What is a Strategic Goal?
A strategic goal is a specific, measurable objective that helps you achieve your vision. It serves as a clear target, guiding your efforts and resources towards impactful outcomes. Strategic goals are the building blocks of your broader product strategy, ensuring that every initiative contributes to the larger organizational objectives.
What Makes a Good Strategy?
A good strategy is one that is aligned with your vision, achievable, and grounded in thorough analysis. It should address key challenges, leverage strengths, and capitalize on opportunities. According to Rumelt "a good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them". A solid strategy must also be adaptable, allowing for flexibility in response to changing circumstances. However, the true essence of a good strategy lies in its focus and simplicity. This brings us to the critical importance of choosing only a few strategic goals.
Prioritizing Strategic Goals
It's tempting to chase multiple goals and sometimes, you could be working for an organisation that is not very strategic, in fact they are just reactive and say yes to everything. That's a difficult situation for sure. We know that the most effective organisations and strategies are those that concentrate on some key priorities. At Netflix we always worked to narrow it down to no more than 3 key goals. This focus ensures that your team’s efforts are directed towards what truly matters, rather than being diluted across numerous initiatives. If you say yes to everything, than NOTHING is a priority and you will attempt do a lot, but usually with half the quality and possibly not deliver anything significant. For government agencies or large organizations, I would say you can increase this number to 5, but no more; primarily because they need to deliver a lot of services, transactions and products to citizens, residents, agencies and businesses. Why is it crucial to choose? By trying to do everything it often leads to accomplishing nothing; too much work in progress means high switching costs and a reduction of quality and efficacy. Limited resources, time, and attention are better spent on a few high-impact goals that can drive significant progress. This concentrated effort allows for deeper analysis, more robust planning, and ultimately, more successful execution. So choose well!
How Product Strategy Delivers on an Organization’s Strategy
A well-crafted product strategy acts as the bridge between your strategic goals and the execution of your organization’s broader vision and sits between your product vision and roadmap. It translates high-level objectives into actionable steps, ensuring that every release, and product decision aligns with the overarching organisational strategy that delivers value to the customer, for the product & hence the business. The product strategy is one of the most important product management assets that you and your team create. For example, if an organization's strategic goal is to increase the number of users by launching in new international markets; then the product strategy might focus on localisation strategies such as translating into a number of other languages, language/region account settings, refactoring the code for unicode 32 characters, etc and your launch plans would be into the market release plans. The product strategy ensures that the product team’s efforts are not just about building a product but about building a product that drives the organization towards its strategic destination. It helps you to identify the following things:
- Who is the product for?
- What kind of product is it and what makes it stand out?
- Who are the users and, if appropriate, who are the customers?
- Why would people choose it over alternatives?
- What are the business goals?
- Which benefits does the product create for the company developing and providing it?
- Why would people want to use and buy it?
- What specific problem does it address, or which tangible benefit does it offer?
- How does it differ from competing offerings?
Without a product strategy, you will struggle to explain how your product creates value and find it difficult to come up with a realistic roadmap and therefore hard to execute on. Remember, your strategy always needs testing and validation against choices and risk. It is never once and done, you will learn more as you go, so be prepared to iterate on it, as a strategy is changeable and dynamic. As new technologies emerge, as competitors offer new products or update existing ones, as you enter new markets and as users’ needs evolve, your strategy has to change in order to proactively guide the product towards success. Check in on your environmental analysis (tech, competitors, industry trends, the organisation, current problems and tech adoption trends)
The Critical Role of Debate in Strategy Sessions
The process of defining strategic goals should never be a solitary task for the product manager. Instead, it should be a collaborative effort that involves robust debate with your team and key stakeholders. This debate is the critical component that allows you to identify the best strategic goals. You can't find a strategy in a monologue, it requires that dialogue back and forth, debating about what others see as the critical issues, opportunities, trends and pain points that should be solved or leveraged. This is dependent on the environmental analysis (mentioned in previous blog) that you have done as the basis for the debate.
During these discussions, different perspectives come into play, uncovering blind spots and surfacing innovative ideas. The debate helps in stress-testing the goals ensuring they are not only ambitious but also realistic and aligned with the team and organization’s capabilities. By engaging the team in this way, you foster a sense of ownership and commitment to the strategy, which is vital for successful execution. I can't stress this part enough; bringing your team into the product strategy conversation is critical and leads to a more robust strategy.
Measuring Success: Metrics, Goals, Targets, OKRs, and KPIs
Once strategic goals are set, measuring progress becomes essential. This is where metrics, goals, targets, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) come into play. I don't want to go into too much depth around these right now, knowing that different organisations, leaders and product managers choose to do different things. What's critical to understand for now is that your strategy should be measurable and your strategic goals sit a level up from things such as OKR's. I will do a deeper dive into these options at a later date.
- Metrics: These are the quantifiable measures that indicate progress towards your goals. Metrics should be specific, relevant, and easy to track.
- Targets: Targets are the specific milestones that indicate progress towards your goals. Setting clear targets helps in keeping the team focused and motivated.
- KPIs: KPIs are the critical indicators of success that you monitor regularly. They provide ongoing insight into whether your strategy is on track.
- OKRs: OKRs are a popular framework for setting and tracking objectives and their outcomes. The objective is a clear, time-bound goal, and the key results are measurable outcomes that define success.
However, by setting up the right metrics and regularly reviewing them, you ensure that your strategy is not just a plan on paper but a living, evolving framework that guides your team to success.
How It Shapes Your Roadmap
Your next step is executing on your strategic plan and your strategic goals provide a clear focus for your roadmap if you are still using one in your organisation. They will help you determine priorities, flesh out the details of initiatives that need to happen, help you to say no to new things, guide resource allocation, and set the direction for initiatives and projects. A well-defined roadmap should ONLY have what is relevant to the strategic goals and ensures that every action taken aligns with those strategic goals. This alignment is crucial for maintaining momentum and ensuring that the product development process stays on track to deliver on the strategic goals. If you don't use a roadmap, at this point, you might have some outcomes to work with. These outcomes should encompass business outcomes, product specific outcomes and customer outcomes. Your product and customer outcomes would help you to deliver on the business outcomes. The product outcomes would also help you to identify pain points, problems and opportunities that you and the team can focus your discovery work on.
Conclusion
In summary, a product strategy that delivers on an organization's strategy is one that is focused, debated, and measurable. By choosing a few key strategic goals, engaging in team debates to refine them, and setting up the right measurement frameworks for your organisation, you can ensure that your product strategy is not just a set of aspirations but is also something you can execute on, to achieve your vision.
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