presenting a strategy to them and more like you’re considering everyone’s inputs and then bringing it all together.

I agree. It’s a lot easier to get an exec's opinion through a coffee chat or even an async conversation than at this big meeting. 

After you get buy-in for your strategy, how do you incorporate it into your team’s day to day work? 

I do it by tying every piece of feedback that I give back to the strategy. Some examples:

1. Sales: “Can we add this feature?”
   PM: “Let’s see how this fits with our 3 product pillars.”

2. Engineer: “Should we build this way?”
   PM: “Does this match our principle of helping large teams?”

3. Design: “What do you think about this?”
   PM: I love it. It really captures our powerful and easy to use principle.”

You need to repeat yourself twice as much - almost to the point of feeling ridiculous. It’s so easy for teams to get off track if you don’t do this.

I love that! It’s so much more effective to bring up pieces of the strategy organically than to say “read my strategy” over and over again.

Yes being able to communicate using your product pillars and strategic principles really helps in many ways:

1. It helps you think consistently by applying your pillars and principles.

2. It helps you earn trust with your team by making consistent decisions.

3. It helps you delegate decisions to your team as they’ve internalized the strategy.

A common complaint from engineers is when PMs change direction based on the whims of senior leadership. If you’re consistent in communicating your strategy, it takes away the feeling that you're making random choices. 

If you do decide to change your strategy after getting buy-in, how do you communicate that change to the team?

Your strategy is essentially a bet that your product team or company is making.

You can validate this bet by setting the right expectations during planning, "We're making a big bet on large companies. Here's how we'll know when it’s working." This way, changes don't come as a surprise if things don't pan out as expected.

If you want to change your strategy due to a market shift or incorrect assumption, don't just update the document. Keeping your team unaware of these changes can lead to frustration as they continue working based on an outdated strategy.

Where you start this conversation depends on your role. If you're a senior leader, begin with other leaders. Once you have a better understanding, you can involve the rest of the team. Ensure that this is a learning opportunity for them, where they can see what changed, what was learned, and how that should affect the overall plan. The key is to keep everyone involved and solicit their input throughout the process.

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Thanks so much Jackie! If you enjoyed this interview, you can find Jackie on Twitter and her product newsletter.