How to Crack Your Product Strategy | Jackie Bavaro (best-selling PM author)

so the first part is your vision and this is where you want to go this is your inspiring view of the future but this is what you're using to like motivate your team and say like imagine like 3 years from now and how amazing it's going to be the next part of the strategy is I call the Strategic framework this could be your strategy document and this is where you lay out like what's the market we're going after who are the customers or the users that we're trying to win and what does it take to win them and then the third part is the road map and this is your strategic road map it's a kind of different a little bit different than a backlog because your strategic road map is your timeline of like what you're going to do when and what you do is instead of working forward you're working backwards and that's the wakeup call that you need to hire more people or cut down your plan um or work faster or do whatever it takes to get onto a good path my guest today is Jackie Bavaro author of cracking the PM career and cracking the PM interview two of the most popular books on product management out there Jackie was also head of pm at AA I spoke to Jackie about how to be more strategic how to define a great vision and strategy for your team and how to communicate your strategy to the rest of the company you know there's so many misconceptions about strategy but Jackie makes everything Crystal Clear consider subscribing for more great interviews every week all right Jackie welcome when was skting 2 p. m. I read your kraak into to PM interview book and I haven't read your cracking to PM career book but I'm going TR I get on to that but yeah I'm sure you've helped like thousands of people getting his profession and you started a newsletter recently and you started writing about I really loved reading that blog post about strategy and you have of course also taught a course about strategy so yeah so I would love to talk to you about that today yeah that'll be really exciting and yeah I've got the new book is the career one and you see how thick it is yeah kind of what inspired me to start my substack is I was like look this is gigantic and maybe I just need to get some of the most important ideas out there so that people will actually see them if they don't have the patience to get through all that yeah exactly you probably have like two years of newsletter material in that book so it's yeah so let's talk about strategy right it's kind of this like nebulous term maybe you can start by sharing like a personal example of why strategy important and kind of like how you learn about the stuff the hard way if yeah so I was really lucky that early in my career I started at Microsoft I was there for a few years and then I went over to Google and I was there for a few years and the companies are so different and so I really got to sort of compare and contrast and that's kind of what helped me get a bigger picture on some of these things like strategy and Microsoft is very structured about strategy and I was in the office division that had really great strategy lots of great like purposeful intent and communication and I like really saw how all the pieces kind of connected together to this bigger picture then I

went to Google and Google is not the same kind of culture around strategy and when I joined as an APM I joined on the Google data apis team and that is part of was part of Google's sort of developer group so I was there sitting next to the people who were the person who was the PM for app Google app engine which was like the early version of Google cloud and some people that worked on developer tools and things like that and we didn't I would say that we did not really have a strategy we had I think a mission so sometimes we'd say like hey why do our teams exist why is Google paying us to do this work and the answer we got was well Google makes money on search the more people search the more money Google makes and the better the internet is the more people will search so we can get more good websites out there and make the internet better especially the open internet as opposed to you know Facebook which is kind of closed and locked down and Google can't search the better we make the open internet the better it will be for Google so there was a Mission there was some purpose but that's as deep as it got we didn't have long strategy discussions we didn't get giant strategy documents we didn't get Vision presentations about like here's what the future of the world will look like when all of this is done yeah so we just plotted ahead doing stuff and I at the time I mostly prioritized things I saw my role mostly as I'm surrounded by these really smart Engineers um and some other people like um developer support and things like that and my job is to help them launch the things they want to launch so I was like they had a very clear list of like this is what we want to do next and I was like yep I'll help you get that done but it was really execution mode and what was really an interesting learning for me is that I got kind of actually like really a two-step approach to seeing kind of how important strategy can be the first is that the PM who took over the team after me did more of a big picture vision and he looked at the team we were building these like the infrastructure for the apis like the calendar API and the contacts API and things like this and he said look this entire infrastructure is too complicated to use we need to one switch it over to be much simpler and two what if it's not just you know Google products that could use this but what if we make it gigantically broadly available for anybody on the internet who wants to create apis like this so he had like a much bigger picture vision and when I heard that I was like oh wow it like never even occurred to me to think that big so that was like a first aha but now looking back at it a few years later I realized that at the time Amazon web services was had started but it wasn't this giant Behemoth that it is today and so Amazon web services is a huge Money Maker for Amazon it's not just like let's make the internet better it's like look we can provide the operating system for the internet and take a small cut of that and enable and that does eventually enable a lot more sites and this line of reasoning the idea of making Google Cloud a money maker making app engine it's something people paid for the idea of using it to support this vision these big websites was just not on our radar at all it was all about like tiny little developers who are starting a new company who might want to build on this like really kind of unique and bespoke infrastructure so it was just this aha moment of you know the team hadn't even taken that step back and had that deep discussion and looked out in the world to see what are the options for our strategy what could the best strategy be and just didn't take strategy so seriously and miss this huge opportunity that's kind of like the beginning of Google Cloud right or like I guess it could have been yeah got it okay so I guess let's start from the basics like you know like can you walk us through the Three core components of a prodct strategy just like at a high level yeah and so these three components

are sort of how I see strategy and the reason I have them is because there was no definition of strategy and I found that a lot of people who would talk about what is strategy would just be missing one of them and you'd get miscommunication because somebody would think they had a strategy and the other person wouldn't so it's totally fine to break down your view of strategy in a different way but if you do cover all three of these then you'll have a complete strategy that works for everyone so the first part is your vision and this is where you want to go this is your inspiring view of the future we can get into examples later if you want but this is what you're using to like motivate your team and say like imagine like three years from now and how amazing it's going to be our product was wildly successful and here's what people's lives look like here's how the lives and our users and our customers are and look at how exciting there are don't you want to go there with me the next part of the strategy is I call the Strategic framework this could be your strategy document and this is where you lay out like who are what's the market we're going after who are the customers or the users that we're trying to win and what does it take to win them what are the principles we need what are the themes that we're going to go after what are the product pillars what are all the different components we think it takes to make so that we actually can win the market and have a successful product okay and then the third part is the road map and this is your strategic road map it's a kind of different a little bit different than a backlog because your strategic road map is your timeline of like what you're going to do when and what you do is instead of working forward you're working backwards so you're saying great want to achieve my vision in three years let's work backwards and say what does that mean we'd have to do two years from now and one year from now let's let see does it all fit in and almost 100% of the time the answer is no it does not all fit in and that's the wakeup call that you need to hire more people or cut down your plan um or work faster or do whatever it takes to get on to a good path got it okay got it yeah so it's more like a road map for like you know a couple years as opposed to like couple quarters right it's kind of it's a couple of years and it's not a commitment it's not an actual plan it's not saying I know we're going to do a b c d it's saying hey is there any way we could achieve our vision and does it in a way that fits so say like hey at least one option is ABC D seems like it could potentially get us to a good future like okay we can go ahead um and start with a and then re-evaluate as opposed to saying you never looked at it at all and you realize that at our current Pace we're gonna in three years we will have almost nothing important built and we won't have made any substantial progress towards our vision and so then you've had three of people working really hard and they don't have much to show for they haven't had the impact on the world that they wanted to have got it okay got it so yeah so that's a great framework and you know other people have like other Frameworks but I think like personal opinion like more important Frameworks is just like knowing the market and knowing what the hell's going on so I guess for the PMS out there like when do you think they're actually ready to start thinking about product strategy or how do they balance with like understanding you know what's going on yeah really good question and I

think that usually the timing is around 6 months it might be a little bit earlier if you're more senior but the there's a bunch of stuff that you kind of want to do before then so you want to have like really you want to start by diving really deep into the users and the product and the company I think that like at a very bare minimum you should have had like an actual personal conversation with at least 10 of your users or potential users and the number we're going for is enough that you're going to start to see patterns so if you're a new if you get hired into a company and your first thing you're supposed to do is launch a feature as part of launching that feature you're going to be talking to customers you're going to mostly be trying to learn what you need to know for that feature but you'll also be seeing other things at the same time it's you're going to start noticing these patterns noticing other problems that come up you'll spent that time also looking at your data getting to see like what do your stats do are any numbers like surprisingly high or are there any like weird usage patterns and you'll just really kind of start to understand how your product fits into people's lives and then the other thing that you'll get a chance to do during that time is also getting to understand how your company Works getting to know the people who are involved What's the culture like what's the planning timeline like is there a time when strategic decisions are made and then are they kind of locked down for a little bit of time and once you have all of those things then you sort of have enough to start building a strategy got it okay got it yeah so let's cover each piece of it that a little bit deeper so you I've been a PM for like many years and like I still sometimes get confus between what a mission is and what a vision is like do you have any perspective on that or can it be combined to one yeah so they can sometimes be combined in one and I think especially in consumer companies you might get them like a little bit more combined into one so your mission is sort of your purpose it's like the reason why we're doing this and like I think a lot of companies do kind of especially in the consumer space start to like blur them but like Microsoft's mission was like enable all humans to realize their full potential right that's like a purpose but it doesn't give you a picture of what that means that they're going to do and I think that a good Vision gives you a picture of this future so realize your full potential could mean absolutely anything there's not like some shared thing that pops into our head but a vision where you say like okay imagine you wake up in the morning and you check your dashboard and it's automatically highlighted the five most important things for you to work on today there might be parts of it that seem a little bit magical but it's got the concrete details that tie into the real pains that resonate with you so that you're like ah yes I can imagine what this future looks like to an extent that it feels inspiring and believable yeah that makes sense yeah and what are some great ways to bring the vision to life that you seeing like is it just writing like a description of the user experience or like getting a designer to help on this stuff or yeah

definitely working at if you're doing a like one for depending on your size but working with your designer is a great idea and there's like a few different ways so I really like to have narrative Visions so what I mean by that is you kind of start with like so and so imagine so and so they wake up in the morning they do this really kind of tying the pieces together talking about like a day in the life of a person yes so that you kind of have like pushed yourself forward into the future the other thing I think can be really helpful is think about infomercials because infomercials do a really good job of sort of building up this problem that it's like so hard to open you know jars you're like oh no and then they say but there's a better way and then they introduce their new product and you see it you see how happy people are using it like it really it ties into that emotional resonance which I think is so important I see yeah and yeah that makes and how do you know when you have a good Vision like you know like when you see the fire in your team's eyes or something or yeah exactly yeah you just because people are excited it's it like you can't be sure that the vision is good but so much of the time people's vision is just is kind of me blle if you tell people you can tell your co-workers you can tell potential people you're trying to recruit to your team you can talk to your customers about it and you want people to say like yes I want that I want to get there like how soon can we have it like yes I want to join your company and work on that you like at the minimum you need that level of excitement because that's the sign that all of this effort will get you somewhere that's worth it because imagine you work for three years on a vision that no one's excited about people get to that future and they're not that happy that they got there yeah yeah totally yeah do you have a good example of like a V vision from any other company or yeah so a our vision was about this idea like early on days it's changed since then but we had ideas of like a as your team brain and that the same way that like your human brain when I'm playing the guitar it helps my left and right hands work together effortlessly your team brain is going to help all of the teams at your company work together effortlessly be aware of what everybody else is doing and so you kind of say like hey can you imagine this future where you come into work every day you know exactly what you're going to be working on because it's been live updated and you know as you're checking off tasks on your personal to-do list it's updating this centralized source of Truth so that everybody's working off of the current state and Nobody ends up working on the wrong thing and you don't have to spend as much time keeping everybody updated and you can avoid all that like endless work about work and status update meetings yeah I love that because I mean I'm assuming I'm like the Target customer for and like it's not only inspiring but it's also like a real problem right like when I'm new to a team I have no clue what other people are thinking just Tak a lot of work and documentation so yeah that's awesome okay so like how about the next piece in terms of the Strategic framework I think you have like three separate sub pieces of that or something yeah and this is an area that yeah so there's basically there's going to be like who is your

target audience and like what does it take to win them so certainly making sure that you've gotten really crisp on who your target market is like who are the users and then how are you going to win them there's sort of two parts to the how it's you know are there do you have a philosophy on like where your areas of investment are going to have to be so I usually call those the product pillars and so that's you know the parts of your product that you think are going to have to get better in the future to achieve that vision and then you've got your strategic principles and those are the things you believe are super important to achieve the vision but they are they're not necessarily like I'm Staffing a team to build this it's more like how I think about problems and resolve tough tradeoffs so for example security is more important than stability is one that we had at a which was you know kind of straightforward but if there was a security breach we would take the site down yeah and stability is more important than performance but performance is more important than features so this was sort of a principle it wasn't like a specific staff team but it was a way that we thought about the relative trade-offs between teams it's like helping you make decisions every day right basically yes and I'm a really strong believer that if your job as a product manager is tough if your constantly getting into uh debates with people about what feature to launch or how to build it or you and your designer can't agree on something whenever you get into these like repeated disagreements it's very often because you're missing a strategic principle that you need or it could be like a design principle or product principle that you need so for example at a we got into one of these types of repeated disagreements we got into was whether to opt to design the product in a way that optimized for people at really small companies or to optimize it for people at really large companies because if you're at a large company I can assume you have your own email domain you probably have some sort of single sign on service the information architecture and finding things going to be really important and you'll make different decisions than if you're really trying to help like the new twers startup that's still working off of their Gmail addresses yeah so just adding in a strategic principle there really helps which one do you guys pick the small company or large company large companies yeah okay because bigger Market opportunity or something yeah I so part of it one of the this is a little bit of you know story here is that one of the patterns that I've seen a few times at a that's really interesting is that a lot of the time when there's more than one customer that you can build for one of them is harder than the other in a and there's two ways this thing can be harder right one way it can be harder is you know you want to build for one first and then you it'll be easier to make them happy and then you build on top of that to make the next set of people happy but for sauna a lot of times it was different than that it was if you build to make the easy group happy it's almost impossible to make that next harder group happy you have to build for the more complicated group and then bring it down to the easier so the first way we saw this was individual versus collaborative so you know you've got like remember the milk like a personal task manager or apple reminders those are very easy to build and every body who has one of those companies really wanted to make it more collaborative but collaboration isn't something you can tack on after the fact so we went after collaboration and really deemphasized individuals because we could tack on individual after the fact but if we didn't start by priority prioritizing collaboration it would we wouldn't be able to do it well and same thing for large companies if you don't start by prioritizing them in their needs you won't be able to serve them well um but it's much easier to scale down yeah I think what you're talking about is actually a pretty classic example of like picking the Run market like yeah I totally agree that you can design yourself into a corner if you only solve for a simple use case yeah so yeah h i mean all these things like the market the pillars and the principles are I mean it all comes down to like just like picking the right F Focus right and I've worked at companies where like the CPO will come out and say like oh you know we have like nine strategic priorities I'm like it's like that's like one too manye you know like what do you think about that like it comes down to like maybe picking three things or maybe one thing to focus on um it's GNA depend on the size of your company so at assana we did a really interesting thing with okrs so objective and key results the way that most companies do it is each team picks their objective and key results we instead had companywide objectives and each team could pick their key results that had to tie into an existing companywide objective okay so our companywide objectives were sort of our strategic focus and the first year we did this I think we had 56 of them it was a gigantic a number and I think we cut it in half and then eventually we got it down to 10 and this was 10 across product and business teams which ended up working really nicely so we'd say like one of them was like win the Work Management space that's something that involves a lot of work from the marketing team and also product team of like building a product that has The Cutting Edge features that we believe need to be Work Management yeah and like let say your

team has like three objectives or like three pillars and this comes down to like the role map which is like do you kind of just like work on all three at the same time or do you try to sequence it yeah great question so I love to think about a road map or even a backlog you can do this as the Sherie board I'm not sure if you've seen this article but the Sherie board is just one of my favorite Frameworks and I used to call it a portfolio of Investments but chut re board makes a lot more sense so if you're building a shakery board you don't stack rank your Meats versus your cheeses instead you think at a really high level like okay I want a shery board that's like half meat and half cheese and then you go and buy the best thing in each category and so same thing for your company's strategic pillars or your Investments is it really helps at a high level to think about what percentage of your team's effort do you want to put towards each of these strategic goals so you might decide that half of your energy should be towards winning new users and the other half should be making your product better more useful improve engagement and retain and retention for existing users um and then once you have that high level split and you know how you want it then you can make the decision about whether to do all of them at once or to do some of them in sequence based on the size of your team and what it takes to do them well so if you've got a big company you can probably go after a few of these at once um but if you are smaller or you have too many of them then you might decide that like it doesn't make sense to have one engineer working by themselves for a quarter instead we will get five people together and sequence the goals okay so like you kind of decide at a high level what percent for each category and then maybe you sequence it every quarter or like every half or something right is that kind of yeah interesting okay yeah I think that makes sense I think I've seen it done both ways where like you kind of split it across different objectives and then or like people have like pretty constraining resources then just try to go after one thing and hopefully that works and they move on to another one but yeah I've kind of seen it both ways yes and I think basically the smaller you are the more I think it ends up making sense to do things sequentially and have everybody focus on one thing at a time and then as you get bigger you know a company like Microsoft couldn't have everybody working on the same priority at the same time yeah I also noticed just like continue to talk a little bit more I also noticed that especially if you're trying to ince a new product in a market with a bunch of existing players like you kind of want to pick which one you really want to different like which area differentiate on otherwise you Pi catch up the whole time and it's like yeah have you thought about this or yeah definitely a bunch and also this comes into this idea of like do you especially with business software there'll be a checklist that your competitor has of all the features they have and

inevitably they're going to make one that shows that they have a lot of features and you're missing a bunch of features yeah and it's not going to be successful to try to compete on that checklist for like a brand new entrant it might become more important as you get bigger usually it's a lot better to pick a narrow use case and or narrow customer type that you can do really well with and that is being underserved by the existing competitors so I think about like the as Work Management space there are some people out there that try uh to do really well for marketers or things like that and so with assana I would say we did not differentiate on the specific customer type that we went after because we do try to be kind of very horizontal very broad but we did actually have a slight customer differentiation in that a lot of our competitors were bug tracking tools they really specialize in software engineers and we're not trying to compete with them we try to be something that regular people can use and then differentiating for us was a lot on this balance between power and ease of use so almost all the other competitors out there for Work Management chose to either be the powerful tool so you think about jir or the easy to use tool you think about like Trello right and what we said is we don't we think that's a false trade-off we think that we can be both powerful and easy to use and we can basically invest a lot in design work so that we can have lots of powerful functionality without making it harder to use okay so maybe like uh simple and then powerful like kind of like simple at surface and then powerful if you think into it yeah interesting zir is like very on one end of the spe Spectrum yeah and I mean one of the reasons so important is that it's not that some teams need powerful and some teams need easy to use it's that within the same team one person needs powerful and everybody else needs easy to use and that's why it's so important to bring those together into the same product totally yeah that makes a lot of sense okay let's kind of move to communicating your strategy because I think that's like just as important as building a strategy well let's talk about like crafting a strategy first like do you kind of just like go off for like a week and just write your own strategy or like how do you your team into stuff yeah so I have a particular way that I think is useful to do this which is that you go away by yourself think about your strategy this could be a half day think about your strategy write your drafts of the vision and the Strategic framework and the road map whatever is in your mind get it all down into paper work through it a bit you know if there's questions that come up like new data you need start you know getting some of this spend a small amount of time on this and then hide that draft don't bring it to your team and say like hey I've got a strategy you can depending on your team culture but for an important strategy a lot especially if it's a shift in directions hide that strategy and then work with your team and maybe set up a team offsite or do one-on ones with people and kind of kick off like Hey we're going to build a strategy and get everybody involved in the creation of the strategy so that prep work was so important because you need a point of view you need to have surfaced like what are the trade-offs that are going to come up you don't want to be just a facilitator in that meeting you want to be someone who is driving and noticing the problems when they come up and who is able to actually lead the team to a good strategy but you don't want to it to be an independent strategy you want it to be collaborative because then people will really believe in it and support it oh interesting like so yeah because if you just share that draft with people then they're like oh you already did this right is that kind of the FL yeah and I've done strategies like that before and it wasn't the worst thing if your goal is to like promoted but it is probably the worst thing of your goal is to actually change the direction of your team got it yes people want to feel like they own something they don't want to get handed something right it's just kind of human nature yeah and usually with

the strategy stuff like there's like a big EXA meeting right where like you present it to the execs how do you kind of drisk that you know like how do you like not have it like all a sudden you present it like they hate the strategy so invite them to that original kickoff meeting getting their input early is definitely really nice and depends on the size of your company if they'll actually attend but get the highest person in your company that you can to join that meeting and get their brainstorming ideas out there make sure they tell you all their concerns up front and have them also be part of the strategy so it's less that I've created a strategy that I'm presenting to you but I've gathered all the ideas listened to everybody including you and here's how I think it comes together okay yeah I think that's like underrated because it's like it's a lot easier to get exact opinion through like a coffee chat or something then like at this big me meeting yeah so that's really good advice and I also really liked your post about working your strategy into the day-to-day work like a lot of times like people just do stuff and like put it aside and people don't look at it anymore for you know six months so yeah how do you do that like how do you we yeah so I think that the best way if you've got a really strong strategy you can make almost every piece of feedback that you give to your team and every time you talk to your team you can almost speak entirely out of things from your strategy document so somebody says like hey do you think we should add this feature and then you say like okay let's how does that fit into our Strategic investment on giving you insights into your work yeah or they say like hey do we want to build it this way or that and you're say well how does that fit into our strategic principle of prioritizing large teams and you can also you know when they show you their designs you can be like that's great that's really captures being powerful and easy to use at the same time yeah and as a PM you're going to feel like you're repeating yourself nonstop right constantly talking about it you can introduce teams like if you're doing like an all hands or something and you're like great I'm going to pull up the calendar team and they're working on our strategic pillar of improving insights so you're going to feel like you're repeating yourself all the time and that means that maybe you're halfway there you need to repeat yourself twice as much to the point that you feel ridiculous and as you talk to people on your team you'll start to see especially if you question them if you try to quiz them you'll see that nobody else has been as immersed in the strategy as you are and it's very easy for teams to get a little bit or a lot off track yeah in some ways it makes your job like easier cuz you don't have to like think fresh every time the problem comes up you can just apply where you roll down and I really love that because it's also you don't have to like hey read my

strategy just bring pieces of it two through four foref front and the people are like why is this guy talking about his strategy all the time they can read his strategy yeah I love that yeah I feel like I personally I should do that more I don't do that enough I I try to like solve problems fresh instead of bring up the pr principles and stuff yeah being able to communicate in terms of those strategic principles and themes really helps for a few ways is it makes your job easier because you don't have to think about things fresh and you can just reuse content it helps your team because they really understand things more deep so you can delegate more to them they can make more good decisions on their own when they really deeply understand all of this and it helps earn trust with your team because it shows the way that your decisions are consistent so a common thing people worry about with their PMS that they feel like their PM is pulling them in all directions and constantly changing their mind and at the whim of the senior leadership and when you have that sort of consistency of communicating in terms of the strategy then it takes away from that feeling that making decisions at a whim it shows the consistent structure to your decision making I love that yeah I think all of everything the strategy like the principles part is like hard to be affected by the market right like the other stuff might change if Market changes principles like how you operate should be like pretty should stay pretty consistent I hope yeah yeah a lot of the ways your strategy is like the bet that you're making that your product team or your company in particular is making and it can include the Val valtion part of it you can say hey we're making a really big bet that winning big companies is important and here is how we'll know if it's time to change that idea okay so this then doesn't seem like a surprise if it turns out that it didn't work out or something yeah so like I guess yeah just like H that point home a little bit like what happens if like you're working on a strategy and then all of a sudden like the market you know like yeah the market changes or you write something a key assumption was totally off like how do you just keep the document updated or how do you so no I would not just keep the updated because nobody else is going to read your document so you've changed the strategy and no one else knows and now you're frustrated that people are working off the old strategy if it's a big change if it's something that's going to be substantial I would bring all those people that you brought in the first time you were creating it bring them back together make sure people are in the loop and say like hey we have this new information let's like work together and figure out how we want this to adjust our strategy and do we want to create a new strategy or how much do we think we can save and keep and depending on you know your team and your level at the company if you're a senior leader you probably want to start that with the other senior leaders you don't want to immediately let everybody if they don't know about it you don't want to randomize people who are doing the work until you have like a little bit more of a sense so I would start with uh a little bit smaller and then bring it down but then eventually you do want to be including people make sure that like it's a learning opportunity for them they can see here's what changed here's what we learned from it and like let's talk about how that should change everything that way you bring them along again got it okay got it so the key point with this just to like make sure you bring people along like see their input along the way you know yeah okay all right yeah I think that's all the questions I had Jackie yeah we can probably well actually why don't we stop with this where can people find you online you know yeah so I have a substack and I'm pretty for the time being I am still pretty active on Twitter for as long as that lasts yeah okay yeah okay cool