How to Build a Winning Product Strategy | UX Design & Product Management Tips

What's up everyone? My name is Ritzy Williams and I have a, a pretty big topic today. And it's pretty big because it's gonna cover a wide range of business and kind of the— it's not just like designing individual features or just building individual features. It's gonna talk about long-term strategy and ways that businesses grow. So in order to talk about the product strategy, we have to first talk about business strategy. Now the way businesses work is, you know, say someone wants to start a business There's a couple different types of businesses you could start. You could sell products, you could sell goods, you can create an app that makes money through advertising, all kinds of things. Uh, for relevance, we'll say that someone has an idea to build an app. Now there's going to be some costs associated with building an app. Maybe you have to hire a development team, maybe you build it yourself, which still has costs because then you have to pay for hosting. There's all kinds of costs. Right? And where you got the initial money, TBD, right? Like you could have taken out a loan, whatever, but somehow you have finagled your way to making your product. And what features will be in the original product is really going to be your MVP, the minimum viable product. That's the feature set needed in order to release that'll actually, uh, that can actually be, you know, with your users, that your users can use and like find value in, and that you can market and that you can actually, you know, get out there. So you build your core feature set. Now this is where it's a bit waterfall compared to agile because you, you kind of have to have those features in order to get to this minimum viable product. It might have taken you a year, it might have taken you a few months. Really, you had to get to this minimum viable product, and from here you probably needed a team to build it. You needed designers, you needed product managers, you needed developers. They built out your initial feature set. And what that— how you determine that, which is part of the product strategy, is, you know, you've done some initial research, maybe some generative research. You've talked to potential users, people that you expect to be your target audience, and you've uncovered maybe their problem, and you've identified areas that you can solve it and that your business can make money. I personally have an app, so I'm gonna kind of use that as an example. So I have a social recipe and recommendation platform, which is like a food app to help people pick what they want to eat for dinner today. And I had to figure out what features people would use to download and use my app. Would it provide value that they would go on and say, hey, I like— this is a cool app, I want to use it, I want to enter recipes, I wanna you know, save some of these things and take pictures and comment on other people's. So I had to figure out which features would need to go into that MVP feature set. After I did that, and none of those even had monetization, right? Like, I didn't think about monetization because I need to get people onto the app so that I can monetize it. That being said, having to think of what am I going to do next Well, I need to start getting people onto the app because I need users in order to monetize. I need users. Let's say I do advertising, you know, much like Instagram or Google or any of the other major products. They use advertising as a way to make money. I have money coming out right now, so I need money at some point to start coming in because I will eventually run out of money if I do not have money coming, coming in, right? So let's say I now need to build that monetization, you know, platform, that area into my, into my app. So that is one feature that's like for the business, it benefits the business. It may not benefit the users as much because say we need to build ads or a way to put ads in there, but it benefits the business. But we also have other feature sets. Maybe we have meal planning, we have other ones that could provide value for the user. And so from this list, or our backlog of feature sets, what we're going to do is prioritize them. So now we need to rank them based on value and effort— value versus effort— and figure out which one of these and schedule them according. Now the size— where, where some of the product strategy gets challenging is depending on the size of your team, You can only deliver so much, and that means you'll either have to deliver at that rate or you'll have to increase the size of your team. Let's say right now it's just me, one person. I can work on one feature at a time. I can— and I have to design and build that feature individually. Now, if I wanted to scale and get, you know, start building more features at a time or move faster, I can hire a developer so I can design they can build, and while they're building, I can design the next feature, right? So the size of our team also influences how fast we can deliver products. This is important because, you know, as we increase our size of our team, we're also increasing our overhead. More people, more cost, more money coming out. So now if we want to ever scale and we ever want to like— we want to continue this job, we're going to need to make money. So now the value of that monetization feature has increased. We need to start making money at some point sooner than later. And if we don't ever build that and ever can't make money, then we're gonna be in a real challenge later on, 'cause we'll have built a bunch of cool features and have a really cool product that makes us no money. And then we'll have to start, you know, making adjustments such as, you know, cutting people and things like that in order to keep our business growing. So that's, that's kind of the business strategy overall, and then some highlights of the product strategy. Now, as you get to different levels of maturities in companies, right, because I've worked at different companies and some were startups, some were small businesses, some were Fortune 500 companies, some were enterprise level, right, all kinds of different sizes where they have more of more surplus of money to kind of build valuable things or are less focused on things, but the value they're bringing from their features still has some, you know, it still benefits the business. And even if it doesn't, even if it's just quality of life, it still benefits the users, which then give you better, you know, quality product, which gets you more people to talk about it and refer it and grow your business and help build your user base. So these are all things to keep in mind when you're trying to figure out the strategy and the plan you want to take for certain features. And one way to kind of help identify which new features or to build that backlog is through user research. Also too, sometimes if you don't know where to look, you might use analytics to help point you in the right direction to do that user research. Um, so that being said, if you combine qualitative and quantitative data, you're really starting to do the right things in order to have a well-informed backlog. Let me break that down a little more. Let's say we are seeing, um, people are, people are like, people are, uh, you know, for wheat, people are starting to use the apps, they're starting to join, they're adding recipes, and they are— they add recipes, but then we're seeing a major drop-off, right? They've added 1, 2 recipes, but that's it. Then we see that they don't use the app for a long period of time. So now we can guess what's going on, or we can do one better, is go talk to some users. Now that's where we may set up some user interviews and say, hey, we saw 'Um, you saw— we saw you've added some recipes. Why did you stop using the app?' Well, and they may say, 'Well, I added the recipes. There was nothing to do. I, I maybe open it to look at the recipes, but that's it. I don't have anything else to do.' That being said, now we can start solutioning ideas to help get people to use it. Well, maybe if you post the food that you made, you may utilize it some more, and you can share share that with other people. So then we, we added posts to our backlog. Uh, what about other types of food did you eat during the week? Well, we went out and we ordered this and this. Well, maybe we add orders to that so you could share that with people. And so we utilize talking to users to help identify potential solutions and features that we can add to our backlog and then prioritize based on value and effort what we should do next. Generally, that's product strategy in a nutshell. Um, how people manage it, right? That's kind of— this is where product managers like manage this. Uh, it's done through a plethora of tools. I've seen companies use Jira, I've seen some use Azure DevOps, I've seen some use ClickUp, monday.com, all kinds of different ways. And then how you track How long it's going to take, it really depends on the methodology your company uses too. I'm a big fan of SAFe, Scaled Agile Framework, where you track your work in sprints and you try to become predictable on how much work you can get done at a certain time and then update according. But really, that goes into like the product management realm of of the product, right? But the strategic part though is, is not just a product manager itself. There's also UX input, there's business input, there's product management input, there's development input, because you still need all those factors. How does it affect the user? Does it affect the business? How much effort is it going to be to build that, right? So these are all kind of areas that go into that strategic landscape. And I do think, you know, kind of circling full circle here, is that you do have to understand that the business is— has to run. It does cost money. And so you have to figure, factor that in too. Because if, you know, a lot of times what I've seen is people want to go for quality of life or just really cool features, but if they don't think about how it's going to improve for the business. Like, you might have a super cool application or super cool, you know, product or website, but if it doesn't make you any money, it's just a cool website. It's— the business won't be able to sustain. And there is that evaluation between business versus user need. And even to that point, even if you make a super cool website and it's bringing people in, that's good. Like, that's good for your business. You do need people to use it, and you want to be creating positive things for, for your users, right? You want to be positively impacting their lives. But as a business, if even like, you know, I'm not saying charge tons of money to do this, but, but think you have to think about the need to keep your business going and how much it's going to cost so that you can keep going, right? Like, and to that, I think there's, there's interesting aspects in terms of like how much you should do and how much you, you know, how much is like extra. Like, should you try to build an app that does everything? Well, probably not, right? Because now you're, you're diminishing the, the, uh, the experience of that app. So maybe you break it out and you might have multiple apps that do different things. And that's why you see some companies have a suite of tools, right? You've got Uber and you got Uber Eats. Um, you might have different ones based on the need. And that, like, if you can run a a company that does well, you can do certain things like that. And then, you know, you might have certain maintenance, like maintenance that you have to factor in. Um, but you might not have new design and things like that. So these are all areas you have to think about from a business and how they impact your product and your spend. Uh, one, just, you know, just talking a little bit more in my experiences here is that You may, depending on your level of maturity too, you can get to a certain point in your business where you have a good product, but you have to spend time getting people to use your product. And that can be done through marketing and other aspects, but like you may not be building something new. So you still, you know, if you have employees that are meant to design, you know, then you need to kind of figure out that strategy too. And that part of your budget of like your marketing spend, your team spend, if you have a physical location, your overhead. So these are all things just to consider in terms of how a company and a business work, how it affects your product, and then how that affects the strategy. So I know I was everywhere. I just wanted to talk a little bit about it. I've been meaning to make this video for a while. I'll probably come back with a lot smaller sections for this, for shorts and other like bite-sized pieces of information. But this was, this is kind of the big, the big picture, the big high-level area that I think is important to know, especially when you're starting to think about product strategy and, and things like that. I hope you guys liked it. If you did like this, make sure you follow for more. Like, comment, subscribe. Stay tuned. I do a lot of talking about UX, business, entrepreneurship, marketing, I'm pretty passionate about the whole thing. So if you are too and you want to come along and give your input, feel free to join me on this journey. Thanks a lot. See you later.