Keeping in mind that products exist to solve problems and help businesses achieve their business goals, a product’s product strategy articulates how it’ll achieve one or more business goals. Logically speaking, a product strategy is created before product development begins.
What a business focuses on is often influenced by a company vision, which therefore influences the product strategies a business creates.
A company vision articulates the kind of change a business wants to make in the world.
The impact of vision on product
A business’s vision helps bring focus by determining the kind of problems and customers a product will address or consider addressing.
product vision
You may have heard of a product vision before. As you can imagine, a product vision–which is specific to a product–would ideally be created after taking into account the business’s overall vision.
Products help achieve business goals by solving customer problems. A product vision articulates the kind of change or new future a product will bring to its target users. It can be difficult to create a product vision without first understanding the goals and ideal end states of target customers.
Recap:
- Company vision: Typically captured in a vision statement that makes it obvious what the world will look like if a business is successful.
- Business goals are influenced by what the company’s vision is. The vision helps explain why the business exists and what change it aims to bring into the world.
- Product vision. Business goals are achieved with products and services that solve customer problems. A product vision determines the kind of problems a product will address such that, solving these problems–for customers–will help the business achieve its goals.
- Product strategy. A product strategy describes how a product is going to achieve the business goals it’s responsible for.
Product strategy defined
A product strategy answers the following questions:
- What problems are we going to solve?
- In the short term
- In the long term
- Why are we solving these problems?
- What outcomes are we expecting from solving these problems?
- Should impact business kpis
- What outcomes are we expecting from solving these problems?
- Who are we going to solve these problems for (also known as target persona)
- How are we going to find these people (marketing consideration)
Knowing what problem to solve comes from understanding the reality of the users you want to help.
Example: Wounded product strategy
At Capital One I led the creation of a new capability (called Wounded) that helped solve a problem that would improve our primary ATM availability KPI. I provided the product strategy below.
Target users
ATM deployment team(MVP)
ATM Operations team
Incident Management team
What problem(s) are we solving
Deployment Issues:
Capital One’s ATM deployment team of only 2 individuals has to release ATM updates to a fleet of over 2000+ ATMs. The deployment team does not have an automated way to verify that a deployment was successful so the team must manually check an ATM after a deployment.
Rather than focus on unhealthy ATMs during a deployment window, which starts at 4am and ends before Capital One banks open, the team often loses time checking the status of healthy ATMs. The goal for fixing unhealthy ATMs before a bank opens is to prevent customers from interacting with a non-usable ATM.
Incident management issues:
There are times when ATMs unexpectedly go down. Since there’s no capability to know the health status of an ATM in an automated way, Capital One is sometimes alerted of these down ATMs by customers which isn’t an optimal customer experience. If there was a way to know the health status of an ATM shortly after it goes down, the incident management team can address the ATM before a customer interacts with it.
What business goals are going to be achieved by solving these problems?
- Speed up ATM software release cycle from 90 days to enable faster delivery of fixes that improve ATM availability, fulfill bank compliance requirements, and maintain brand image
- Build backbone needed to support continuous deployments to ATM fleet multiple times per day to enable faster innovation
Relevant KPIs
ATM Availability – Percent of time terminals are available for customer usage
- This product will allow the incident management and deployment team to remediate down ATMs before a customer interaction quicker and faster which will improve ATM availability
Missed Customer Interactions – The number of missed customer interactions per million transactions measured
- The less time an ATM is down, the less missed customer interactions the business will endure
What is the product going to be?
Web application (Wounded) and service that shows the health status of all ATMs in Capital One’s fleet. Deployment and ATM operation stakeholders will also be able to see ATMs grouped by their deployment group. Users will instantly know the health status of ATMs during and after deployments and the reason why the ATM is down.
Questions or comments?
Let me know.
