3 Crucial Questions to Define Your Product Strategy

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Product Management  

Do you know what your stakeholders want from your project? Sometimes, you get to the end of the project and your customers or users say, “You gave me what I asked for, but it’s not what I need.” That’s bad enough at the end of an iteration, but it’s terrible at the end of the project.

Sometimes, you thought you were supposed to deliver fast, but the customers say they wanted more product speed or reliability.

Both of those examples relate to the product strategy. While most project managers or leaders focus on project success, projects exist to create products that customers will use.

That’s why anyone who leads projects also needs to clarify the product strategy—why this project is essential to the organization. Here are the three clarifying questions:

1. Which customers or users do we want to target now?
2. Which of their problems do we want to solve with this project now?
3. When do we want to give those customers those solutions?

While the product leader should answer these questions, they don't always know the answers. That’s why I like it when the project manager also asks these questions to create a successful project.

Here’s how to use those questions to clarify your project’s product strategy. That will allow you to refine your project approach.

Question 1: Which Customers or…

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