Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age

Roman Pichler

Copyright © 2016 Roman Pichler. All rights reserved.

Published by Pichler Consulting.

Editors: Rebecca Traeger; Victoria, Bill, and Carma from CreateSpace

Design: Ole H. Størksen, Roman Pichler, and Melissa Pichler

Cover photo by Ollyy/Shutterstock

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To my children, Leo, Yasmin, and Kai
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments .........................................................................................9
Preface ........................................................................................................ 11
The Big Picture: Vision, Strategy, Roadmap, and Backlog .................. 11
A Brief Guide to This Book ................................................................ 13
Part 1: Product Strategy .............................................................................. 15
Strategy Foundations .............................................................................. 16
Understand What a Product Strategy Is .............................................. 16
Think Big and Describe Your Vision .................................................. 18
Find Out How Vision, Strategy, and Tactics Relate ............................20
Let the Business Strategy Guide the Product Strategy ......................... 21
Be Clear on Your Innovation Strategy ................................................22
Take Advantage of the Product Life Cycle Model ...............................28
Capture Your Strategy with the Product Vision Board ....................... 37
Complement Your Strategy with a Business Model ............................ 39
Choose the Right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
for Your Product ......................................................................... 42
Track the Product Performance with a Product Scorecard .................. 47
Complement KPIs with Operational Metrics ...................................... 49
Engage the Stakeholders ..................................................................... 50
Review and Update the Product Strategy ............................................ 53
Strategy Development ................................................................................. 56
Segment the Market............................................................................ 56
Pick the Right Segment ....................................................................... 59
6 • • • Contents

Use Personas to Describe the Customers and Users ............................ 62

Find an Itch That’s Worth Scratching .................................................65
Clearly State the Value Your Product Creates .....................................66
Make Your Product Stand Out ...........................................................68
Eliminate Features ..............................................................................72
Offer a Great Customer Experience .................................................... 74
Build Variants and Unbundle Your Product........................................77
(Re-) Position Your Product ................................................................84
Strategy Validation .....................................................................................86
Iteratively Test and Correct Your Strategy ..........................................86
Determine the Necessary Validation Effort ........................................88
Involve the Right People ..................................................................... 89
Use Data to Make Decisions ............................................................... 91
Turn Failure into Opportunity............................................................92
Get Out of the Building ......................................................................94
Identify the Biggest Risk ..................................................................... 95
Choose the Right Validation Techniques ............................................98
Directly Observe Customers and Users ...............................................99
Carry Out Problem Interviews..........................................................100
Create Minimum Viable Products .................................................... 101
Build Spikes to Assess Technical Feasibility ...................................... 102
Pivot, Persevere, or Stop.................................................................... 103
Use Agile Techniques to Manage the Validation Work .....................104
Part 2: Product Roadmap.......................................................................... 109
Roadmap Foundations.......................................................................... 110
Why You Need a Product Roadmap ................................................. 110
Be Clear on the Different Types and
Formats of Product Roadmaps .................................................. 112
Choose the Right Roadmapping Approach ....................................... 114
Understand Who Benefits from Your Roadmap ................................ 116
Involve the Stakeholders ................................................................... 119
 Contents • • • 7

Get the Relationship between the Roadmap and

the Product Backlog Right ........................................................120
Avoid These Common Roadmapping Mistakes ................................122

Roadmap Development ........................................................................125

Make Your Product Roadmap SMART ............................................125
Take Advantage of Release Goals .....................................................126
Capture Your Roadmap with the GO Template................................128
Determine the Right Release Contents .............................................129
Get the Features on Your Roadmap Right ........................................ 131
Identify the Success Factors .............................................................. 132
Determine the Window of Opportunity ........................................... 137
Take Dependencies into Account ..................................................... 143
Make Your Roadmap Measurable .................................................... 146

Roadmap Changes................................................................................ 148

Track the Progress ............................................................................ 148
Review and Change the Roadmap .................................................... 150

Portfolio Roadmaps .............................................................................. 155

Why You Should Use a Portfolio Roadmap ...................................... 155
Plan Your Portfolio with the GO Portfolio Roadmap ....................... 156
Address These Portfolio Challenges .................................................. 157
Epilogue .................................................................................................... 159
About the Author ...................................................................................... 161
References ................................................................................................. 163
Index ......................................................................................................... 167
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the help and support
of many people. I would like to thank the attendees of my product
strategy and roadmap workshops, as well as my blog readers, for their
feedback, comments, and questions. I would also like to thank the fol-
lowing individuals for reviewing this book: Jock Busuttil, Mike Cohn,
Kerry Golding, Steve Johnson, Ben Maynard, Rich Mirnov, Stefan
Roock, Jim Siddle, and Caroline Woodhams. Special thanks to Marc
Abraham for reviewing and re-reviewing the manuscript as I changed
and rewrote sections. Thank you, Geoff Watts, for helping me come to
grips with self-publication; and thank you, Ole Størksen, for designing
the book cover and turning my sketchy images into proper graphics.
I am particularly grateful to my wife, Melissa Pichler, for all her help
and support—from reviewing the manuscript and helping me with the
graphics to listening to my ideas.
 PREFACE

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Lao Tzu

Developing a successful product is not down to luck, a stroke of ge-

nius, or just trying hard enough. While these factors are undoubt-
edly helpful, product success starts with making the right strategic
decisions. The challenge for product managers, product owners, and
other product people is that we are often so preoccupied with the
tactics—be it dealing with an urgent sales request or writing new
user stories to keep the development team busy—that we sometimes
no longer see the wood for the trees. In the worst case, we take our
product down the wrong path and end up in the wrong forest; we’ve
perfectly executed the wrong strategy and are left with a product that
underperforms or even bombs. This book will help you play a proac-
tive game, make the right strategic decisions, and use them to guide
the tactical work. It explains how to create a winning product strate-
gy and an actionable product roadmap using a wide range of proven
techniques and tools.

The Big Picture: Vision, Strategy, Roadmap, and Backlog

When you look up the meaning of the term strategy, you will prob-
ably find it defined as a plan of action to achieve a long-term goal.
While this definition makes sense, developing a successful strategy
for a product involves two steps: finding the right overall strategy
12 • • • Preface

and deciding how best to implement it. To help you focus on each
step and deal with its specific challenges, I discuss them separately
in this book and distinguish between a product strategy and a prod-
uct roadmap. The product strategy describes how the long-term goal
is attained; it includes the product’s value proposition, market, key
features, and business goals. The product roadmap shows how the
product strategy is put into action by stating specific releases with
dates, goals, and features. Figure 1 illustrates how the product strate-
gy and roadmap relate, along with their connection to the vision and
the product backlog.

PRODUCT PRODUCT PRODUCT

VISION
STRATEGY ROADMAP BACKLOG

FIGURE 1: Product Strategy and Roadmap in Context

In Figure 1, the vision describes the ultimate reason for creating

the product, the product strategy states how the vision will be realized,
and the product roadmap states how the strategy will be implement-
ed. The product backlog contains the details necessary to develop the
product as outlined in the roadmap, such as epics, user stories, and
other requirements. Note that the relationships between the elements in
Figure 1 work in both directions: the product backlog can cause chang-
es to the roadmap, for instance, which in turn may affect the strategy.
For example, if the feedback from the customers and users indicates
that the product does not adequately address their needs, or if the de-
velopment progress is slow, then this may lead to product roadmap
changes. Similarly, larger roadmap changes can cause product strategy
adjustments. And if you cannot find a valid product strategy—a strat-
egy that helps you realize the vision—then you may have to change the
vision or look for a new one.
 Preface • • • 13

A Brief Guide to This Book

This book contains two parts. Part 1 covers product strategy practic-
es, including determining a compelling value proposition, addressing
the right segment, and selecting the right key performance indicators
(KPIs). Part 2 discusses product roadmapping practices such as choos-
ing the right roadmap format, using the right planning horizon, and
reviewing the roadmap. Each practice is described in a section, and
related sections are grouped into chapters. I have done my best to write
the sections so that they can be read independently rather than requir-
ing you to read the book from the beginning to the end. I have also
tried to keep the sections as concise as possible, so you can read and
digest them easily.
Most of the examples in this book are taken from the consumer
space. The reason for this is simple: I have tried to use products that I
hope you, the reader, have heard of. But the majority of practices also
apply to business-to-business products. While virtually all examples
are either digital products or products where software plays a key part,
you can apply many of the practices to other products (although you
may have to adjust them and ignore the software-specific advice).
I have written this book specifically for product executives, prod-
uct managers, product owners, entrepreneurs, marketers, and others
who create and manage products. You will notice, however, that I use
the term product manager in the diagrams. My intention is not to ex-
clude anyone who isn’t called a product manager. Instead, I employ the
term in a generic sense to refer to the person in charge of the product,
no matter what the individual’s actual job title is. While I am aware
that product managers aren’t always in charge of the product strategy,
I believe that anyone who looks after a product and is accountable
for its success should drive the creation of both the strategy and the
roadmap.
 PART 1: PRODUCT STRATEGY

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.
Peter Drucker

The first part of this book discusses concepts, techniques, and tools
that will help you develop a winning product strategy. The practices
are grouped into three chapters: strategy foundations, development,
and validation. The foundation practices are key to achieving product
success, no matter where your product is in its life cycle. The develop-
ment practices help you create a new product and ensure the continued
success of an existing one. They include techniques such as segmenting
the market, working with personas, and bundling and unbundling the
product, all of which are described in the pages ahead. The validation
practices help you test strategy assumptions; they minimize the risk of
choosing the wrong product strategy and help you create a strategy that
is likely to be successful. While these practices are especially import-
ant for new products, they will also benefit an existing product whose
strategy needs to change—for instance, to achieve product-market fit
(PMF) or to revitalize the product to extend its life cycle.
 STRATEGY FOUNDATIONS

As its name suggests, this chapter lays the foundations for the remain-
der of the product strategy part. It contains essential strategy concepts,
techniques, and tools that will help readers who are new to the topic
get up to speed; for seasoned strategy practitioners, they provide the
opportunity to brush up their knowledge or close any gaps. Let’s start
by discussing what exactly a product strategy is.

Understand What a Product Strategy Is

What do searching on Google and booking a car on Uber have in
common? Both are common technology experiences that require
well-designed products that can handle varying loads, process com-
plex interactions, and manage huge amounts of data. To achieve this,
user stories have to be written, design sketches have to be created,
and architecture and technology decisions have to be made. While
attention to the details is necessary to create a successful product, it
is easy to get lost in them. This is where the product strategy comes
in: it helps you manage your product proactively by looking at the big
picture.
A product strategy is a high-level plan that helps you realize your
vision or overarching goal. It explains who the product is for, and why
people would want to buy and use it; what the product is, and what
makes it stands out; and what the business goals are, and why it is
worthwhile for your company to invest in it. Figure 2 illustrates the
elements of the product strategy.
 Strategy Foundations • • • 17

Mar ket
and N eeds

P R O D U CT
STR ATE G Y

K ey Featu res, Bu si ness

D ifferen tiat ors G oals

FIGURE 2 : The Elements of the Product Strategy

Let’s take a look at the three aspects captured in Figure 2: the market
and the needs, the key features and differentiators, and the business goals.
The market describes the target customers and users of your prod-
uct: the people who are likely to buy and use it. The needs comprise the
main problem your product solves or the primary benefit it provides.
Think of a product like Google Search or Bing, which solves the prob-
lem of finding information on the Internet, compared with a product
like Facebook, which provides the benefit of staying in touch with fam-
ily and friends.
The key features and differentiators are those aspects of your prod-
uct that are crucial to creating value for the customers and users and
that entice people to choose it over competing offerings. Take, for ex-
ample, the first iPhone and its key features of mobile Internet, an iP-
od-like digital-music player, and a touch screen; or the Google Chrome
browser with its focus on speed, safety, and simplicity. As these two
examples show, the point is not to list all product features in your strat-
egy—that’s done in the product backlog—but to focus on the three
to five features that influence a person’s decision to buy and use the
product.1

1 As these examples show, I view features as product capabilities. Features are bro-
ken into epics in the product backlog. You can also think of a feature as a group
of epics or a theme.
18 • • • Strategy Foundations

The business goals capture how your product is going to benefit

your company, and why it is worthwhile for the company to invest in
the product. Is it going to generate revenue, help sell another product
or service, reduce costs, or increase brand equity? Being clear on the
business goals allows you to select the right key performance indica-
tors (KPIs) to measure your product’s performance. Take the iPhone
and the Google Chrome browser mentioned earlier. While the iPhone
generates the largest portion of Apple’s revenue at the time of writing,
the Chrome browser does not earn any money for Google. But it does
allow the company to control the way people access the Internet, and
it has reduced Google’s dependency on third-party browsers such as
Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Note that a product strategy is not a fixed plan or something
you only create for a new product: it changes as your product grows
and matures. As a consequence, you should review and adjust your
product strategy on a regular basis—at least once a quarter as a rule
of thumb.

Think Big and Describe Your Vision

Because the product strategy is a high-level plan that describes how you
intend to realize your vision or overarching goal, it is helpful to begin
by capturing that vision. The vision is the ultimate reason for creating
your product; it describes the positive change the product should bring
about.

Why the Vision Matters

Having a vision is important, as creating and managing a successful
product requires a lot of time and energy. In order to be fully committed,
you have to be convinced that what you are doing is right: life is too short
to work on products you don’t believe in. On the positive side, if you are
enthusiastic about your product, then this will help you do a great job
and inspire others. Say I want to create an app that helps people become
aware of what, when, and how much they eat. My vision, then, could
 Strategy Foundations • • • 19

be to help people live more healthily; the strategy would be to create an

app that monitors their food intake in conjunction with a smart watch,
fitness band, or smart food scales. Figure 3 illustrates this relationship.

P RODU CT
VISI ON
ST RATE GY

FIGURE 3 : Vision and Product Strategy

Qualities of an Effective Vision

An effective vision has four qualities: it is big, shared, inspiring, and
concise. A big vision, such as “help people eat healthily,” increases the
chances that people will buy into it compared to a narrow one, like
“lose weight.” What’s more, it makes it easier to change the strategy
(if necessary) while keeping the vision stable. Say that it turns out that
my idea of developing a health app is ill conceived. With a big vision in
place, I can explore alternatives, such as writing a book on healthy eat-
ing or offering mindfulness classes that teach people to become aware
of their eating habits.
The beauty of a shared vision is that it motivates and unites peo-
ple: it acts as the product’s true north, facilitates collaboration, and
provides continuity in an ever-changing world.2 An inspiring vision
resonates with the people working on the product, and it provides mo-
tivation and guidance even if the going gets tough.
A concise vision, finally, is easy to communicate and understand.
To achieve this, I like to capture the vision as a slogan—a short, mem-
orable phrase such as “help people eat healthily.” A powerful exercise
is to ask the key stakeholders to formulate their visions for the product
and to share them with one another. Then look for common ground
and use it to create a big, shared, inspiring, and concise vision.

2 James Kouzes and Barry Posner (2012) describe a shared vision as one of five
core leadership practices.
20 • • • Strategy Foundations

Find Out How Vision, Strategy, and Tactics Relate

As powerful as they are, the vision and the product strategy are not
enough to create a successful product. What’s missing are the tactics—
the details required to develop a great product, including the user sto-
ries and the design sketches. Figure 4 shows how the vision guides the
product strategy and how the strategy directs the tactics.

V IS IO N

S T RA T EG Y

T A CT IC S

FIGURE 4 : Vision, Strategy, and Tactics

Without a valid product strategy—a strategy that has been vali-

dated and does not contain any significant risks—you will struggle to
discover the right product details; to create the right epics, user stories,
story maps, scenarios, design sketches, and mock-ups; and to make the
right architecture and technology decisions. If you are not clear on the
path, then how can you take the right steps?
But it’s not only the strategy that shapes the tactics. The latter also
influences the former. As you collect data about how people respond
to your product, you learn more about the customer needs and how
best to address them. This may require smaller strategy updates, but it
could also result in bigger changes, such as pivoting or sun-setting your
product: significantly changing your strategy or phasing out the prod-
uct, respectively. Think of YouTube, which pivoted from a video-dat-
ing to a video-sharing site; or take Google Buzz, a social networking,
microblogging, and messaging tool, which was taken off the market a
year after its introduction in 2010 due to its lack of success. Similarly, if
 Strategy Foundations • • • 21

you struggle to find a valid strategy, then this could indicate that your
vision is a hazy, unattainable dream that you should wake up from. Vi-
sion, strategy, and tactics hence influence one another. Table 1 provides
an overview of the three concepts, together with sample artifacts.

TABLE 1: Vision, Strategy, and Tactics

Level Description Sample Artifacts

Vision Describes the positive change the prod- Vision statement or slogan.
uct should bring about, and answers
why the product should exist. Guides
the strategy.
Strategy States the path for attaining the vision; Product strategy, product roadmap,
captures how the vision should be real- business model.
ized; directs the tactics.
Tactics Describes the steps along the way, and Product backlog, epics, user stories,
the details required to develop a suc- story maps, scenarios, interaction and
cessful product. May lead to strategy workflow diagrams, design sketches,
changes. mock-ups, architecture model.

Let the Business Strategy Guide the Product Strategy

A product is a means to an end. By benefiting its customers and users, it
should create value for your company. It is therefore important that your
product strategy supports the overall business strategy. A business strate-
gy describes how your company wants to achieve its overall objectives. It
determines, for instance, which new innovation initiatives your company
invests in, which markets you target, which role organic growth and ac-
quisitions play, and how your company sets itself apart from the compe-
tition. Take Apple and Samsung, two companies that have employed dif-
ferent business strategies in the same marketplace. At the time of writing,
Apple releases a few high-end and highly priced products while Samsung
focuses on capturing market share with a wide range of offerings. Some
companies refer to their business strategy as the company mission. When
I worked at Intel in the late 1990s, the company mission was to “be the
preeminent building block supplier to the worldwide Internet economy.”3

3 Intel’s mission statement of the year 2000.

22 • • • Strategy Foundations

To ensure that your product helps the company move in the right
direction and that your strategy receives the necessary support from
management and stakeholders, the business strategy has to direct the
product strategy, as Figure 5 shows. Similarly, your overall company
vision should influence the vision of your product.

C o m pa n y
Vis io n

P ro d u c t
Bu s in e s s Vis io n
St ra te gy

Product
S tra t e gy

FIGURE 5 : Business and Product Strategy

To put it a different way, the product vision should be in line with

the overall company vision, and the product strategy should help im-
plement the business strategy. If your business does not have an overall
strategy, or if you are unaware of what it is, then delay formulating a
product strategy until a business strategy becomes available—unless
you work for a start-up, in which case your business and product strat-
egy are likely to be identical.

Be Clear on Your Innovation Strategy

Products are value-creating vehicles. In order to generate value, a product
has to offer something new; it has to innovate to a greater or lesser ex-
tent. Innovations range from small incremental steps, such as improving
the user experience for an existing product, to big and bold ones—think
of the original iPhone, the Nintendo Wii, or the Uber taxi service. It’s im-
 Strategy Foundations • • • 23

portant to understand which innovation strategy your product executes

and which innovation type it represents, as this will shape the product
strategy. A helpful way to classify innovations is the Innovation Ambition
Matrix developed by Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff and shown in Figure 6.4
H IG H

D is rupti ve
I nno va tions
MA R K E T N E W N E SS

A dja cent
I nno va tions

C ore
I nno va tions
LOW

LOW PR O D U C T NEW NE SS H IG H

FIGURE 6 : The Innovation Ambition Matrix

The matrix in Figure 6 considers the newness of the product on the

horizontal axis and the newness of the market on the vertical axis. This
allows us to distinguish three different innovation types: core, adjacent,
and disruptive.5

4 Note that I use the term disruptive instead of transformational, which Nagji and
Tuff (2012) employed. Some people use incremental instead of core, evolution-
ary for adjacent, and revolutionary or breakthrough for disruptive.
5 The Innovation Ambition Matrix is based on the Ansoff matrix, which explores
the relationship between the product and the market; it distinguishes an existing
product from a new product and an existing market from a new one. This gives
rise to four growth strategies: market penetration, product development, market
development, and diversification. Market penetration means incrementally en-
hancing an existing product to increase its market share. Product development
involves creating a new product for an existing market—a market you already
serve. Market development refers to entering a market that’s new to your com-
pany with an existing product. Diversification implies developing a new product
for a new market (Ansoff, 1957).
24 • • • Strategy Foundations

Core Innovations
Core innovations optimize existing products for established markets;
they draw on the skills and assets your company already has in place,
and they make incremental changes to current products. These initia-
tives are core to your business, as they generate today’s revenues. Most
of your company’s products are likely to belong to this category (unless
you work for a start-up). Examples of core innovations include Micro-
soft’s Windows operating system and the Office suite. Both are major
revenue sources for the company. The longer-term growth potential
of core products is low, and so is the amount of risk and uncertainty
present. Your ability to create a reliable financial forecast or business
case is high due to your in-depth knowledge of the market and the
product. Because core products leverage existing assets, a conservative
attitude is appropriate. You should aim to protect the product, focus on
operational excellence, avoid mistakes, optimize the existing business
model, and use proven technologies—unless you decide to make a big-
ger change to your product, such as taking it to a new market, which
would turn it into an adjacent innovation.

Adjacent Innovations
Adjacent innovations involve leveraging something your company does
well into a new space—for example, taking an existing product to a
market that’s new to the company or creating a new product for an
existing market. Examples of the former include Microsoft entering the
server market with Windows NT in 1993 and Facebook moving into
the online payment space with its Messenger application.6 Examples of
the latter include the Apple TV and Google’s Chrome browser. Both
companies entered an existing market (TV set-top boxes and web
browsers, respectively) with a new product. Adjacent innovations al-
low you to open up new revenue sources, but they require fresh insights

6 Facebook added a “send money” feature to its Messenger product in March

2015. For more information, see http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/03/send-
money-to-friends-in-messenger/
 Strategy Foundations • • • 25

into customer needs, demand trends, market structure, competitive dy-

namics, technologies, and other market variables. You may also have
to acquire new skills, use new technologies, and adapt an existing busi-
ness model. The amount of risk and uncertainty present is therefore
considerably higher than in core innovations. It consequently requires
more time to develop a valid product strategy, and it becomes difficult
to create a reliable financial forecast. To succeed with adjacent inno-
vation, you should adopt an inquisitive attitude, be willing to take in-
formed risks, and have the ability to make mistakes and fail. You will
benefit from having a dedicated, collocated product team that is loosely
coupled to the rest of the organization and that applies agile and lean
product development practices.

Disruptive Innovations
Core and adjacent innovations provide you with the benefit of lever-
aging existing skills and assets, both intellectual and material. This
makes the challenge of innovating successfully manageable.7 Unfor-
tunately, such innovations also share a significant disadvantage: they
address an existing market, and their growth prospects are limited
by your ability to grow the market and capture more market share—
that is, to attract more customers and users. In order to experience
higher long-term growth, your company should invest in disruptive
innovations. Apple, for instance, disrupted the mobile-phone market
with the iPhone by offering a product with superior usability, as well
as better design and better mobile Internet; Nintendo disrupted the
games-console market with its Wii, which could be used without a
traditional control or keyboard and was offered at a lower price; Am-
azon disrupted the retail book market with its online platform, mak-
ing it easier and more convenient for consumers to shop, and offering
greater choice and lower prices. While disruptive products often use
disruptive technologies—for example, the touch screen in the case

7 C. M. Christensen (1997) refers to core and adjacent innovations as sustaining,

as they address established markets and build on existing assets.
26 • • • Strategy Foundations

of the iPhone, and the Internet in the case of Amazon—a disruptive

technology does not necessarily create a disruptive innovation. In-
stead, a disruptive innovation typically solves a customer problem in
a better, more convenient, or cheaper way than existing alternatives.
A disruptive product also creates a new market by addressing non-
consumption: it attracts people who did not take advantage of similar
products. But as the disruptive product matures, it makes inroads into
an established market, reconstructs market boundaries, and disrupts
the market. Take the iPhone as an example. The incumbents, includ-
ing Nokia and BlackBerry, did not perceive the original iPhone to be
a threat; its business features, such as e-mail integration, were too
weak. But as the iPhone improved and offered an increasing range of
business and productivity apps, more and more people began to use
the product, and the market share of Nokia and BlackBerry phones
started to decline. The first iPhone also removed the traditional dis-
tinction between business and consumer segments, thereby changing
the market boundaries.
While disruptive innovations are crucial for enabling future growth
and securing the long-term prosperity of your business, most estab-
lished companies struggle to leverage such innovations effectively. To
achieve disruption and to do different things, a company has to do
things differently and therefore disrupt itself—at least to a certain ex-
tent. It has to discontinue some of the practices that have helped it
succeed in its established markets, acquire new skills, find new business
models, and often embrace—and in some cases develop—new technol-
ogies, such as the touch screen for the iPhone and the motion controller
for the Wii. The effort to create a valid product strategy is significantly
higher than for adjacent innovations; it may take you several months to
find a product that is beneficial, technically feasible, and economically
viable.
 Strategy Foundations • • • 27

Succeeding with disruptive innovations requires an entrepreneurial

mind-set and the ability to experiment, to make mistakes, and to fail.
You will benefit from using an incubator: a new, temporary business
unit that provides the necessary autonomy to think outside the box,
break with traditions, and to iterate and fail quickly. Having a small,
collocated team with full-time members is a must, as is employing
agile and lean product development practices. Be aware that creating
a reliable financial forecast is impossible for disruptive innovations.
Requiring a solid business case can prevent you from creating disruptive
products. It’s often better to use the risk of inaction—the danger of not
investing in a disruptive product and therefore losing out on future
revenue and profits.8

Summary
Table 2 summarizes the three innovation types; it shows that you
should adopt different practices and manage products differently de-
pending on their innovation types.
Note that over time, successful disruptive and adjacent products
turn into core ones. A good example is the iPhone. While the first ver-
sion was a disruptive innovation, it has become a major revenue source
for Apple. But you can also move a core product into the adjacent space
by taking it to a new market. Think of the iPhone 5C, which was aimed
at a younger audience and emergent markets. The bottom line is: to
grow organically, companies have to continually look for new growth
opportunities and invest in adjacent and disruptive products—the
products that generate tomorrow’s cash.

8 Nagji and Tuff (2012) recommend that companies should invest at least 10 per-
cent in disruptive innovations.
28 • • • Strategy Foundations

TABLE 2 : The Three Innovation Types and Their Impact

Areas Core Innovation Adjacent Innovation Disruptive Innovation

Product Optimize an existing Create a new product Create both a new
product for an estab- for an existing market, product and a new
lished market. or take an existing prod- market.
uct to a market that’s
new to the company.
Growth Potential Low Medium High
and Risk
Attitude Conservative—pro- Inquisitive—take in- Entrepreneurial—cre-
tect existing assets, formed risks; look for ate new assets, devel-
focus on operational new growth opportu- op new skills, and find
excellence; avoid mis- nities while leveraging a valid business mod-
takes; optimize exist- existing skills, assets, el. Mistakes and fail-
ing business models. and business models. ure are unavoidable.
Organization Business as usual; Dedicated, collocated Incubator with a small,
matrix organization. product team that is full-time product team
loosely coupled to the that is autonomous
rest of the organization. and collocated.
Technologies Proven technologies; New technologies may New, disruptive tech-
changes usually result be necessary to gain a nologies are likely to
in incremental im- competitive advantage. be required.
provements.
Research and Low (hours to days) Medium (weeks) High (months)
Validation Effort
Reliable Financial Possible Difficult to create Impossible to create
Forecast

Take Advantage of the Product Life Cycle Model

The purpose of the product strategy is to maximize the chances of
achieving product success: to ensure that your product grows and pros-
pers. A helpful model to understand how products develop over time
is the product life cycle. The idea behind the life cycle model is simple.
Like a living being, a product is born or launched; it then develops,
grows, and matures. At some point it declines, and eventually the prod-
uct dies and is taken off the market, as Figure 7 shows.9

9 Theodore Levitt (1965) first described the product life cycle model in his article
“Exploit the Product Life Cycle.” You can find a comprehensive discussion of the
product life cycle in Baker and Hart (2007).
 Strategy Foundations • • • 29

The product life cycle model in Figure 7 presents five stages: devel-
opment, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. I have also added
three important events in the life of a product: launch, when the product
first becomes available; achieving product-market fit (PMF), when your
product is ready to serve the mainstream market; and end of life, when
you decide to discontinue your product. Of the five stages, growth and
maturity are the most attractive ones, as they provide you with the big-
gest business benefits. For revenue-generating products, your product
should become profitable around PMF, and it should offer the highest
profit margin in maturity. You should therefore aim to get your product
into the growth stage quickly, and to keep it there for as long as you can.
B U SIN E SS BE N E F IT S

Development

Introduction

Maturity
Growth

Decline

TIME

Launch Product- End of

Market Fit Life

FIGURE 7: The Product Life Cycle Model

While the curve in Figure 7 is roughly bell-shaped, your product’s

actual trajectory may differ significantly: it may be steeper or flatter.
This demonstrates that the life cycle model is not a predictive tool that
forecasts the business benefits your product will generate. Instead, it
is a sense-making model that helps you reflect on how your product is
doing so you can make the right strategic decisions. In order to leverage
the product life cycle model, you have to define the business benefits
your product delivers and then track them over time. For revenue-gen-
erating products, for example, revenue is commonly used, but if your
30 • • • Strategy Foundations

product exists to sell another product or service, then the number of

active users might be the appropriate metric to track.
As an example let’s take a look at a sample product life cycle curve.
Figure 8 illustrates the life cycle of the iPod family by showing iPod
sales per year.

60,000,000

45,000,000

30,000,000

15,000,000

0
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Introduction Growth Maturity Decline

FIGURE 8 : The Life Cycle of the iPod Family10

As Figure 8 shows, the iPod was launched in 2001 as Apple’s first con-
sumer music gadget. The company was a new entrant in the digital-mu-
sic-player market, which at the time was dominated by products like
the Nomad Jukebox from Creative Labs. In 2002, the iPod became
Windows-compatible, and sales subsequently reached 600,000 units.
In the following year, Apple launched iTunes, which helped sell more
than 900,000 units in 2003 and nearly 4.5 million in 2004. The iPod
had entered the growth stage and become the dominant digital-music
player in the United States. To sustain growth, Apple enhanced the
product and added new features, for instance, the ability to show pho-
tos and videos. The company also introduced new product variants,

10 The sources for the data shown in the graph include

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AIpod_sales_per_quarter.svg
• statista.com/statistics/276307/global-apple-ipod-sales-since-fiscal-year-2006/
• apple.com/pr/products/ipodhistory/.
 Strategy Foundations • • • 31

such as the iPod Nano and iPod shuffle in 2005 and the iPod Touch
in 2007. Additionally, Apple issued a number of limited iPod editions,
including a black-and-red U2 special edition. Sales of the iPod reached
their peak in 2008, which also marked the product’s maturity stage. In
2009, iPod sales started to decline. As a consequence, Apple discontin-
ued the original iPod, now called the iPod Classic, in 2014.

Development
Let’s now look at the individual life cycle stages and how they influ-
ence the product strategy. Before the launch your primary goal is to
find a valid product strategy—a strategy that results in a product that
is beneficial, feasible, and economically viable.11 In this period you
are likely to carry out some research and validation work, and you
may have to pivot—that is, to significantly change your strategy and
choose a different path for attaining your vision. Take, for example,
the idea mentioned earlier of creating a healthy-eating app. If it turns
out that building an app is not a valid approach, I could pivot and
choose to write a book on healthy eating instead.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to launch the perfect product.
No product is impeccable from day one. Even iconic products like the
iPhone had a comparatively humble start. Think of all the things the
very first iPhone could not do: no videos, no copy and paste, and no
third-party apps—just to name just a few. The trick is therefore to
launch a good-enough product, a product that does a good job of meet-
ing the primary customer need, and to subsequently adapt and enhance
it. How good your initial product has to be is closely linked with its
innovation type. The initial version of a disruptive product can be com-
paratively basic, like the original iPhone. An adjacent product, howev-
er, faces higher customer expectations, as it addresses an established
market where the customers have viable alternatives to choose from.
Take the Google Chrome browser as an example. When the product
was launched in 2008, the company entered an existing market with a

11 Ries (2011) calls such a strategy a validated strategy.

32 • • • Strategy Foundations

number of established products, including Internet Explorer, Firefox,

Opera, and Safari. In order to succeed, Google had to offer a product
that was faster, more secure, and simpler to use than the competing
browsers. The company also heavily advertised its product, for instance
by using poster ads at train stations in London.

Introduction
After the launch your objective is to achieve PMF and to experience
growth as quickly as possible. How long this is likely to take you and how
much effort it will require, depends on your product’s innovation type.
Building an initial customer base and finding out if and how people use
the product is particularly important for disruptive innovations. Take
Twitter as an example. The company had to discover how people used
the product to decide how to move it forward, as Twitter’s cofounder
Ev Williams explains: “With Twitter, it wasn’t clear what it was…
Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning,
which we described as status updates and a social utility. The insight we
eventually came to was [that] Twitter was really more of an information
network than it is a social network. That led to all kinds of design
decisions, such as the inclusion of search and hash tags and the way
retweets work” (Lapowsky 2013). Adjacent products, however, tend to
require a shorter introduction stage, as they address an existing market
and compete with established products. You can therefore usually learn
about the customer and user needs and how best to address them during
the research and validation work you do in the development stage.
With both disruptive and adjacent products, make sure you track
the product performance and monitor how your product’s business
benefits develop. If they are flat or rise only slowly, then you should
investigate why the uptake is poor. Consider changing your product,
or even killing it. The former may entail enhancing or adding features,
or it can require a more drastic change, such as pivoting or unbundling
the product. Flickr, for example, changed from an online role-playing
game to a photo-sharing website; YouTube evolved from a video-dating
site to a video-sharing product (Love 2011). While killing your product
 Strategy Foundations • • • 33

may sound rather drastic, it frees up resources and avoids investing

time, money, and energy on a product that is not going to be success-
ful. Take, for instance, Google Wave, a product that combined e-mail,
instant messaging, and wikis. Due to its lack of success, Wave was
discontinued at the introduction stage about a year after its launch in
2009.12 Remember that failure is part and parcel of the innovation pro-
cess; there is no guarantee that your product will make it to the growth
stage and become a success.
If you see a positive market response to your newly launched prod-
uct, then don’t make the mistake of overoptimizing your product for
the early market. The initial customers and users of a new tech product
are usually happy to put up with a few teething issues as long as they
will gain an advantage from using it. To get into the mainstream mar-
ket, you have to satisfy much higher expectations; you have to provide
a product that works flawlessly and is easy to obtain, install, and up-
date. As a consequence, the transition to the growth stage may not be a
small, incremental step. Instead, your product may face a gap or chasm
between the early and the mainstream market that you have to over-
come (Moore 2006). Figure 9 shows the product life cycle with such a
chasm between the introduction and the growth stage.
BU SI N E SS B E N E F I T S

Chasm Mainstream
market
Early
market

T IME

FIGURE 9 : The Product Life Cycle with Chasm

12 Google has released most of Wave’s source code to the Apache Software Founda-
tion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave and http://incubator.apache.
org/wave/about.html.
34 • • • Strategy Foundations

To bridge the chasm, you have to adapt and improve your product.
This may include enhancing the user experience, adding or improving
features, or refactoring the architecture to increase performance and
stability.13 In addition, you may have to adjust the business model and
revisit, for example, the cost of acquiring customers and the marketing
and sales channels you use. The size of the chasm is influenced by your
product’s innovation type. While the initial version of a disruptive
product can be simpler and more basic than an adjacent one, it tends to
require more time and effort to achieve PMF and experience growth. An
adjacent product usually faces a smaller gap between the introduction
and the growth stage, as the initial expectations for the product are
typically higher.

Growth
Once you start to experience significant growth, you have achieved
PMF. You should now have a product that fits the market and does a
good job of creating value for the mainstream customers and users and
for your business.14 For a revenue-generating product, you should have
reached the break-even point by now and should be benefiting from a
positive cash flow. Your strategy now needs to focus on penetrating the
market, sustaining the growth, and fending off competitors. Therefore,
you have to find ways to attract more customers and users and clearly
differentiate your product, since competitors may start to copy some
of its features. At the same time, you have to manage the growth and
deal with a product that serves an ever-growing audience, is becoming
increasingly feature-rich, and requires more and more people to devel-
op it. You may want to start unbundling your product and promote

13 An architecture refactoring is a larger refactoring exercise that addresses not

only individual classes and methods, but also the overall structure of a software
product. While class-level refactoring should be part of the normal development
work, architecture refactoring often requires a dedicated effort, such as a whole
sprint or even an entire release.
14 Downes and Nunes (2013) suggest that certain disruptions only have two cus-
tomer groups: trial users and the vast majority. The former roughly correspond
to the early market and the latter to the mainstream market.
 Strategy Foundations • • • 35

features to products in their own right, or you could employ product

variants. (I explain both techniques later in this part.)

Maturity, Life Cycle Extension, and Decline

As your product matures, growth will eventually start to stagnate.
When this happens, you face an important strategic inflection point.
One option is to accept your product’s trajectory, let it continue to
mature, and keep it at this stage for as long as possible by, for instance,
defending its market share and reducing cost. Alternatively, you can
move the product back into the growth stage thereby extending its life
cycle, as Figure 10 shows.15

Life Cycle
B US IN E SS B E N E F IT S

Extension

T I ME
Introduction Growth Maturity Decline

FIGURE 10 : Extending the Product Life Cycle

A number of techniques can help you make an aging product attractive

again including enhancing its capabilities and adding new features. Take
the iPod Classic mentioned earlier. Apple made considerable changes to the
product throughout its life cycle: it decreased its weight, extended the bat-
tery life, and added the ability to view photos and watch videos, to name
just a few. Sometimes, though, the opposite strategy is more appropriate,
and instead of adding you may want to remove features and declutter your
product. Microsoft Word is another example. Microsoft has made signif-
icant efforts to simplify the application in recent years, thereby improving

15 Moon (2005) argues that the product life cycle does not have to be linear, and
that rejuvenating the product can be a great option.
36 • • • Strategy Foundations

the user experience and making it easier for people to use the product. An-
other way to stimulate growth is to take your product to a new market or
market segment, thereby turning it into an adjacent innovation. Apple, for
example, introduced the iPhone 5C in 2013 to target a younger audience
and emerging markets. Finally, you might consider bundling your prod-
uct with other offerings to increase its attractiveness. For instance, mobile
operators in the United Kingdom have started to offer free streaming sub-
scriptions when customers purchase higher-priced contracts.
Despite your best efforts, your product will one day reach the de-
cline stage. During this stage, you want to milk it for long as you can
while minimizing the investment that goes into the product. As the
profits it generates start dropping, you should consider discontinuing
it—just as Apple did with the iPod Classic in 2014.

Summary
Table 3 summarizes how the life cycle stages shape the product strategy.

TABLE 3 : The Product Life Cycle and the Product Strategy

Life Cycle Stage Strategy

Development Develop a valid strategy: a strategy that results in a product that is bene-
ficial, feasible, and economically viable.
Introduction Adapt and improve your product to achieve product-market fit (PMF).
This may require incremental changes such as improving the customer
experience, adding new features, and refactoring the architecture. But it
may also make a more drastic change or pivot necessary. Aim to achieve
the break-even point for a revenue-generating product by the end of this
stage. Ensure that your business model is scalable.
Growth Sustain the growth by penetrating the market and fending off competi-
tors. Keep your product attractive, and refine it. Manage the growth by
unbundling your product or by creating variants, for instance. Ensure
that your product is profitable (if it is meant to generate revenue).
Maturity As growth stagnates, extend the life cycle and revive growth by taking
the product to a new market, for example, or bundling it with another
product or service. Alternatively, milk your product by serving the late
majority. Defend its market share and focus on profitability for reve-
nue-generating products.
Decline Reduce cost to keep the product profitable for as long as possible, then
start phasing it out.
 Strategy Foundations • • • 37

As Table 3 shows, the strategy for a new product should first help you get
to launch, then to achieve PMF, and then to sustain the growth. Once the
growth starts to stagnate, you have reached an important strategic inflec-
tion point: You either revitalize your product, for instance, by taking it to
a new market, or you let it mature and eventually decline and die. As you
have probably noticed, the strategic work does not end until you discon-
tinue your product. You should therefore regularly assess your product’s
performance and adjust your strategy accordingly. Strategy and execution
go hand in hand for digital products. They are two sides of the same coin.

Capture Your Strategy with the Product Vision Board

Even the best strategy is useless if you can’t communicate it effectively.
The Product Vision Board is a simple yet powerful tool that helps you
with this. I have designed it to describe, communicate, test, correct, and
refine the product strategy.
The Product Vision Board consists of the five sections shown in
Figure 11. The top section captures the vision; the bottom four sections
describe the product strategy.

V IS IO N
What is your vision, your overarching goal
for creating the product?

T AR GE T NE E D S PR OD U C T BU S IN ES S
G R OU P G O AL S
Which market or What problem does What product is it? How will the
market segment the product solve? product benefit
does the product What makes it the company?
address? Which benefit does special?
it provide? What are the
Who are the Is it feasible to business goals?
target customers develop it?
and users?

FIGURE 11: The Product Vision Board

38 • • • Strategy Foundations

The top section in Figure 11 is called Vision. It captures your overar-

ching goal, which is expressed as a brief vision statement or slogan.
The leftmost bottom section is called Target Group. It describes your
market or market segment, the customers, and the users. The next
section is called Needs, which states the value the product creates for
your target group, the problem that the product solves, or the benefit it
provides. The Product section captures the actual product; it explains
what makes your product special and why it stands out. It also asks
whether it is feasible for your organization to develop the product. The
last section, titled Business Goals, captures the desired business bene-
fits—the value the product should create for your company. Examples
include opening up a new revenue source, achieving a profitability tar-
get, reducing cost, or being able to provide a service or sell another
product. There is also an extended version of the Product Vision Board
with additional sections to capture the business model, which I discuss
below.
When you create your Product Vision Board, start with your vi-
sion, and then describe your strategy by filling in the bottom sections.
You can use the Product Vision Board to describe the vision and strat-
egy for a brand-new product or for an existing one. In the latter case,
you may want to invite the stakeholders and ask them to create their
personal Product Vision Boards. Then compare the results and see
whether there is a shared vision and a shared product strategy; if not,
determine where the main differences are and decide how to address
them.
You can download the Product Vision Board template from my
website, www.romanpichler.com, where you can also find more infor-
mation about the tool. Alternatively, you may choose to re-create it
using your favorite tool—be it an electronic spreadsheet or a white-
board. A number of other tools are also available to capture the prod-
uct strategy, of course, including the Lean Canvas (Maurya 2012) and
the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder and Pigneur 2010). Choose
the one that works best for you.