Digital Product Management

3 PRODUCT STRATEGY: CREATING BUSINESS VALUE

Kevin J. Brennan

A strategy essentially consists of three things: an understanding of the problem or challenge you face, a decision about what you should do to address it, and a plan of action to make that decision a reality, including dealing with the obstacles you’ll face.¹ A strategy that lacks any of these three things isn’t really a strategy at all. In many companies, strategy amounts to wishful thinking or a set of (usually financial) goals with no real idea of how those goals might be achieved.

Strategy needs to start with a clearly defined business problem or opportunity. This almost always relates to customer behaviour, as was discussed in Chapter 2. Even if the ultimate motivation was ...