In fast-paced environments, especially those flooded with customer requests, product managers often find themselves caught in the cycle of continuously triaging customer asks, understanding the scope of requests, and delivering products to satisfy those needs. In this article, we’ll explore why relying on backlog grooming alone isn’t enough, how it can ultimately hinder the growth and impact of your product and even your career and why you need to define product strategy.
1. Over-emphasizing one customer ask
2. Building for a small scope instead of an end-to-end delightful product experience, where you end up creating bugs leading to further customer requests
3. Lack of significant impact: At the end of a quarter or a half-year, a product manager might look back and find that they’ve spent the majority of their time putting out fires rather than making meaningful progress. This can diminish enthusiasm for the product area and lead to frustration.
1. Product planning is sometimes considered as a synonym or equivalent or replacement to product strategy. But, product planning and product strategy are different beasts altogether. Product planning is about timelines, risks, how to mitigate and who will execute, etc., while product strategy is about the why behind those solutions. Many companies overly emphasize on product planning without confidence in reaching goals.
2. Product positioning frameworks: Companies often confuse product strategy with product positioning frameworks. While positioning outlines how to talk about the product, who the target audience is, and how we differentiate ourselves from competitors, product strategy is about the journey to achieve a goal. Positioning is great for educating go-to-market teams; product strategy, however, is about how to drive product development in a way that leads to real customer impact and growth.
After successfully overcoming the above pitfalls, another pitfall that product managers fall into thinking that it doesn’t need to evolve. This is dangerous. Product strategy should be a living, breathing document that adapts based on continuous discovery, experimentation, and learning and not team outings/retreats. A product strategy is never “done”—it must evolve to reflect the realities of user needs, market changes, and organizational goals.
Defining a good product strategy is working backwards from your goal. A good product strategy not only covers the “why” but also the “what and how”.
1. Vision: It represents the long-term aspiration for the product. Once it’s defined, it typically doesn’t change, but it serves as the guiding principle for all decisions. A strong vision provides clarity and purpose for everyone.
2. Goal: Measurable time-bound outcome
3. Challenges:
4. Target metrics: Metric to measure the success after resolving your problem area. These can be further broken down logically for each sub-problem area.
5. Actual status: Represents the current state of the product. Problem discovery also happens by clearly defining metrics and identifying the current status.
6. Solution: After gaining clarity on big problem areas, define and brainstorm multiple solutions. Solutions are to be further prioritized for experimentation based on confidence and effort.
The below representation communicates the building blocks visually:
Let’s consider the example of a talent acquisition product and how a strong product strategy can transform the business:
1. Vision: Within 3 years, we will achieve the gold standard for autonomous, AI-led talent acquisition. Our product will become the definitive solution, enabling organizations of all sizes, globally, to efficiently discover and hire exceptional talent.
2. Goal: In order to reach this goal, we need to reduce the time to hire from an average of 60 days to 7 working days within next 3 years.
3. Challenges:
1. Challenge 1: Recruiters do a monotonous task of requisition creation
2. Challenge 2: Recruiters spend 80% of their time on resume screening and screening calls
3. Challenge 3: 70% of hiring managers agree that they are not given access and insights to close the candidate quickly
Backlog grooming, while essential, isn’t a substitute for building a thoughtful, flexible product strategy. A good product strategy is about understanding the big picture, defining a vision, identifying the most important challenges, and continuously evolving to meet user needs
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