How do I close the strategy to execution gap in a product company?

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” Japanese proverb

I personally love that quote. In product companies, left unmanaged, the strategy to execution gap often results in product failure as it’s a proverbial ‘daydream’. In my experience, the magnitude of failure is proportional to the size of the gap. Yet despite being a known problem as well as the subject of a Japanese proverb, little is written about bridging strategy to execution in product companies. And when discussed, it often fails to demonstrate how to create a clear path from A to B for the team. The gap, in product companies, is where product strategy comes in. Product strategy provides a bridge between leadership expectations/enterprise strategy and product roadmaps. Said differently, product strategy connects the organization’s desires to product delivery.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. In my two decades of experience across industries and companies as an advisor, entrepreneur, and leader, this bridge is rarely built or is left half-finished. When a real bridge doesn’t connect two sides you cannot pass over the river, ravine, or natural barrier. Similarly, when the bridge doesn’t exist or is incomplete the strategy to execution gap cannot be overcome. Product teams cannot reach the other side where the enterprise strategy resides.

Therefore the goal of product strategy is to lay out a clear path to achieve the company’s high-level objectives. A path that shortens time to results, accelerates growth, and reduces waste by reducing rework. When product strategy exists and is clear, product teams can sail over the gap with ease.

 Intuitively this makes sense so why do organizations skip product strategy? A lack of patience and willingness to invest in the talent required. It feels easier and faster to skip from a lofty, abstract enterprise objective or leadership mandate right to build. They believe the time to value is shorter by moving straight to engineering and launch. Unfortunately in almost all cases, this leads to failure resulting in a need to complete the strategy anyway.

Product strategy, as a bridge, has one primary goal — creating clarity. Clarity around the product vision, market opportunity, end-to-end story, value to the user, metrics, objectives, prioritized capabilities, and how the product directly delivers to the corporate strategy. A solid product strategy, at its essence, translates abstract objectives into a product that creates user value and revenue. It lays out the path forward.

Product strategists deliver translation and clarity through the product strategy and path forward. Product managers then leverage the strategy and map to set the roadmap to guide engineering. The same strategy is also used by marketing and sales to build their key messages. Product strategists guide the organization from strategy to through execution.

In smaller organizations, responsibility for product strategy falls to product managers who pull double duty. However as a company and its product grow, product strategy moves into a specialize role separate from product management. Regardless of size or maturity when the split occurs, the roles still must remain tightly aligned.

 What are the core responsibilities of a product strategist? Rather than a job spec, I prefer to focus on the key questions they answer. Questions that set the direction for the product and the team. Questions that create clarity and form the base of the strategy, map and framework to execute. While I recognize that the questions can vary based on industry, company, the company’s strategy and objectives there is a core set I find repeated:

• How do I map corporate strategy and objectives into a vision and strategic themes for our product teams?
• How do we reach the end state of the corporate strategy through our products?
• What problems will the product solve for the buyer / user?
• How can our products contribute to and deliver value against our corporate strategy?
• How do we tell the story of the product strategy and how it meets the strategic objectives of our enterprise strategy?
• What targets should be set for each product?
• What needs to change with each of our products and its strategy?
• What’s going on in the market and with our competitors?
• How do the market dynamics impact the specific strategy and targets for each product?
• What’s the optimal go-to-market approach? Customers, value, pricing, distribution, etc.
• How do I drive focus and eliminate distractions, intentionally deciding what not to do?
• Where do we start?

Successful product strategists need to fall in love with the art of answering these questions (and others) while also imagining a story that helps the team follow the right path forward. A good product strategist can clearly articulate answers to these and other questions in a way that motivates the team, a great product strategist tells them a story setting a clear path the succeed.

Using Google Maps as an analogy, the questions and their answers represent context about the destination. Where it is, how far away is it, what’s at the destination, etc.? The path or A → B plan (hereafter referred to as the product strategy map) represents the step-by-step directions that show you how to get from where you are to your final destination and all the local hot spots along the way. The product strategy map is the framework for how you reach the destination including the step-by-step directions. If the strategy represents the why and what, the map represents the how and when.

Let’s consider a hypothetical example of how enterprise strategy translates to product strategy, specifically a product vision.

Pretend for a moment you own a multi-national donut franchise since I love donuts. Your corporate strategy might include an objective to grow revenue with a critical segment, Gen Z. To corrupt them and seize the market since most of Gen Z doesn’t eat donuts and isn’t already locked in with a competitor. More specifically, 100 million dollars of new revenue next year from Gen Z customers. How will that be achieved? Product strategists to the rescue.

The product strategy team jumps into action to set a vision to achieve the enterprise objective through a product. Since it would take pages and pages to articulate the answer to the strategic questions, I’ll jump ahead. Physical donuts that come with a unique digital donut in the form of an NFT. A piece of digital artwork that only that buyer would have. Impressed? I hope so. The corporate strategy of $100 million in revenue from Gen Z is now mapped to a product vision. What comes next is an exploration of the vision in the form of a brief that summarizes the answers to the questions and articulates product vision along with a map. 

Assuming you embrace the importance of product strategy, I will share four steps you can take to move your organization into a rhythm of integrating product strategy to your process.

• Become an ambassador for the enterprise strategy. Spend significant time with those who produced the strategy to gain a clear understanding of the why behind the objectives and goals. As a product strategist who is the only bridge between the enterprise strategy and product execution, you need to know it in and out so you can put it in your own words to help the product teams execute.
• Bring together your key partners — Design, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales — and share your answers to the questions above (or the set you decide). Let them poke holes, ask questions, refine your thinking. This will also help set the stage for the A → B plan. Walk out of the room with agreement on the answers as refined. This commitment will help the team start to embrace the strategy you will outline in the brief.
• Define the product strategy for one product (don’t try and do them all at once). Build a product strategy brief (presentation, long form Word doc, etc.) that shares, sells, and clarifies the product vision. Articulate the market opportunity, end-to-end story, value to the user, metrics, objectives, prioritized capabilities, and how the product directly aligns with the corporate strategy based on the answers to the questions.
• Work with your key partners — Design, Product, Engineering — to build your product strategy map. Understand what they need/expect from the map. What should be articulated to ensure seamless execution of strategy? Use this as the base for your map development going forward.

I hope this post at least got you thinking and willing to consider the importance of product strategy in the success of your company. I’ll leave you with this question to think about. Could my last product launch have gone better if I truly understood the enterprise strategic objective it was meant to support and how the product tied to it?