The 4 key elements of a product strategy on a page

As a product manager or product owner, one of your main tasks is to create a strategy that’s clear enough and fits into the whole company’s strategy.

Creating a strategy on a page is a very powerful way to distill all the user and market data that you gathered into a very succinct document that will make it easier for your stakeholders to understand and digest.

Here are the 4 elements I always include in my product strategy documents:

Company’s vision: Writing down the company’s vision in your strategy document allows you to link your product to the company’s goals and not lose sight of the big picture.

Problem definition: Before jumping into your strategy, remind your stakeholders of the problem you’re solving, a problem statement needs to be clear and validated with quantitative and qualitative data.

High level solution: This is the most important element of your strategy, a high level definition of your solution defines what value your users will get from using your product.

For example, you might want to help teachers teach remotely by creating “a free and easy tool helping educators efficiently manage and assess progress , while enhancing connections with learners from school, from home or on the go” (Google classroom)

Initiatives: You might need to define your solution in more detail (depending on which stakeholders you’re targeting), in this case you can list features or themes (depending how far are you in validating the solution) and a link to your prototype if you have one.

I hope this helps, there are as many ways to define a product’s strategy as there are companies, product strategy is one of the most challenging areas in product management. Keep in mind that you don’t need to get it right the first time around, keep refining it whenever you learn something new, and hopefully you will end up with a solid product strategy backed with data.