Product Strategy Requires Coherent Choices

Effective Product Strategy is about the ongoing and collaborative creation of coherent choices that allow Product Teams to execute with focus and a clear connection to their Vision. It's about arriving at clear trade-off that allows teams to say no–Which isn't the result of using a framework or template, but the connection of evidence-informed choices.

And that's where Path to Product Strategy guides you the starting points of Product Strategy.

Key Outcomes of the Course

Course Curriculum

1. Product Strategy Foundations:

• What is and isn't Product Strategy
• The importance of Product Strategy Patterns over Strategy Templates
• The Stable Core and Dynamic Peripherals of Product Strategy
• Company Strategy vs. Product Strategy and Feature Strategy
• Useful vs. Useless Product Strategy

2. Creating the Strategic Narrative

• Your Product Vision and Long-term Strategic Goals define the WHY behind choosing your Playing Field and provide Orientation for making Winning Moves
• Defining a user-centered Product Vision instead of listing Company Intentions
• Defining value-oriented long-term North Star Metrics to help guide your Strategy definition

3. Defining the Playing Field

• Your audience is one of the core parts that define your playing field. Instead of solving problems for "everyone," we'll look at tactical ways of thinking and framework to help you clarify your audience focus so it's in line with your vision and goals 
• We also cover how to understand the relevant jobs of your core audiences, so you can prioritize research and testing efforts later on.
• Products don't compete against competitors but against alternatives. By understanding who your audience is hiring today for their jobs, you understand the last puzzle piece of your playing field: Who you will be compared against.

4. Identifying and Choose Winning Moves

• You don't just want to participate on the sidelines of a playing field, but be on it to win it. Therefore, we cover distribution, value propositions, and differentiators.
• Channels don't follow the abilities of your product. That's why you have to understand the possible and best-possible channels to reach the users and buyers in your core audience.
• To make your audience choose you, over alternatives, you have to provide value propositions, high-level features, or services that match their proven jobs. We cover tactical structures for shaping this process.
• To sustainably get chosen by your audience, you have to know what differentiators you can rely on and which could easily be copied or attacked. We'll use moat scoring as a way to bring clarity to your positioning.

5. Strategy Synthesis and Strategy Implementation

• Can you say what your Product Strategy is? In this session, we'll make sure you can. By using the evidence-based building blocks of the previous sessions, we cover how to synthesize insights into a concise statement for each of your Strategy choices.
• Even a well-articulated explicit Product Strategy choice won’t automatically lead to results. We'll look at setting leading indicators for your Product Strategy choices and how to use these to define Product Discovery priorities.

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What Others Have to Say

Who is this Course for?

• Heads of Product and VPs of Product looking for a new perspective on enabling the goal-definition and decision-making of product teams and departments.
• (Senior) Product Managers who want to provide their product teams clarity and inspiration beyond the next Sprint.
• Product Ops Managers, Agile Coaches, and Scrum Masters want to support product teams beyond Scrum rituals.
• UX and Engineering Product Team members want to engage in continuous strategic discussions beyond Product Delivery.

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Meet your Instructor, Tim Herbig

As a Product Management Coach and Consultant, Tim Herbig enables product teams to make more evidence-informed decisions in line with their strategic choices by connecting the dots of Product Strategy, OKRs, and Product Discovery.

For over 10 years, he has worked in various in-house and consulting roles as a Product Manager and Head of Product. I constantly challenged myself to make an evidence-informed way of working in industries like publishing, professional networking, and building Enterprise-level b2b SaaS applications. I know what it takes to balance large-scale product iterations with the scrappiness of a pre-Product-Market-Fit state.

He now helps product teams develop and implement better practices that help them progress in their context instead of chasing artificially created "best practices." I achieve that through hands-on training, coaching offerings, in-depth courses, and intriguing content.