395: Creating business and product strategy – with Sean Kim

How product managers can empower teams to create a winning product strategy

We hear a lot about strategy and that product managers need to create a product strategy. In practice, what does that mean and how does a product strategy help you be more successful?

Helping us explore that topic is Sean Kim. He is the President and Chief Product Officer at Kajabi, a web platform that helps creators and entrepreneurs turn their knowledge into income. Previously, Sean was head of product at TikTok, where he set the strategic direction and led product teams. Prior to TikTok, he was the global head of product at Amazon Prime.  You can see from his intersection of product and business leadership experiences that he is the perfect person to help us better understand creating product strategy.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:31] What is strategy?

I always start with the customer problem. Once I’ve identified the biggest problem I can solve for them, I think about the potential solution to solve the problem and reduce friction. Then I think about how we can offer the solution. We create a step-by-step approach to validate the solution through a minimum viable product and then start building the customer experience.

Strategy includes thinking about what your competitors are doing and the risks involved in your solution.

Product strategy is 100% focused on the customer.

[7:23] Is there a link between product strategy and organizational strategy?

It’s critical to know what your North Star metric is—where you point all your product teams. Then look downstream to identify the core metrics that are helping you drive to the North Star metric. Then find the input actions that drive the core metrics. Align your teams around these actions.

[10:57] What’s an example of creating a product strategy?

When I was at Amazon, our North Star metric was paid Prime members. We needed to ensure our customers realized the value of membership. We focused on the Prime membership cancellation experience. We launched a new cancellation experience that helped customers realize the benefits they would lose if they cancelled. Even though Prime is a well-known brand, most customers didn’t realize there are over 30 benefits beyond two-day shipping and videos.

After our successful tests, we had to scale globally. We enabled machine learning to test everything—the cancellation experience, copy, call to action, colors, etc. The machine learning tested all combinations of the content in the cancellation experience and determined the best one to show people globally.

We had to debate whether we would offer discounts for the membership. That’s a slippery slope. We’re trying to empower PMs or marketers globally to make decisions. We established tenets for how to make decisions to help scale the business and improve the product globally.

[17:27] What’s something that’s gone wrong for you related to product strategy?

I tell my teams not everything is going to work, but you have to swing big. You have to take risks, and some will fail. Failure is just one step closer to success. It’s an amazing learning opportunity to know what’s not working. From there we can potentially build even better products.

When I was at TikTok, I worked on the Learn tab. TikTok has two tabs on the homepage—Following and For You. We launched a third tab called Learn because a lot of people who had stopped using TikTok said the content was not useful. We set out to onboard more useful content and create a dedicated place where people could find it. We thought we could potentially launch other tabs that offer dedicated content. It seems like a simple enough concept, but it’s actually a ton of work across a lot of different teams. There was a lot we had to think through. Once we launched,