Guide product direction, align teams and cultivate support with a technology product innovation strategy and roadmap.
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Set, Vet and Execute Your Technology Product Strategy
Top GenAI Opportunities for Tech Products
Chief product officers are under pressure to deliver differentiated products that solve customer problems and support business growth. An efficient strategy that guides the product roadmap is critical to that goal.
Download this eBook to explore:
- GenAI capabilities to achieve the top customer value goals
- 4 key actions when deciding where and when to add GenAI capabilities into your products
- Next steps for technology product leaders
Improve product management success with a strategy aligned to customer needs
The Gartner four-step product innovation strategy framework equips product managers to create a compelling, customer-centric and easy-to-communicate strategy and roadmap.
Define Product Strategy
Vet the Strategy
Craft the Roadmap
Communicate
Leverage the Gartner four-step product strategy framework
Given the day-to-day pressures technology product management leaders are under, putting in the effort to create a product strategy can feel like a suboptimal use of time. It does not have to be. Using the Gartner product strategy framework, product managers can prioritize customer-centric technology product innovations. They will be more clearly aligned with company objectives, and provide a rationale for saying “no” to feature and function requests that distract from the product goals.
Leverage the following wheel-based framework to consider four core components in your technology product strategy:
Environmental and market factors. These include key trends in the industry, changes in buying behavior, insights into the competitive landscape and technology opportunities that enable access to new market segments. Use Gartner Market Trends, Market Insights, Competitive Landscapes or other trusted external data. Consider using the Gartner Product Decisions tool to test your assumptions about key buyer needs.
Company factors. These include competencies that support product success, like technical skills or industry partnerships. They also include company constraints, such as funding or financial targets. Sources for this information include technology, product and marketing leaders. As you gather it, identify sources of competitive advantage and differentiation, as well as technology and capability gaps.
A vision for differentiation. These include the target segments the product will serve, unfilled needs the product aims to address, and what is unique about the product from the customer’s perspective versus the alternatives. Starting with the environmental and company factors — and taking a customer-centric lens — should help technology product managers construct a realistic vision grounded in real-world needs and capabilities.
Strategic themes. These capture how the company will realize its product vision. Themes may include the aspects of product excellence critical to the vision. They often emerge from understanding when and in what contexts customers experience value related to your product.
These four components form a story for the technology product strategy, which enables product leaders to effectively communicate to stakeholders and product teams. The four components also ensure the product strategy process is simple and comprehensive.
The end result that emerges from this framework should be a one-page document or five to six presentation slides that stakeholders can easily use and consume.
Validate the product strategy for a new offering by “working backward”
The product strategy that emerges from a first pass through the wheel-based product strategy framework requires review and validation. This should happen before a high-profile strategy rollout.
An effective technique for product strategy validation involves “working backward.” This involves articulating from the customer’s perspective the end state for the new product or service and working backward to refine the product strategy so it can fulfill that end state. This approach has two main benefits:
It keeps new products and services highly customer-focused.
It communicates product strategy simply and clearly to internal stakeholders and teams.
Crafting a mock press release is a low-investment way to work backward and validate an early-draft technology product strategy. The press release succinctly and convincingly answers the following five questions:
Who is the customer?
What is the customer problem or opportunity?
Is the most important customer benefit clear?
How do you know what customers need or want?
What does the customer experience look like?
The press release should start with a basic (not technical) description of the product and focus on benefits important to the customer (not the benefits to your company, your ecosystem partners or your industry as a whole). Avoid jargon or technical details, and be brief and clear to keep it business friendly. Include fictional customer quotes to articulate the need it fulfills and how.
Create the first draft press release in collaboration with one or two other people, such as the portfolio leader or another product manager. Allow sales and marketing to review, edit and add draft messaging, ideal value stories and so on. Then allow engineering to comment on feasibility, tech/feature description accuracy, etc. Get other relevant executives’ feedback. Finally, meet with all stakeholders to review the final draft. After gaining feedback from each stakeholder group, revise and refine the press release and then revisit the strategy to apply learnings.
This process may take as little as a few days (depending on externalities, such as the availability of stakeholders to sign off). This approach helps technology product managers identify the assumptions they have baked into the strategy and make revisions to define realistic, customer-centric value drivers, benefits and outcomes.
Codify the strategy in a roadmap focused on developing critical capabilities
A product roadmap codifies the validated product vision and strategy. It’s the step-by-step plan for developing the technology product described in the strategy (and in the fictional press release). Product managers can use it to cultivate stakeholder confidence by showing that the strategy is achievable and the steps have been carefully considered.
The primary steps for creating a roadmap are:
Identify capabilities needed to fulfill each strategic theme.
Collect and categorize requests from internal and external stakeholders.
Prioritize major items.
Obtain high-level estimates of the amount of effort required for major items.
Make build/buy/partner decisions for major items.
Draft the roadmap, aligning items with timeframes based on priority, effort and interdependencies.
The roadmap is not meant to be a detailed release plan, nor should it catalog all of the features to be developed. Instead, the roadmap should include major capabilities that will impact customers and deliver value. Timeframes for releases may be labeled simply as “now/next/later” to keep stakeholders focused more on the evolution of the product and less on specific functionality.
Keep the product on its strategic trajectory by learning to say “no” to requests that do not support or progress the product strategy. As you move into product development, test hypotheses and prototypes with trusted customers to assess feasibility. Define a minimum viable product for major new capabilities. Drive engagement and continuous alignment by organizing workshops with team members across engineering, presales, sales, customer success and marketing, so they can help identify roadmap inhibitors. Examine progress over time as capabilities are developed from the roadmap.
Stay aligned on the strategy and roadmap with focused stakeholder communication
Communicating about the product strategy and roadmap is essential for maintaining stakeholder alignment and support. Poor communication can result in misunderstandings and unmet expectations, and lead the organization to withdraw commitment to the product. Prospects and customers likewise report that they consider roadmaps in their purchase and renewal decisions. Communicating the strategy and roadmap to both internal and external audiences is therefore a major success factor.
For internal audiences, present and discuss the product strategy in quarterly or annual product reviews using the storytelling structure enabled by the wheel framework. Namely, describe why the company will be able to exploit the opportunity, why the product will be valuable in the market, and what the team will focus on when building it. Product managers should include a brief summary of the strategy as a preface to internal product presentations, to ensure a common understanding of the intended product direction.
Adjust how you communicate the roadmap for different stakeholders or audiences. The technical language used with R&D and engineering teams should be adjusted into business-goal-oriented language for business partners.
For sales and other customer-facing teams, use the presentation format they use with prospects and customers. This makes it easier for the teams to repeat key points accurately to external stakeholders. Begin the roadmap portion of the presentation with the product vision and by highlighting new customer capabilities to build enthusiasm before getting into the details.
Invite roadmap feedback. Product managers may not be able to honor specific requests from individual stakeholders, but then can consider them for future updates. It is equally helpful to understand which planned items are most interesting and which are not as important as product management thought.
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