Escaping the Build Trap

Chapter 14. Product Vision and Portfolio

Product initiatives translate the business goals into the problems that we will solve with our product. The product initiatives answer how? How can I reach these business goals by optimizing my products or building new ones?

With Netflix, the biggest thing it needed to do to really get streaming to take off was to enable people to watch Netflix on any device, wherever viewers wanted to. Think about it. At the time, if you wanted to download something, you could watch it only on your laptop. There were no internet-connected devices. And no one wants to watch TV on their tiny laptop screen all the time. First of all, you’re basically saying that no one can watch it with you. And second, a 13-inch screen is hardly a cinematic experience.

Netflix created a product initiative to tackle this problem for the user. Putting that in user story format, we’d get, “As a Netflix subscriber, I want to be able to watch Netflix anywhere, with anyone, comfortably.” This is the company’s product initiative. It then explored many possible solutions—developing the Roku, partnering with Xbox and creating an app for it, and ultimately enabling all the internet-connected devices it could. All of these solutions, which I call options, were aligned to this product initiative.

Options are your bets, as Spotify would call them. They represent the possible solutions that teams will explore to solve the product initiative. Now, sometimes the solution will be readily ...