Creating a Product Strategy in flight

Well this was fun!  And deeply satisfying.

In my role as Product Manager for CultureMoves I had the opportunity to create a Product Strategy from scratch.

We had been working on the product for about a year; the business owners had conducted enough research to give them confidence to hire 3 new employees an (ostensibly) transition me to full time product management.

(I did maintain my role as Director, Design Experience for the duration of my time as Product Manager, but that's for another story).

The business had what I would call an 'overarching strategy lite' - more of a guiding document with a set of goals that was more than adequate for the consulting arm of the business to use to target business development and use in lite assessment of its goals.

This document was not, however, nearly detailed enough for a product team, and in fact didn't contain much detail of the product at all.

As a result, our super lean team kept asking ourselves: what do we prioritise? Where should we spend our effort? What are we aiming for?

As product manager it was my job to help the team know these things so, in absence of a strategy from the overarching business, I created one myself.

I read up on strategic frameworks, case studies and real stories from similar businesses. I consulted experts close to the business and experienced in product creation. And I put together the above document (redacted, of course, due to commercial info).

Then, I brought it to the team. This was never designed as a top-down exercise - my team had accumulatively much more product knowledge than I could possibly have alone, so I'd have been remiss not to tap into that. This looked like discussions over each of the points in the strategy; stress- and sanity-testing each. We made changes for the better.

Then I took it to the founders of the business (the investors in our product). What ensued was one of those moments I look back on and go 'ah yes, I do know what I'm doing'. We had a robust discussion - pros and cons, frameworks chosen, POV setting and challenge... and I felt like I was contributing my expertise to the founders of the business's thinking.

It doesn't look like much (oh how I wish I had the time to make a beautiful document back then) but I am super proud of what these few screenshots represent: I took the initiative to give my team what they needed, upskilling in the process.