Product Strategy Is How You Win

You have a product vision, you have your roadmap, you know how to execute it. That’s all you need, right?

What if that vision is painted with broad brush strokes? What if your roadmap is wrong? What if you execute on the wrong thing at the wrong time?

While many product leaders emphasize execution over strategy, I think it’s important to note that executing on the wrong thing results in accelerated failure.

Think about that for a second. A team that can ship product at light speed, might be piloting their metaphorical product ship directly into a supernova.

Many conflate vision and strategy but, in my experience:

It’s looking at the constraints you have, the state of the market, and the behavior of customers, to piece together an equation where the solution is positive value for customers and the business.

If you don’t start with the intent to win, you won’t.

So let’s dive in.

What Is Product Strategy, Really?

Product strategy is not just about getting to market or solving a customer problem—it’s about knowing exactly who you’re going after, how you will take the lead, and what will keep you ahead. If you allow me a nerdy board game reference, it’s the difference between placing your armies at the beginning of the game of Risk and actually conquering “the world”.

Aside: There are a ton of books out there on general strategy and a few different schools of thought for what that means. I’m very opinionated in practice > study so instead of pointing you towards a somewhat clichéd book like Good Strategy Bad Strategy, I’ll point you towards Zag and Obviously Awesome. Zag is more focused on building your business with strategy in mind while Obviously Awesome is more about how you position your business/product in the market.

Many companies have good ideas but fall short because they make critical missteps like:

• Targeting the wrong customers

• Prioritizing features that don’t matter

• Ignoring competition or market trends

And without a cohesive strategy, they fail to build the momentum needed to truly succeed. Your product strategy should cover everything from prioritizing your roadmap to your support documentation and everything in between.

How To Win

Think of your product strategy as the roadmap to conquer your market. Here are the key components that will help you get in the lead and stay there:

1. Product Vision: This is your north star, your “why.” It’s the big picture of what your product aims to achieve and the impact it will have in the long run.

2. Goals and Milestones: Specific, measurable targets that take you from where you are today to where you need to be to stay competitive. It’s important to have regular and incremental milestones to know whether your strategy is working. In reality, any strategy can be beaten. If your competitors see what you’re doing or have strategies that take that play into account, you may have to pivot and you want to do that as early and as quickly as possible.

3. Ideal Customers: It’s not just about picking customers—it’s about understanding the right customers. Who feels the most pain from the problem you are solving?

4. Competitors of Concern: I love “Obviously Awesome” because the author gives you a clear and easy way to find your competitors. “What would your customers use if you didn’t exist?”

5. Positioning: Fill in the blank: “Customers will choose us over competitors because of our _______.” It’s the specific, undeniable reason customers choose your product over the competition.

6. Key Initiatives: These are the actionable steps that drive your roadmap. They’re what you execute to turn vision into reality, but each step should contribute to your lead—not just getting to market but dominating it

Product Strategy and Winning

You’re not just looking to get to market—you want to win and keep winning. Here’s why a well-crafted product strategy is essential to long-term success:

1. Clarity and Alignment: When your team aligns on how you differentiate yourself from competitors, how you add value to your customers, and why you build the way you do, you get better ideas, better decisions, and better results. It sounds easier than it is, but that is why strategy is important as a practice and not just an idea.

2. Prioritization: A winning strategy means you’re not building every feature imaginable. You’re laser-focused on what moves the needle, whether that’s the features that will drive acquisition or the ones that will lock in retention. Your strategy gives you the best kind of constraints.

3. Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Winning isn’t about reacting to what your competitors are doing—it’s about setting the pace. A strong strategy helps you position your product in a way that competitors can’t easily replicate, and it usually sets a clear standard for your product. “We’ll win by being the best at X” means that your team should understand that you always have to be the best at “X”.

Creating A Solid Product Strategy

Now that we know what goes into the strategy, let’s look at how to actually build one that leads to dominance. Here’s a step-by-step approach, with a focus on how to prioritize and execute effectively.

1. Define a Vision That Inspires Total Buy-In

You’re not just building a product—you’re creating a future for your users. Your vision should be inspiring but clear enough to rally your team around. It should communicate the long-term potential, not just the immediate solution.

Try and describe what change

• For Product Managers: Lead the charge by aligning the product vision with the company-wide goals and future needs of your customers.

• For Engineers: Build with the future in mind—ensure that the architecture can adapt as the vision evolves, and take opportunities to set the foundation for future features as you build what’s in focus right now.

• For Designers: It’s easy (and smart) to design with affordances in mind but you can get creative by leveraging familiar patterns and interactions from other contexts to make your product more usable and delightful or you can take an experience that sucks across all of the existing solutions and make it better.

Mini Case Study:

Without being under the hood of the product, Linear is one of the most impressive products on my radar right now. If you have experience in project management and software development, you know that none of the project management/work tracking tools are perfect. They are all pretty labor intensive to learn and manage and have varying levels of trade-offs between simplicity and usefulness.

Linear takes a different approach to the information architecture between tasks, epics, projects, and views, and removes all of the complexity — allowing users to set it up in the way that works for them. Additionally, the team has put so much thought into making every task easy, that it’s almost impossible to get stuck. Their command bar offers accurate suggestions, they have keyboard shortcuts for everything, and there’s no "right way” to navigate across projects and tasks, they let you do it in whatever context you’re in — which saves a lot of cognitive energy.

They impressed me so much during my blind run of their onboarding flow, that I ended up moving all of my personal, work, and hobby project tasks into it. This market is known for building to optimize flexibility since project teams all tend to work a little differently. Linear built flexibility into their data structure and took a more opinionated approach to meeting true requirements — which I love to see.

2. Conduct Ruthless Market Research

It’s not enough to know your competition—you need to know what they’re doing poorly and how you can do it better. Competitive analysis isn’t just about understanding their strengths—it’s about finding gaps you can exploit.

• For Product Managers: Find out who’s talking about your competitors in the open — I recommend using Spark Toro if they are big enough to have an audience segment with data in the platform. Otherwise, search Twitter/X, look them up on G2, check their customer service forums or Github repos. Get scrappy and you can find some really helpful insights.

• For Engineers: Of course look at repos, documentation, etc. But also look at how they market to developers. What technical capabilities or features do they promote on their developer landing pages? What emails do they send after a new developer creates an account?

• For Designers: Look at usability gaps in competitor products—where are users frustrated, and how can your product delight them? What are some of the most common patterns for common user tasks/flows across competitors? Can you do it better?

3. Get Laser-Focused on Your Target Audience

Winning products don’t try to please everyone. Focus on the right customers—the ones who will help you build momentum. Understand their pain points, motivations, and what will keep them loyal.

• For Product Managers: The way you describe the problem is just as important as the way you describe the person/persona. Your team doesn’t really need to know your ICP’s life story, what they need is a clear understanding of:

  • What is their motivation or drive? What is something meaningful they are trying to accomplish that your team can understand?

  • What are the challenges preventing them from achieving that goal?

  • Why is the problem/challenge you are solving for them complex, tricky, etc.? Why do they need a solution that is better than what already exists?

    • For Example: You might say something like, “the solutions they have available aren’t built for their team. it feels like trying to trim weeds with a chainsaw, and they tend to create as many problems as they solve.”

• For Marketing: Ensure that every message resonates with your core customer and aligns with their specific pain points. The best thing you can do is talk to your customers and leverage their words/phrases to find and draw in customers just like them.

  • Pay attention to how they talk about the problem.

  • Dig into how the problem manifests in their day-to-day experiences.

  • Connect the dots between the core problem and the downstream effects.

  • Listen closely to how they describe what they wish they had.

4. Prioritize Features that Create Competitive Distance

You’re not just building features for launch—you’re building to create competitive distance. Focus on features that make your product not just good, but undeniably better than anything else out there.

• For Product Managers:

  • Prioritize high-impact features with a low time-to-value ratio. These should help the customer solve a sharp problem within the first 5-10 minutes of a user’s experience with your product.

  • Don’t worry about feature parody with competitors. If you narrowed in on the right customer and problem, there will be features that your competitors have and that your specific customer base does’t want/need.

    • For Example: Jira has the most complex roles and permissions setup I’ve ever seen in a software product. Without being dramatic, I hate it.

• For Engineers: Don’t try to build every single feature from scratch or in a way that scales immediately. Focus on your competitive advantage and look for ways to save time on everything else.

  • Look into open source projects for table stakes features that already have a set standard and don’t need to be innovated.

  • Leverage third-party tools for complex requirements that are outside of your core product’s value.

    • For example: WorkOS is a great solution for user auth and management. Building and maintaining that part of an app isn’t as simple as most people thing and it’s another potential distraction from doing the thing that makes you the best.

• For Sales: Understand the difference between features customers will expect and the ones get them excited. Start the conversation by focusing on the problem they need to solve, and come back to the boring stuff later.

Discussion Prompt: Are we building features that will give us a long-term advantage, or just keeping up with the competition?

5. Plan to Pivot

A rigid roadmap is a recipe for failure in today’s fast-changing market. Instead, adopt a scenario-based approach to your roadmap. Build for multiple outcomes and be ready to pivot based on early market feedback and key product data.

• Scenario A: If we see strong early adoption from our primary target market, we’ll prioritize Feature A for scalability. That means that in 8 weeks, we’ll have 50% or more of signups actively using the product at least once a week.

• Scenario B: If secondary segments show unexpected interest, we’ll shift to Feature B to capture that audience.

  • For example: This means that we’re acquiring and activating a higher volume and percentage from this segment when normalized to our core focus. In that scenario we will prioritize Feature B and shift our acquisition efforts to this segment to see if they will scale.

• Scenario C: If growth crawls or slows, we’ll coast on the acquisition and run a few cycles of customer research to see how we can make the product more valuable.

Discussion Prompt: Are we flexible enough in our roadmap to pivot based on early market feedback?

Time to GTM

At this point your strategy is ready to be battle-tested and you should focus on building it and getting it to market. Luckily, I wrote a pretty in-depth guide for modern GTM that you can dive into if you are still feeling knowledge-hungry.

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Have questions, feedback, or just want to say “Hi!” — hit me up on Linkedin or reach out on some other channel.