post

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Customer Research

Hardware

Digital Transformation

Our Privacy Policy is changing on April 5, 2022 - for more information and a description of the updates, <a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/privacy/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">see the policy here.</a>

Switching back the focus from ‘Build only’ to ‘Build-measure-learn’

Product career special part 2: Making a change

Build what matters with vision-led product management

Lessons in fearless leadership

Building a product organisation from scratch by Kevin Mansfield

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Product Management

The executive product leader persona

Test blog post

With his background in technical editing, community building and product marketing, Chris' approach to product management is inherently centered around user narratives. He spent the first few years of his career working with the B2B developer products, prototyped an experimental technical publishing platform along the way, and then kick-started the Mind the Product platform. You can find him at ProductTank, or on twitter as @camassey.

Chris Massey

<div>
<p>In this talk from <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/producttank/">ProductTank</a></span> London, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://twitter.com/susanavlopes">Susana Lopes</a></span> (Director of Product at Onfido), talks about how Onfido moved from prioritising at the sprint &amp; quarterly level to setting strategic direction and prioritise at a much larger scale. She starts by outlining several top-down methods for defining strategy, before diving into the bottom-up method called The State of Product.</p>
<h2>Top-Down Strategy</h2>
<p>Susana uses Melissa Perri’s “Strategy Deployment Levels” framework as a prime example of a well-structured top-down strategy-development method. It clearly articulated who in the organisation is responsible for what level of strategic definition, and lays the groundwork for how a strategy can be devolved down into options and actions at the level of execution.</p>
<p>This is a great approach, but might be aspirational for many of us. So what do you do if you’re not set up to be a product-led organisation, either as an individual contributor or as a product leader? Susana suggests you take a buttom-up approach to developing strategic direction for your product, and outlines one method for achieving that &#8211; The State of Product.</p>
<h2>The State of Product</h2>
<p>There are three key components to defining the State Of Product:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Deadline </span>&#8211; This process needs a concrete structure, and a deadline is essential, especially because you need the C-suite involved.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">C-level attendance</span> &#8211; Without the attendance and buy-in of your C-Suite, this process is going to face huge obstacles.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Framework to zoom out</span> &#8211; We all get caught-up in the low-level decisions that come with our day-to-day jobs, so we need to ensure we’re able to step back and consider the bigger picture.</li>
</ul>
<p>The State of Product is a product-manager-led process which defines and communicates the strategy for the coming year, ending with a formal resource request. To ensure it’s effective, you need experienced / senior leadership in attendance, and you need to ensure you’re covering these key topics:</p>
<ul>
<li>Product definition</li>
<li>Product performance</li>
<li>Product market analysis</li>
<li>Product strategy</li>
<li>Product roadmap</li>
<li>Execution, risks, unknowns</li>
</ul>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-22181" src="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susana-lopes-ProductTank-London-1024x571.png" alt="Susana lopes speaking at ProductTank London" width="1024" height="571" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susana-lopes-ProductTank-London-1024x571.png 1024w, /wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susana-lopes-ProductTank-London-300x167.png 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susana-lopes-ProductTank-London-768x428.png 768w, /wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susana-lopes-ProductTank-London-285x160.png 285w, /wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Susana-lopes-ProductTank-London.png 1676w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>Everything from the product definition to the market analysis is fairly descriptive &#8211; you’ll need to do some work to ensure you’re framing them all well, but the real work comes when you start trying to articulate a product strategy. Susana recommends a few tools that she’s found helpful</p>
<h2>Some Useful Tools for Defining a Product Strategy</h2>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Strategic Network Analysis</span> &#8211; consider the things you want to maximise to prevent competitors from entering the market, and the things you want to minimise to prevent users from leaving. Susana describes several effects and behaviours you should consider.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">SWOT Analysis</span> &#8211; To understand where to focus your resources, it’s critical to understand where your organisation’s / product’s strengths and weaknesses are. More importantly, it’s critical to understand where your biggest <span style="font-style: italic;">opportunities and threats</span> are, and how you could use your strengths and weaknesses to respond to those.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Competitive Assessment</span> &#8211; Once you’ve developed a clear understanding of your own positioning, it’s important to understand where your <span style="font-style: italic;">competitors</span> have strengths and weaknesses. With that information, you can start to develop themes that incorporate insights from your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as the dynamics of your market and competitors.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Product Themes</span> &#8211; As you develop your themes, it’s crucial to maintain focus &#8211; stick to 2-3 themes, so that you can make a significant impact in each area. Use these themes to describe a roadmap and, from there, you can dive into your execution considerations (threads and resources).</li>
</ol>
<h2>Why Now?</h2>
<p>It’s always crucial to ensure that you have a clear, robust strategy and roadmap. However, it’s particularly important to be reviewing both strategy and roadmap during times of significant market upheaval and change, as you may need to be ready to respond to significant threats &#8211; or huge opportunities &#8211; which simply didn’t exist 2 quarters ago. If you don’t already have a top-down process of reviewing and adapting your strategy, The State of Product methods gives you the tools to start assessing and, if necessary, redefining your strategy from the bottom-up.</p>
</div>
<div class="g g-21"><div class="g-single a-95"><a class="gofollow" data-track="OTUsMjEsMSw2MA==" href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/product-management-training/public-workshops/product-metrics-workshop/"><img decoding="async" src="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Training-Metrics-what-should-a-PM-know_-FOOTER-scaled.jpg" /></a></div></div>

core/freeform

Business Strategy

How to navigate tricky work relationships

Organizing around complex products at the intersection of physical and digital by Matthew Cornford

Scaling Empowered Teams: Advice From Nilan Peiris

Bottom-Up Product Strategy – The State of Product, by Susana Lopes

Testing Business Ideas, by David Bland

How to Connect Your Product Work to Your Top Business Metrics, By Pratima Arora

Atomic Product Strategy, By Rob Hayes

Setting Up an Internal Product Function by Prag Patel

Socially Preferable by Nathan Kinch

Driving Growth vs Building Core Value by Roan Lavery

ProductTank Krakow

ProductTank Heidelberg

ProductTank NYC

Product Leadership Course

ProductTank Recife

ProductTank Dublin

ProductTank London

ProductTank Birmingham

Member AMA: Unpacking User Research with Laura Klein

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Copenhagen

Trainer-Led Workshops

ProductTank Tauranga

World Product Day

Member AMA with Ken Norton

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Montevideo

ProductTank Tallinn

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Abu Dhabi

ProductTank Oslo

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Brussels

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Brno

ProductTank Cardiff

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Bucharest

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Atlanta

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Palo Alto

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Tel Aviv-Yafo

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Dubai

ProductTank Madison

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Brisbane

ProductTank Bonn

ProductTank Des Moines

#mtpcon London+EMEA 2022 Workshops

#mtpcon London+EMEA 2022 Conference

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Köln