100 Product Strategies

Few elements wield as much influence over a company's fate as the art and science of monetization. And I know from personal experience that this is a hard-to-master topic for product people.

Consider the multiple complex questions that may arise: do we go for a subscription or pay-as-you-go model? How many tiers of subscriptions? What’s the right price? Do we include ads? How frequent? How intrusive?

At the core of all these questions is the value exchange: how much are users willing to pay (in money or attention) in exchange for the value we provide? Solving it correctly can be the difference between success and stagnation.

Megan is a seasoned product leader with vast experience solving these questions in multiple industries and multiple monetization models. We explored real-life challenges, frameworks, and tips that you can apply to your strategies.

You can find Megan Hughes on Linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganhug1/

Find all the details and more episodes in:

https://productdirection.substack.com/

Frequently, strategies are about finding avenues for growth. We often think about that as directly impacting the core company metrics.

But when developing platforms that allow integrations to the core product, the strategy is more complex: we enable entry points that enable 3rd party developers to solve “edge but valuable” use cases adopted by users who *only then* increase the core product metrics.

In this conversation with Frank Harris, VP of Platform Product at Slack, we discussed how they formulated a strategy in this complex landscape and the nuances and challenges of the growth journey.

You can find Frank on Linkedin or X.

When doing expansion strategies, we need to come up with insights about what markets we can penetrate and win. Combining that with product-led growth thinking, you can review the pull from existing users to come up with underserved needs and sizing opportunities.

That can be easier said that done, but in this episode of 100 Product Strategies, Markiyan Matsekh, ex-Director of Product at Vimeo, shared the steps he took to conquer the enterprise segment.

Besides the very insightful strategy story, he shared the fundamentals and the importance of Vimeo’s positioning and differentiation to win in a crowded market.

And of top of that, we closed with an interest story of an unsuccessful strategy, that failed for the same reasons the other one succeeded, reinforcing the importance of these concepts.

You can find Markiyan on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markiyanmatsekh/

Why do we create strategies?

To focus on the most critical problems or opportunities which will help us get closer to our vision.

And the first step of putting that focus into action is concentrating our resources there.

This is easier said than done, and the complexity becomes more evident when we have more than one product, at different maturity stages, and with very different strategic paths ahead of them.

While this problem can fall into the Portfolio Strategy space for larger corporations, startups also face this challenge when expanding.

In this episode, I had the chance to speak with Iryna Struk, who is running product management at HandsHQ, a startup with a mature product and another trying to find product market fit.

We discussed not only resource allocation but also a broad set of topics, starting as usual with how they create strategy, how they handle context switch, and how they balance the different levels of uncertainty when planning.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/irynastruk/

You can also find more info on:

https://productdirection.substack.com/

Many of us work in complex environments where the set of opportunities we can potentially pursue to impact a desired outcome is very wide.

As you can imagine, at Google, you can find both very complex and large environments, and opportunities to innovate in multiple directions.

In this episode, I spoke with Stefan Schnabl, who works in the education space at Google, with the potential to cover very different audiences, problems, and solutions.

He shared many tips and stories, from how they align on direction down to how the team does research and experimentation in the space to identify strong opportunities.

You can find Stefan on Linkedin, and the pilot post in his blog.

Most companies' strategies are “roadmap on steroids”: large plans of multiple big ideas to implement, which usually have not been validated.

To differentiate and create thoughtful and successful strategies, you must start with evidence-based insights.

But how do we collect that evidence? How do we gain confidence and compare opportunities? After selecting opportunities, how do we keep validating the strategy through the multiple solution ideas we may pursue?

I had the pleasure of speaking with the evidence-guided guru, Itamar Gilad, and we explored the practices, tools, and challenges you will use and face to make your strategy more robust relying on solid evidence.

Itamar has been helping teams with tools and resources I strongly recommend, like the confidence meter, and ICE Scoring. He recently published his fantastic book, Evidence Guided, which is a must for all product managers and leaders.

TL;DR: Platforms are everywhere, and their challenges are hard to understand and impact even non-platform products. Thor is an expert who shared his learnings building the Miro Marketplace and, previously, the Google Maps Developer’s Platform.

Many times when discussing strategy, we focus on the most typical scenarios: consumer apps, B2B SaaS, media, etcetera.

But platforms are continuously emerging, and even if you are not working on one, they are probably impacting you: app stores, social media integrations, etcetera.

The challenges they present for strategy are quite nuanced, ranging from defining complex success metrics to understanding how to align with the larger company strategy.

Understanding how to think differently about their strategies is critical. Thor Mitchell is the Product Director for Miro’s platform teams, has a long history of working in this field, and shared his process, journey, and challenges in developing their latest strategy.

You can connect with Thor at Linkedin or Twitter.

Startup challenges change as they grow. The focus and needs of the product strategy also change, as the company moves through funding rounds and product maturity stages.

What are the critical factors leaders should consider at each stage? How does collaboration among different areas evolve? What’s the impact of funding rounds on focus areas?

In this episode of 100 Product Strategies, we spoke with Lily Smith, CPO at BBC Maestro and co-host of the Product Experience podcast, who has been taking product leadership roles at startups at different stages.

We discussed the strategic implications of technical scalability, user experience improvement, and business expansion. Lily compared how challenges evolve from pre-market-fit stages to the scale-up period.

You can find Lily on Linkedin!

Remember that you can find more info and material on productdirection.co/podcast.

If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs

You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho Bassino, at productdirection.co (training, coaching, and more)

We all love good strategy stories. What is better than good strategy stories? The ones that are simple and that we can derive lessons to apply elsewhere.

In this episode, Saeed Khan shares his stories and thoughts collected over 25 years of product management experience.

Different from other episodes, in this one, we started with the core elements of strategy, which Saeed simplifies as building hypotheses on how you can achieve certain objectives. Making some mapping to the Playing to Win framework, he simplified the result of strategy as a set of Goals connected with Measures, which are connected to Actions.

We also reviewed some examples so you can apply these simple steps to your products.

Over the last 18 months, I have interviewed 29 product leaders, inquiring about their strategy formulation and challenges.

We covered different industries, customer types, company scales, product types, and geographies.

As I shared in the podcast intro, after writing Product Direction, I felt we didn’t have enough examples out there of how people do strategy work and what challenges they face.

My secret project all along was to compile a list of different examples and also tag them accordingly so product leaders could listen to stories they felt were related to their context.

https://productdirection.substack.com/p/my-secret-summary-of-30-real-life

Let's review my takeaways and where you can get the summary of all past episodes!