Product Strategy Frameworks I Teach, and When to Use Each

The Four Pillars

The four pillars of product management are product strategy, product delivery, customer experience, and adoption and growth. I draw them as an hourglass, with the two that face the market on top (strategy and adoption) and the two that live with your internal teams on the bottom.

Each pillar either narrows or expands. Strategy narrows everything you could do down to a single customer problem to bet on, and delivery expands that one idea into every detail it takes to solve it. Customer experience narrows again, because a complicated solution has to become easy to buy and easy to use. Adoption and growth puts it in front of the market, and what you learn funnels back into strategy.

Most product managers start in delivery and get stuck there. Getting out changes your question from "what should we build?" to "what business should we be in?" Say a team of five developers and a product manager costs almost a million dollars a year. If that work is not returning $5 million to $10 million a year, a business owner would ask why those people are focused there at all. Most product managers never ask.

The Product Metrics Ladder

This ladder has two poles. One is the customer's value and the other is our company's value. It stands on a foundation, which is the persona you are solving for and the important need they have. You climb by asking why. The lowest rung is the feature, which gives the user a new ability you can measure usage of. Next is the larger task the feature improves, with a measurable change in how fast or how often they do it. Above that is the bigger objective the customer came to your product for, and above that is the outcome they want whether they use your product or not. At every rung the company pole says what we get. The Product Metrics Ladder connects a feature to the customer's outcome and to our own business result, one "why does that matter?" at a time.

The example I teach is a loan payments app for financially stressed cardholders who fear late fees. Someone wants AI, so the feature is a chatbot. Most product managers stop at measuring how many people use it, but usage only tells you people tried something. Keep climbing. The chatbot lets a cardholder resolve a payment question in seconds, which helps them avoid late fees, which gives them a feeling of control over their money. On the company pole, fewer questions reach support and people who feel in control of their money stay with us. A support-cost feature turned out to be a retention feature too.

I climb one in how to escape feature factory mode, and output vs outcome is about the bottom rungs versus the top ones.

The Vision Triangle

I used to think I was not creative enough to write a product vision. What I figured out is that a vision is a synthesis of three things you can go and collect.

Customer truth answers "why this?" It is something you saw by interviewing people (or better, by watching them work) that everyone else accepts as the way it has always been. Market shift is the second, and it answers "why now?" with whatever is just now possible because of a technology, a regulation, or a change in how people work and live. The third is your unique capability, or "why us?": what your company can do that others would have a hard time following.

Combine them into one statement: a world where this kind of customer can achieve this kind of outcome without the friction they have today. It never names a solution.

I skipped customer truth once. At a legal tech startup I took somebody else's intuition about what customers needed. I couldn't name any of those customers myself, and it didn't work out.

Strategy as a rubric for decision-making

If the vision is where you are going, the strategy is the order you go in. It should answer which customers first, which problem first, which capabilities first, and what you are saying "not yet" to. I think the vision is what says no, because it defines the area you operate in, and the strategy says "not yet," because it is the order of operations for getting to the vision.

That order gives your team a rubric for decision-making when you are not around. They can choose between a need for this persona and a need for another one, because they can see which comes later. It also helps when someone asks you to add something to the roadmap, because the strategy already says their idea comes later and why (more in stakeholder management for product managers).

At HealthMine, a digital health company, I built the order by working backwards. Health insurance companies paid us, so we had to show them cost savings. Costs come down when members act on their health, and members act when we motivate them, but we can't motivate anyone until we know how to reach them and what guidance to give. So we started with the health data. See also how to write a product strategy.

The DHM filter

For a list of competing ideas, the filter I teach is Gibson Biddle's DHM filter, which came out of Netflix: delight, hard to copy, margin-enhancing.

Ask in that order. Is this so good that customers will tell others about it, pay for it and come back? Does our advantage get stronger the more we do it? At Netflix, where this came from, recommendations bring viewers back, more viewers create more data, and more data makes better recommendations. Does it justify a higher price or lower our cost to serve?

Most ideas get as far as "people will love it" and stop, with nobody asking what evidence we have. Pass a list through all three screens and only a couple survive.

The User-Buyer Bridge

In 2013 I joined a product that helped hospitals audit patient bills for missing charges before they went to the insurance company. It had 400 customers and sales that had been dropping year over year. Our pitch was a list of features: review 100% of your bills, 6,000 standard rules. A buyer had to guess whether that was worth a thousand dollars or ten million.

I didn't build any new features, I built a spreadsheet that estimated how much revenue each hospital could recover. For one health system it showed almost a 32X return on what we charged, and once our salespeople had that number to show, sales doubled.

The User-Buyer Bridge connects the job the user does to the economics the buyer is measured on, so the buyer is never left guessing. Interview users and buyers about their objectives and how they are evaluated. Map the user's process. Then stack the metrics on the customer's side: what the analyst is measured on, then their manager, then the department, then the company. Buyers often don't know the pain points of their own staff, so speak at the economics level and then show how the staff's pain relates to it. When the user and the buyer sit in different companies, see B2B2C product strategy.

One product strategy framework to try this week

Pick one feature in your current sprint and write the ladder sentence for it: "We believe that if we gave this persona this feature, they could do this task better, which helps them with this bigger job, which gets them this outcome, and that gets our company this result." Do not do the whole roadmap yet, because you will fill in boxes for a week and never test one. Do one. If you get stuck on the customer's pole, go talk to a customer. If you get stuck on ours, go talk to your boss.