How do CPOs balance keep teams engaged in meaningful work while building a product strategy from scratch?

Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle at the time of this recording, shares how she integrates customer feedback, collaboration with internal teams, and data-driven insights to inform strategic decisions, underscoring the value of communication and using various artifacts to convey the product strategy effectively across the organization. 

By engaging in discovery while leveraging foundational work, teams can build trust and demonstrate progress to stakeholders. Stephanie’s experience as a seasoned product leader in B2B SaaS, along with her focus on leadership coaching and diversity and inclusion, underscores the critical role of experienced product leaders in making the craft of product management appear seamless.  

Overall, her approach emphasizes the iterative nature of product strategy development, de-risking bets with data and discovery, and fostering collaboration and trust within teams to drive meaningful progress and innovation in product development. 

Resource Links 

Visit Stephanie’s webpage 

Follow Stephanie Leue’s Substack 

Follow Stephanie Leue on LinkedIn 

Visit the Doodle website 

Follow Holly on LinkedIn 

Visit the Product Science Group website 

Explore Product Science Workshops and Courses 

Quotes from Stephanie Leue:

"We just don't want to build one feature after another. We want to have kind of a bigger picture in mind and we want to achieve that bigger version of what we are today, right?" 

“If you show them 1 minute 20 about the future of a product, they immediately have 20,000 things that will never work out. And they have 20,000 questions and like tons of ideas why things will take way longer than expected. But to be honest, that's exactly the discussion you want to have, right?”  

“We needed to train ourselves to ask the right questions. We needed to get answers to these questions. We needed to understand the data we got. We needed to compose a picture out of that data. So that takes a while because that's like a team effort.”

Lab Notes 

Lab Note 604.1: Experienced product leaders make the craft of product management look easy 

Lab Note 604.2: Strategy is a series of bets that can make even the CPO uncomfortable 

Lab Note 604.3: Use different communication approaches for different audiences of your product strategy

Lab Note 604.4: Find foundational alignment and begin executing while you are developing your bigger product strategy 

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View the transcript and the ⁠full episode description on the Product Science Podcast website here.⁠