Product Strategy Templates

Considering all of these influencing factors together forms the basis of a product vision and allows you to define a high-level plan for your product, which is your product strategy roadmap. When you know your product strategy, you know who your product is for, why people will want to buy and use it, and how your product stands out against competitors. When you know this your product strategy determines the future direction of all your product efforts and is the basis for executing a strategy roadmap. It enables you to focus on a specific target market and feature set, rather than investing resources into projects that don’t fit with the strategic goals of your business.

Defining your product strategy and then using it to build and manage your roadmap requires a good understanding of your market and corporate strategy. As your product matures and the market evolves, you’ll need to consider the financial performance of your product as well. The basic steps for building and maintaining your product strategy are as follows:

A market review is the first step in defining your product strategy. In this step product management must strive to understand and define the key characteristics of your market. This includes identifying target customers, defining key customer needs, understanding the competitive landscape and how to position yourself in that competitive space.

Corporate strategy is defined by the executive team and must provide an overarching vision for the business, mid to long term financial goals and a plan for achieving those goals. It must include a strategy for how your company will generate revenue from your product. This could be through geographic expansion, establishing a reseller channel, by investing in new and adjacent markets or building new products that appeal to your existing customer base.   This revenue model is not only key to your product strategy but also determines your sales and distribution strategy.

With a clearly defined market and a vision for the direction and growth of the business, product management can get to work defining a product strategy roadmap. This is a challenging task as it requires product managers to carefully consider the right combination of market dynamics, customer needs, financial goals, and corporate strategy. It is through the distillation of these factors that the product manager must define:

• A product vision and value proposition that addresses target customer’s needs and strongly positions the product in the market
• A pricing and licensing model that aligns with the revenue model and financial goals of the corporate strategy
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• The features and investments in innovation that will address the specific problems of your target customers and deliver value against your competitors in the market.

Our range of product strategy templates and slides makes this easier than ever. Each comes with a video on how to use the template to the best effect.

It should be clear that pulling together a product strategy that is aligned with all the major elements of your target market, your corporate strategy and the innovations that will uniquely solve your customer’s problems is a significant undertaking. Even when you feel you've got it nailed, you still need to get buy-in and agreement from major stakeholders, particularly the executive leadership, and that will mean pitching, socialising and evangelising with a well structured and impactful presentation of your efforts.

In this section of our website you will find a collection of different product strategy templates. Each strategic planning template has been specifically designed to help you tell a story around the insights and decisions that have led to your chosen product path. Since product strategy ties so closely into many other product planning activities, you will find a strategic plan template for each of these on our site as well such as investment proposal templates and agile product roadmaps.

Each product strategy roadmap is supported by a “how to” video to help you roll your unique product strategy into one of our product strategy PowerPoint templates that will surprise and delight your audience.