Product Strategy: A Pragmatist’s Perspective

This article is a selection of the 2023 TechRadar by Devoteam , it’s designed to introduce the context of the chapter by covering a hot topic in the industry.

This year’s focus is on the Cloud Native era – a new era where technology and business are more interconnected than ever. Companies must prepare for disruptive models built with, in, and for the cloud.

Product Strategy for the Win

The product strategy sets the ambition, trajectory, and ensures that your product and service offering evolves continuously. However, many companies are struggling to find the right way to implement their product strategies. So how do you create a winning strategy?

Very soon most large companies will manage their internal organisations as products to increase innovation, responsiveness and competitive advantage. Redefining the Product Strategy is the first step to increase upsell and cross-sell.

While businesses are aware of the necessity of embracing new forms of technology, they often lack a clear strategy for doing so. The digitalisation of processes and technological innovation, as well as changes in consumer behaviour, are among the many challenges to be overcome. Companies thus end up relying on a roadmap that is constrained by user requirements and ultimately reduces the quality of their products. To succeed in the future, businesses will need to develop new strategies for expanding their operations and bringing in additional revenue.

As a result, competition has increased among companies and the role of product strategy is thus becoming increasingly important in the company’s overall strategy. This holds true regardless of what that strategy is: diversification, market penetration or product development since it intervenes at all points in the product life cycle.

Devoteam’s Recommendation to get started on Product Strategy

The products, services, or offers of companies need to be shaped to adapt to new challenges by leading them towards a sustainable business model and a more efficient operating model that utilises technology potential and a 360-degree analysis of the ecosystem, promotes product culture within the organisation, and controls risks through validated learning to adapt to new challenges.

Despite the growth of product culture, businesses are paradoxically still in the early stages of maturity: everyone says that customer concerns should be at the centre, but only a few companies adhere to this principle. Organisations are still operating in silos. Making the organisation pay attention to subtle cues is one way to show upper management why a Product Strategy is necessary. We recommend using an end-to-end multidisciplinary approach combining strategy, design and build:

• Strategy means defining a vision and a path while taking into account the operational and the factual aspects. Some actions include: segmenting the market, choosing the targets and the positioning, setting scenarios and prioritising actions.
• Design implies concretising the strategy in tangible elements in order to facilitate easy and effective decision-making. Actions that fall under this phase consist of describing the experience and the offer, the business plan and also product backlog and testing.
• Build and manage the whole product lifecycle by forming strategic partnerships.

Successful first steps often involve focusing on a specific product or service, demonstrating the method’s efficacy, and then expanding it to the larger context. Whatever the maturity level of the company’s offer, the approach should include evaluating the current offer and the company’s environment, understanding the customer base, defining the product’s vision and ambition, designing products, services, and experiences and testing them with customers.