“Inspiration is a wonderful gift to a product analyst—when it strikes. But like lightning (one of the few other things that “strikes”), it’s difficult to know when, where, or how frequently inspiration will shower its gifts upon you. And because inspiration—or the lightbulb moment, or whatever you want to call it—makes a terribly unpredictable partner, you can’t count on it as the sole source of your product strategy. Yes, you could sit around waiting for the next Facebook-sized idea to hit you. But truthfully, you’re about as likely to be struck by lightning!”– by Andre Theus, VP Marketing at ProductPlan

So, if you’re a business analyst or a product manager responsible for outlining a compelling product strategy, you need a plan. Not a formula to yield a boring, uninspiring product but a defined approach to developing a winning strategy for product management to clear your path for inspiration to strike!

I recently joined as a business analyst, and in one of our many inspirational stand-up meets, we got a chance to confer upon a question.

What Goes into A Product Strategy?

If you’ve defined what you want to accomplish (vision), the roadmap to measure it (objectives), and the plans to get there (tactics), you are already halfway there.

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Vision

A vision is the most essential prerequisite for choosing the right strategy. If you don’t have an overarching product goal, you cannot know how to best get what you expect. This is nicely illustrated by the famous conversation between the Cheshire Cat and Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Asked which way Alice should take, the cat replies: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” “I don’t much care where,” says Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” responds the Cheshire Cat.

Objectives

Your objectives should be the roadmap of your product strategy. Your objectives should articulate your product vision. As a product owner, you act as a north star that tells the team at every point the direction of the product vision and product roadmap.

• Focus on the functionality, releases, sprints, and milestones.
• Facilitate discussion on reusability of any existing code snippets, components, or any artifact that will expedite your development process.
• Engage stakeholders via MoM to confirm their approval on various tasks and implementations.
• Implement a Requirements Traceability Metric (RTM) to align with your vision and your product strategy.
• Add value by crossing an extra mile to guide your client towards a better approach or providing out-of-the-box functionality.
• Include as much transparency as possible in your engineering roadmaps. Even though your developers will be focused less on product vision and revenue potential, it is a smart practice to include relevant milestones and requirements the other departments are facing so your developers understand your specific deadlines and requirements.

Tactics

The world will never stand still! The market trends keep on changing, and new technologies emerge. Therefore, it is important to assess your strategy regularly.

A good business analyst should know that the overall purpose of their kickass strategy is to help their company achieve business/corporate goals.

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Review: Revise your product performance using relevant key performance indicators (KPIs), ask yourself:

• Do the metrics show a positive, flat, or negative trend? 
• What conclusions can you draw from your analysis? 
• What would help your product excel?

Market Trend Analysis: Dig into market trends, ask yourself:

• Is there any new technology, compliance, or social developments, for example, machine learning or artificial intelligence, GDPR? 
• Do they impact your product development, quality, delivery? 
• Do they offer an opportunity to innovate, add, remove, or enhance features or create a brand-new product altogether?

Closed environment Monitoring: Follow developments within various internal teams, ask yourself:

• Any internal changes to the business strategy by a specific team?
• And if so, what are the consequences for your product? 
• Are important stakeholders less engaged?
• Is their interest and support flagging?

Hence canvassing the roadmap of your ultimate strategy comes in handy:

Draw your canvas board picking up each of these titles, and define the path towards YOUR winning product strategy.

At TA Digital, as part of the Business Analysis practice, we work as digital strategists to become the drivers of any project or a new product building. We promote a seamless client experience by delivering our services through an ideal and ingenious product strategy.