When doing expansion strategies, we need to come up with insights about what markets we can penetrate and win. Combining that with product-led growth thinking, you can review the pull from existing users to come up with underserved needs and sizing opportunities. That can be easier said that done, but in this episode of 100 Product Strategies, Markiyan Matsekh, ex-Director of Product at Vimeo, shared the steps he took to conquer the enterprise segment. Besides the very insightful strategy story, he shared the fundamentals and the importance of Vimeo’s positioning and differentiation to win in a crowded market. And of top of that, we closed with an interest story of an unsuccessful strategy, that failed for the same reasons the other one succeeded, reinforcing the importance of these concepts. You can find Markiyan on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markiyanmatsekh/

Why do we create strategies? To focus on the most critical problems or opportunities which will help us get closer to our vision. And the first step of putting that focus into action is concentrating our resources there. This is easier said than done, and the complexity becomes more evident when we have more than one product, at different maturity stages, and with very different strategic paths ahead of them. While this problem can fall into the Portfolio Strategy space for larger corporations, startups also face this challenge when expanding. In this episode, I had the chance to speak with Iryna Struk, who is running product management at HandsHQ, a startup with a mature product and another trying to find product market fit. We discussed not only resource allocation but also a broad set of topics, starting as usual with how they create strategy, how they handle context switch, and how they balance the different levels of uncertainty when planning. You can connect with Iryna on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irynastruk/ You can also find more info on: https://productdirection.substack.com/

Many of us work in complex environments where the set of opportunities we can potentially pursue to impact a desired outcome is very wide. As you can imagine, at Google, you can find both very complex and large environments, and opportunities to innovate in multiple directions. In this episode, I spoke with Stefan Schnabl, who works in the education space at Google, with the potential to cover very different audiences, problems, and solutions. He shared many tips and stories, from how they align on direction down to how the team does research and experimentation in the space to identify strong opportunities. You can find Stefan on Linkedin, and the pilot post in his blog.

Most companies' strategies are “roadmap on steroids”: large plans of multiple big ideas to implement, which usually have not been validated. To differentiate and create thoughtful and successful strategies, you must start with evidence-based insights. But how do we collect that evidence? How do we gain confidence and compare opportunities? After selecting opportunities, how do we keep validating the strategy through the multiple solution ideas we may pursue? I had the pleasure of speaking with the evidence-guided guru, Itamar Gilad, and we explored the practices, tools, and challenges you will use and face to make your strategy more robust relying on solid evidence. Itamar has been helping teams with tools and resources I strongly recommend, like the confidence meter, and ICE Scoring. He recently published his fantastic book, Evidence Guided, which is a must for all product managers and leaders.

TL;DR: Platforms are everywhere, and their challenges are hard to understand and impact even non-platform products. Thor is an expert who shared his learnings building the Miro Marketplace and, previously, the Google Maps Developer’s Platform. Many times when discussing strategy, we focus on the most typical scenarios: consumer apps, B2B SaaS, media, etcetera. But platforms are continuously emerging, and even if you are not working on one, they are probably impacting you: app stores, social media integrations, etcetera. The challenges they present for strategy are quite nuanced, ranging from defining complex success metrics to understanding how to align with the larger company strategy. Understanding how to think differently about their strategies is critical. Thor Mitchell is the Product Director for Miro’s platform teams, has a long history of working in this field, and shared his process, journey, and challenges in developing their latest strategy. You can connect with Thor at Linkedin or Twitter.

Startup challenges change as they grow. The focus and needs of the product strategy also change, as the company moves through funding rounds and product maturity stages. What are the critical factors leaders should consider at each stage? How does collaboration among different areas evolve? What’s the impact of funding rounds on focus areas? In this episode of 100 Product Strategies, we spoke with Lily Smith, CPO at BBC Maestro and co-host of the Product Experience podcast, who has been taking product leadership roles at startups at different stages. We discussed the strategic implications of technical scalability, user experience improvement, and business expansion. Lily compared how challenges evolve from pre-market-fit stages to the scale-up period. You can find Lily on Linkedin! Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

We all love good strategy stories. What is better than good strategy stories? The ones that are simple and that we can derive lessons to apply elsewhere. In this episode, Saeed Khan shares his stories and thoughts collected over 25 years of product management experience. Different from other episodes, in this one, we started with the core elements of strategy, which Saeed simplifies as building hypotheses on how you can achieve certain objectives. Making some mapping to the Playing to Win framework, he simplified the result of strategy as a set of Goals connected with Measures, which are connected to Actions. We also reviewed some examples so you can apply these simple steps to your products.

Over the last 18 months, I have interviewed 29 product leaders, inquiring about their strategy formulation and challenges. We covered different industries, customer types, company scales, product types, and geographies. As I shared in the podcast intro, after writing Product Direction, I felt we didn’t have enough examples out there of how people do strategy work and what challenges they face. My secret project all along was to compile a list of different examples and also tag them accordingly so product leaders could listen to stories they felt were related to their context. https://productdirection.substack.com/p/my-secret-summary-of-30-real-life Let's review my takeaways and where you can get the summary of all past episodes!

If you create a great strategy and communicate it properly, and have good people to execute it, what can possibly go wrong?  Well, as you can imagine, multiple layers of complexities can get in the way.  In this episode, Randy shared two stories where different company intricacies made good strategies fail. The learning will help you view your strategy process from a wider perspective, and help you avoid these pitfalls. Randy is the author of What Do We Do Now?, host of The Product Experience podcast by Mind the Product, and Coach and Consultant at outofowls.com. In this episode, we talked about: 2 stories about good strategies failing The complexities of funding your strategy Build or Buy decisions in strategy High-level stakeholder alignment How to build trust for decision-makers And much more! Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

The world is full of hard problems, which led to opportunities to tackle them using groundbreaking innovative products.  Bigger companies are in an interesting position: they can invest in exploring new problems related to their core mission, but which can be years ahead in terms of helping them expand their business. Yet, for many reasons, they fail to innovate. And the first problem is how they strategize in this context. Luckily, in this episode, Andrew Skotzko shares a great story about such a situation and what we should do when facing it.  I previously wrote about the differences in execution for this type of strategy, but Andrew gives a great example from the trenches, full of details and advice you can leverage if you feel your strategy needs to be more far-fetched. You can find Andrew’s content and services on https://www.makethingsthatmatter.com/, and subscribe to his daily 2-min tips at: https://www.productleadershipdaily.com/ Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

If you are a product leader joining a new organization, or if you have recently been promoted within your organization and are tasked with creating a strategy, where should you start? How do you align on what strategy is? How do you collect the existing knowledge and past decisions and combine them with new trends and goals? Besides years of product leadership experience, Tobias has helped many organizations and leaders create their product strategies and answer these questions. In this episode, we talked about: What are the symptoms of lacking strategy? How do different artifacts (objectives, strategy, vision) play together, and what should go first? Diagnosing your current situation. What is inside a good strategy? The written narrative approach. How to test your strategy, and what to with conflicts? And much more! You can find Tobi on Linkedin or on his website: https://www.tobiasfreudenreich.de/. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

How do you navigate the intricate balance between the rapid-paced weekly sprints of agile software development and the long-term planning cycles inherent in hardware components? In this episode, I spoke with Dominik Busching -Head of Product at Tado- and unveiled how they create innovative solutions that not only enhance user satisfaction but also contribute to the sustainable transformation of the energy industry. In this episode, we talked about: What are the challenges of Strategy in the intersection of Hardware and Software.How they went from a tacit strategy by their founders to a fully-fledged Product Strategy using written narratives.How they identify trends in a complex space.How they test hypotheses in the hardware world. And much more! You can find Dominik on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

In this episode, I spoke with Nils Janse, CEO and co-founder of Delibr, a tool to help Product Managers organize and structure decision-making across the entire product flow. We covered amazing insights, going from crafting a value proposition, followed by how to select the focus areas and how to be stubborn on the vision while flexible on the execution based on customer feedback. Pay special attention to Nils’ definition of the “three interacting trees” (minute 20 approx). He uses three interacting models: an opportunity solution tree for specific outcomes, a higher-level JTBD-tree, and a Product-tree focused on the components. Amazing discovery to balance all the different opportunities you may need to handle. The conversation was a bit “meta” since we discussed their process and, at the same time, Delibr’s strategies to support the process!  In this episode, we talked about: How Delibr made its way to a Product Management tool, starting as a tool for “structured decision making.” How to differentiate in the product management tooling space Starting your strategy by identifying your ICP How to mix the “upstream” vs. “downstream” opportunities Not trying to fit all your opportunity space into OSTs, and other trees can be used. How LLMs can be extremely helpful in so many text-intensive PM tasks And much more! You can find Nils on Linkedin, and do check out his book Epic Alignment. You can check Delibr and ask for a demo.  Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

The role of strategy in pre-market-fit startups can sometimes be unclear. How would we focus or double down on a path when we have so much uncertainty and risk? We would likely pivot many times before finding what we need to double down on, and doing a deep strategic exercise is a waste of time.  But when we neglect strategy, the consequences can be worse. Not having clarity on what we are trying to achieve and testing random things has crashed many startups. Luckily, there is a middle ground. In this episode, I spoke with David Pereira, an experienced product leader and strategist, who told us (with very detailed examples!) how to create strategies that help startups find Product-Market Fit and connect them to an iterative execution that drives success. In this episode, we talked about: Where to start when defining strategies in the seed-stage startup context How to find the right problems in a new or unknown market How to align on the expected result How a strategy for a seed-stage startup can look like How to connect strategy with the fast-paced execution of a startup And much more! You can find David on LinkedIn, and read his material on dpereira.substack.com Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

Playing to Win is a strong framework, but it can create some confusion during its implementation, like making your winning aspiration “be the #1 of X”. I spoke with Stuart Congdon, a strategy veteran, who has used it many times and walked us through a complete example with my typical annoying questions to get to the root of their strategic decisions! In this episode, we talked about: A real implementation of the Play to win framework Using Customer Journey and Service Blueprint to identify opportunities How to find your niche for the “where to play” How to differentiate and don’t make a strategy that could be the same as any competitor Recommended Book: Superstrings. A Theory of Everything And much more! You can find Stu on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

Many strategies come from a need to grow, or start by reviewing many opportunities to find the ideal ones. But what if we have a unique asset that we can leverage to create a strategic advantage? A recent example could be how Disney used their unique IP to create a winning streaming platform in an already competitive market.  In this episode, Joe Jenvey from Sedex shared a more “down to earth” example: using their unique supply chain data to create new value propositions for their customers.  Joe explained (among *many* other things) how they started from the business need and did a discovery process to understand the customer problem they could solve and how to solve it.  We talked about: How their process started with a business need and developed into a product-led customer discovery. How they interacted between different areas of the business The tools they used to collect and share data How they validated their strategy How do they manage vision, roadmap, goals, and checkpoints And much more! You can find Joe on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

Strategy in B2B has serious power dynamics. There often seems to be a fight between PMs and Sales, when in the end, hopefully, they are trying to do what's best for the company. Adam Thomas has used multiple hats in the past and brings some advice on working with the different sides of the organization to create a trusted and focused strategy, and how to keep validating your strategic investments with survival metrics. In this episode, we talked about: How to formulate portfolio-level strategies How Product and Sales interact, why we always struggle, and what to do about it The importance of focus (and consequently trade-offs) for strategy The but - therefore storytelling rule Survival metrics How “Product Strategy” roles interact with Product leaders and teams And much more! You can find Adam on theadamthomas.com, and also on Linkedin or Youtube. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

One of the key elements of a solid product strategy that generates growth based on your product success, is building and sustaining strong differentiators. But finding, validating and aligning on that differentiation is hard work. In this episode we explored strategy creation with Leah Tharin, Head of Product at Jua.ai and Product Led Growth expert. We covered many aspects of strategy creation, starting with the importance of determining your target user, how to identify opportunities that you can later select for your differentiation, and all the way down to how to summarize it in an inspiring one-pager. In this episode, we spoke about: How Leah strives for a strategy one pagerThe importance of defining your audience and unique value propositionHow she explores the opportunity space and decides what to focus onSelecting based on facts rather than opinion or influenceWhat is needed for a Product Led Growth strategyRecommended book: The Earned Life And much more! You can find and connect with Leah’s content on leahtharin.com. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

To create a good strategy, you need a vision. If the vision is inspiring and drives a significant purpose, chances are you have stronger bases to build a motivating strategy. Simone started her product career in gambling! In Canada the government provided the service, which already had some nuances for strategy. At some point she felt the calling to do something more purposeful, that eventually led her to work on renewables, and finally at an ONG. In this episode, we talked about: How Simone used ProduxLabs Strategy Canvas to keep things visual and simple.How politics,risk tolerance, and current success of the business model affects strategy and its stability or time horizon.How organization size affects strategy creation speed, and the level of information required for decisions.How ONGs think about and understand the user and the competitive landscape differently.Beyond prioritization frameworks: how it all boils down to collecting “evidence” and making sure people “get it” when talking about why something is a priority. And much more! You can find Simone on linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

The key drivers of your strategy can be radically different in nature: are we optimizing on a well known topic? Are we doing a new big bet into uncharted territory? Unfortunately, many times we are not conscious of the type of decision we are making, and how this affects the strategy “health”, risk, time horizons, and execution process. Luckily, Alessandro doesn’t fall into that trap. He has a well established Playbook, that he uses with the team to balance the strategy and communicate the proper level of uncertainties and how they plan to reduce it. On top of that, he has a very structured approach to uncover opportunities using a combination of Jobs To Be Done and Opportunity trees that we explored at length. In this marvelous episode, we talked about: The inputs to start thinking about your strategyHow to map the opportunity space from a JTBD perspectiveHow to make the entire company contribute to the opportunities and better influence the roadmapHow he uses the strategy playbook at Amenitiz. And much more! You can find Alessandro on Linkedin. Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast. If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)