Crafting a Successful Product Strategy: Your 5-Element Framework

As you all know, today we are gathering to learn more about crafting a successful product strategy. My name is Tracy Armstead. I'm your moderator today, and I will be the one manning the questions in the Q&A. Sidebar to your right. Please don't put any questions that you have there, and I'll make sure that we get as many answered as possible. I am currently the Director of Learning Experience and Product at Studion. We just rebranded, by the way, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are a technical services company that designs and develops end-to-end solutions for learning and life sciences clients. I'm happy to be moderating today. Because as we all know, every PM and product leader can benefit from crafting a successful product strategy. Today you'll learn a successful, proven 5-element framework developed by an innovative product leader, Yasi Baiani. Yasi developed the product strategy playbook to launch new aspects of product at Fitbit, then applied it at Clio, launching 2 new product lines and ultimately landing major clients like Salesforce and Pepsi. She'll share her process for determining inputs in order to choose where to invest, how to use strategy building process to generate buy-in, and a recipe for successfully executing your strategy on your strategy. So we'll take questions, like I said, at the end. Feel free to keep asking throughout. And after the presentation and Q&A, feel free to join us for a 30-minute optional networking session. So attendees can connect and learn more about each other. If you don't have any questions, feel free to upvote others in the queue. So with that, I will turn the mic over to Yasi. Welcome.

Awesome. Hi everyone. Thanks, Tracy, for the introduction. And I appreciate everyone joining. This is really great and I'm looking forward to this conversation with all of you. Before we get started, I wanted to ask all of you to follow on different social media if you could, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads. Take pictures of today's conversation, add your own perspective and experiences to your posts, and tag me so I can also share along and just continue to bring the conversation outside of this room and help everyone to understand how to put kind of sound and effective product strategy in place. With that, let's get started. A little bit about kind of my background. I have been a product executive, strategist, advisor to many startups, and investor in some of the startups. But primarily, I have been leading product at companies like Fitbit, Clio, Teladoc, and Athenahealth. And the conversations we have today are some of the kind of strategies and framework that I put in place and tested in those organizations. And at this point, I call them kind of tired and true framework because I have seen results when we apply some of these kind of frameworks and playbook into our work. So I wanted to share those with you, but I also wanted to give you an example of a few places that actually we brought a similar framework into our team and actually put these into kind of practice. One is that basically by going through the same kind of rigor and process at Fitbit, my team and I was able to contribute to growing the company from $745 million revenue to, to over $2 billion of revenue by launching some new categories and marquee categories such as sleep at Fitbit, which then helped to drive sales of the devices. Similarly, we applied same strategy to one of the biggest, most innovative kind of categories we launched at Fitbit called female health. As you can imagine, was not an easy category to launch because of our executives, a lot of them male, could not really relate to the problem of cycle tracking, fertility cycles, and things like that. But with kind of combining some of these kind of framework elements, we've been able to put a strategy in place that was speaking to everyone, and the kind of strategy itself compelled everyone to invest in this category. When we launched female health category at Fitbit, within a month we had over 2 million users. That really showed the kind of interest and appeal from the customer side and kind of embracing that category. And in my last role as Senior Vice President of Product at Clio, I did the same thing. I used the same framework and was able to identify with my team and really cross-functional team. This is a collaboration which I'm gonna talk about of everyone, not just the product team. We were able to identify 2 new categories, one teens category and one adult care or elderly care category, which we then launched them within 2 years. And over 50% of our existing clients bought one or two of those product lines. And when we speak about kind of Clio clients, these are, you know, companies like Salesforce, Pepsi, they have a lot of rigor into making decision to expand to a new product line. And the work we have done around this strategy really validated the need and then allow us put something out in the market that people buy. So with that, I just wanted to share a few of these so you can kind of see how these actually applied and worked in the real world. These are not just frameworks, theoretically. I wanted to ask the audience, why does the product strategy matter so much? I know a lot of you are product leaders, are product managers, are doing this for kind of day in, day out. I would love to hear your thoughts in the chat, why product strategy matters so much. So feel free to kind of share your ideas in the chat. I will give it 30 seconds or 60 seconds. And I would love to hear your thoughts. Yes, for prioritization, planning, defining success metrics.

The guiding light to what you're solving for. Without it, that's a good point. Without it, you have no direction toward success. Without a good sound strategy, you will not be able to stay focused. Intentionality is what we build, engage buy-in from colleagues so that they know we have a targeted plan.

Amazing. Yeah, a lot of great thoughts. And absolutely, you all know why product strategy is important and we all resonate. That's why you're, you're here, which is super exciting. I just put a few of those here, which I always think a clear product strategy is really critical for the teams, not only just product team, but honestly, it will bring the whole organization together. It will allow you to set the North Star. It will allow all the teams across the company to row towards the same direction. And that's really important because a product strategy in silo or a product strategy that product team launched, but the rest of the organization are not aligned with, it will not take you that far. So it's really important to build that, you know, cross-functional alignment and help everyone row towards that North Star. It will allow you to unlock, identify and unlock multi-billion dollar opportunities for your companies. And it gives your team focus. What I always say is a good and sound product strategy not only is important to help the team to start focusing and delivering what matters, but it also allows you and your teams to focus on what not to do. What are the things that your team will deprioritize in order to achieve this big North Star goals that you set? Okay. So these are some of the benefits of the product strategy. And let's talk about the 5 elements framework that we're going to talk about today. And let's just understand what are each of these elements. First of all, I put the vision in the middle because the assumption here is that the company already has its vision crystallized. If there is no company vision and clarity on that, the first thing that a product executive and leader should do is help CEO and the founders and the rest of the executive team to really align on that vision. Because our assumption here is like, that's clear. And with that, we build a product strategy that can support company vision and strategy.

But look at the—

let's look at the 5 elements. What is customer voice? You know, of course, like we can do a variety of types of customer research. We can get out there and talk and interview customers or prospects. We can do concept testing. We can do surveys. What's important to understand is customer voice can come in a combination of quantitative or qualitative research. I actually recently wrote a blog post for Women in Product, which I encourage you to go and check it out. And there I link to UX research methodologies. You see the range of topics around voice, customer voice, and the ways that you can collect this information is actually pretty broad. It's not just always interviews. So it's important to understand where quantitative or qualitative research you use and where you use behavioral versus attitudinal research to be able to observe what really resonates with customers and whatnot. But if we only focus on customer voice, we are missing a lot of other things that we need to consider in order to bring a sound strategy to the market or to the, you know, to the company and kind of launch the product and bring them to market that actually are effective. For instance, market trends and size. You know, it's really important as product strategists we understand where the consumer mindset and trends are, what are the B2B decision makers are doing, what are the trends in the B2B world. And also, we don't want to get ourselves into the kind of categories and areas that are kind of losing the wind behind them. We wanted to ride the waves and position ourselves to be best kind of taking advantage of those. For instance, right now there's a lot happening around AI, so we want to kind of ride that tide versus boxing ourselves in the category that is a dying category or a consumer trend that is not attractive anymore. So understanding these are really important, but also understanding your market size and the opportunity size is also critical. So that's another exercise I encourage all the, you know, PMs and product team members to do as they're thinking about feature, category, product line opportunities and come up with that strategy. Data. Again, data come in many different ways. One of the ways you can look at the data is looking at your own product data and performance. If you're launching a new product line, you can, you can look at the existing product lines of the company and see how things are performing and how would you expect the new product line to be different and shape some hypothesis around that and incorporate those into your strategy as you're presenting it to other people. Also, you can get out there and talk to other PMs or other product leaders in the same industry and understand how their products are performing. What does a good engagement look like in their industry? What does a good activation look like in their industry? And again, shape some of those hypotheses as you're putting together your strategy and your story. Competitive landscape, that's also critical to understand and incorporate as part of your strategy work. I always say that it's important to be customer obsessed, not competitive obsessed. However, this doesn't mean that you should ignore competitors. It's really important to spend time to understand their strategy, their approach, the kind of direction they're going. So hopefully you can build a product strategy that gives you a moat and competitive advantage over time. And ultimately, internal stakeholder voice. What does that mean? I always joke that everyone has an opinion about the product strategy and product direction in the company. That's kind of a good thing, but also a challenging thing, right? As product executives, we need to manage that. We need to make sure we hear everyone in the company because what I've learned over time is everyone has great ideas. So I wanted to hear all of them pretty constantly. I don't want to miss any opportunity that anyone internally could have. Also, executives in the company have different perspective and see the product and direction in different lenses. For instance, your head of operations, they have different expectation from the product team and what the product should do and could do. They probably are focused on building internal tools and operational tools that help their team to be more effective. On the other hand, your engineering team may have other asks and hopes for where the product go, or your CEO may have very different perspectives. What's important as part of this strategy work, you want it to get out there often to hear your internal stakeholders, incorporate those into your decision-making and the directions that you're defining, and make sure you align everyone so at the end of the day everyone can row towards the same direction, right? So with that, now we know what are the components of the framework, and I wanted to tell a story because as product people we are all storytellers and story will resonate with us well. So I decided to pick just one example. This is one of the earliest times that my team and I went through this framework. And I wanted to walk you through the experience. Many of you might be Fitbit users, and you have probably experienced activity reminder and hourly goals on your product and on your app. So let's talk about it to see how it all came about. First of all, start with a vision. Fitbit's vision from day one has been very clear and states true throughout the time that I worked there. And I still think even today, Fitbit's vision is to help everyone live a healthier, happier, and more active life. With that vision and goal, a lot of times as product team, when we were evaluating ideas, we try to tie it to this and see if we are serving our members', you know, goals, if we are serving our company's vision as we are building this new big categories. Okay. When I, you know, start digging into our customer voice, one of the better places at Fitbit that we can see that was our forum. We had passionate group of users with a lot of ideas and asks. Our forums were active. They were putting requests out. And for many, many months, the number 2 request that our customers and users had was to bring idle alerts to them. And when we dig into the kind of request, it was like basically an ability to inform them that you've been sitting for a long time. Get up and move. This was really intriguing for me, and I was really surprised that none of the product people or other people in the company have taken any action about this. But when I dug in more, I understood why they didn't, and I'll tell you this is part of my story. We also look at a lot of other kind of data points from customers, but here I just include one example from each of the elements of the framework to hopefully help you to see how each of these pieces will help you to make decision and put a strategy together that's compelling. I also partner with our R&D team and say, okay, what are the trends we are seeing? Is this like getting people moving even attractive? We saw yes, there is a lot of headline and coverage around sitting is the new smoking. And when we dug in deeper on the kind of clinical research, we saw there's a lot of clinical research to support the fact that if you're sitting for long hours, We actually increase our cardiovascular risk. We have higher chances of diabetes, or our metabolism will slow down. We gain weight. And there's all sorts of kind of validation support the fact that if you move more often during the day, you can actually benefit from that. And the research supported that you don't need to walk for hours per day. All you need is to, to kind of break your sedentary time every hour. by walking about 200, 250 steps. So we thought that's easy, we should be able to do that. That's not a big kind of ask to help ourselves to be more healthy. And it's very much aligned with our kind of strategy and our vision as a company. Also, when we look at our data, despite the fact that everyone, especially early days of Fitbit, thought— people thought internally, but also there was an external assumption that Fitbit users are very active. These are like athletic people, they're active people. But when we look at our data, it shows something different. Yes, majority of Fitbit users do some activity in the morning or in the evening, but a lot of them have been sitting for long hours during the day. I think it speaks to almost all of us, like we all have that lifestyle, right? And this was really interesting for us. So we realized that if we help people to move every hour, We are not only serving a small group of people, but a majority of our users can benefit from that. We also look at our competition. At that point, our competition, biggest competition was actually Jawbone. And they didn't do a good job with their idle alerts. That's where when I initially, you know, shared the customer request, that's where they get the idea. Like they call it idle alerts because that's what Jawbone called their reminders to move. like idle alert, but they didn't have a screen. They would remind people after an hour to move. Because they didn't have screen, it was very confusing to people. And after we dug in more into forums and the data that was shared publicly, we realized that it's actually not an engaging experience for members. They really get confused with that. There was no ability to customize the timeframe that you need to be active or no gamification around that. So we know our competitor is not doing a great job, but somehow still members want this. And when we look at the internal stakeholders, I went and talked with our CEO who was very product-driven and our head of product about this idea. So I said, all the hypotheses and information that we collected support that we should launch a version of idle alert or reminders to move. And what the feedback we got back was that this is totally off-brand. How do we make something that's negative, sedentary time and accumulating the hours that you're sitting, something positive and fun? Everything else at Fitbit is motivational, fun, and positive reinforcement is a big part of our experience. How do we make this to be on brand? And they felt like because the competitor offering has such a negative feedback in the market, we won't be able to do something different and positive either. So they were concerned about the frustration that we could cause for the members. But we still had pretty strong conviction because we knew that multiple other parts of our framework is really supporting that there is a there there.

Okay?

With that in mind, I got the permission to do some testing around this concept and close the loop with our executives pretty quickly to say, do we move forward or not? They gave me green light for doing that. They said, if you guys did all the work, and it doesn't impact every other project, you're more than welcome to further test and bring data. And that's what we did. My team and I actually packaged all the products. Our R&D team partnered with us and prototyped various devices. And we sent these out to members to test. Let's see what were the prototypes look like. These are the old Fitbits. And this is where, you know, we were testing and sending prototypes out. This is multiple years ago. So we prototyped 2 types of experiences because we didn't know what will resonate with people. We had an assumption that because Jawbone experience is frustrating because it buzz members, you know, within an hour, it's not clear what they're buzzing for, there are other also reminders that was showing up on the devices. We actually just had screens on Fitbit devices. So we said, let's put a message on the device. And rather than randomly, you know, buzz people, our hypothesis was like model A or version A should work better. 10 minutes to the hour, if you hit your 250-step goal, great. We'll just, you know, leave you alone and give you a star in your app. If we— if you didn't hit that goal, we'll remind you with some message that it's time to get up and do some, you know, walk. And if you react to that and, you know, complete your 250-step within that hour, you get a, you know, reward or, you know, something positive. Because again, we wanted to build in that, you know, reward mechanism into the experience. But we said, okay, let's also do another version. What if we every 60 minutes buzz them, but with some messaging on the device so it's much more clear? We also thought that, you know, variety of messaging and fun and playful messages is important part of this experience. So that's all of the things that we incorporated into our prototype and testing. We packaged the product, send it to users. We also recruited users from a wide range of backgrounds. We, you know, recruited people who are very sedentary and have sedentary jobs like bus drivers or people who barely move. We recruited some people who have desk jobs and have, you know, more flexibility to move. And we recruited people who are very active. So we wanted to see if this is like bothering them if they get this type of messages on their device because we don't want to have negative impact on our core for users. So with that in mind, we also started doing some design testing because we wanted to visually also help people to react to this and do what's best for them, which is moving a bit every hour. And what we learned very quickly as we were doing design iteration, and I had an amazing design team in at Fitbit who partnered with me on this, we learned that something like this, even though it's powerful, is very scary. People didn't want to say see their sedentary time accumulating over time. But on the other hand, this other version of the design, which give people star and encourage them that, yes, you did something great, was very much resonating with people. We also start testing a clock-type model and design that, you know, every hour you hit your goal, you see that you're kind of filling those, you know, stars every hour. So the design got more refined and refined over time. When we finish our testing, both the visual components and the kind of prototypes that we send, we got surprising results, which it spoke for itself, and all of our executives couldn't argue this anymore because 55% of testers gave positive feedback to Model A. They said, this resonates, I love it, it's gamified, it's fun, I can get up and do something good for myself. And 90% of them said they want Model A on their devices. Even the active people. So the survey results came really strong, and we saw some anecdotal fun comments on the qualitative information that people included in surveys. For instance, someone said, "I love this feature. It's great excuse for me to walk away from conversation with my wife and say, 'Sorry, I have to go get my hourly goal.'" And some people walk away from meetings and say they have to go get their hourly goal. The bottom line was people found this is playful. This is fun. fun and it's actually working. But we didn't stop there. We look at the actual data that was sent to us by our devices to see, did these people actually get up and walk? And did we really change behavior? Behavioral change was a very important effort that we, we worked on at Fitbit. And I can say that this was one of the most effective behavioral change features that we launched at Fitbit. And as you see, this is from the test results, but this was actually when we launched the product and launched the feature with— for all of our users. But majority of our users sit pretty long, uh, you know, minutes. Um, the most they sat was about 190 minutes. This is when we send them just devices and we start testing the, the reminders to move. It dropped to 120 minutes, um, on average. And after we take survey, which was an extra intervention, right, because we didn't want to just launch survey with the actual launch, but we do want to have reminders. When we took away the survey, you see the impact of the behavioral change stayed. It didn't go up back again for them to kind of sit much longer. So when our executives saw the combination of qualitative results, survey results, the data about behavioral change, I remember that day very vividly that they said, we hold off one of the device launches for 3 months. This feature will go on that device and every other product going forward. So it became a must-have. Not only for our basic products, but also for products that was actually targeting athletes and more athletic users. So this was like a really exciting and interesting experience for our team because more than anything, it really showed how you should have conviction and how you should go after kind of proving your hypothesis. Don't just stop with the first no. But how you go about doing it is like utilizing this framework. And this is really how it actually ultimately changed the behavioral— behavior of users when we launched that. 70% of people moved more, 60% kept their activity higher, and they, on average, they stepped 450 steps more per day, which may not sound about a lot, but is actually quite a lot for people who are very sedentary, which was the majority of our target, but again, major, you know, most of our clients, most of our members could benefit from this too. So hopefully this will give you just one example and flavor of how you can put this framework together. Look at all the 5 elements, listen to your user, pay a lot of attention there, but also look at the data, market trends, what the competitors are doing, what they're not doing so well. Maybe you can do things differently, look at the alternative, you know, solutions in place, and ultimately try to align stakeholders internally by collecting all of this information. With that, I would like to open up for conversations, questions, or anything that you all are interested.

Oh, thank you so much, Yasi. I learned so much. In just a short amount of time. I see that we have a lot of people reacting in the chat, but I do— let's see, I actually have some questions. I don't know if anyone else would like to add their questions, but I'll get us started. So how do you think of advisors or experts' voice How does that fit into the framework?

Absolutely. That's a great point. I think there are 2 ways that we can think about that. I'm actually working with a startup who are building products in HR category and they brought multiple HR leaders from different organizations as part of their product development process. They're actually getting that feedback, so they are technically bringing customer voice very closely into their product development. process. So that's one way to think about it. The other way to think about it is, for instance, like, you know, companies have advisory board, they have clinical board. I myself put advisory board in place for sleep at Fitbit. Those people, those experts, again, were a close partner with us. You can kind of think of them either as customer voice or internal stakeholder voice, depending on what's the structure of their involvement with the organization. But they are critical. And I really encourage, as you're thinking about how to collect some of this information to think about the experts in the industry that you can have, advisors you can bring on board who have expertise, and they can shape your view and your strategy with you. But then when you quote them, when you rely on their point of view, has a lot of cachet with your executives, with your investors, and give you a lot of conviction because they have a lot of intimate understanding of that particular category.

Nice, thank you. I do see a number of questions now in the Q&A. Would anyone like to come up on stage and ask it themselves, or I would be happy to narrate any of these questions, but, you know, always best to hear from people directly. Okay, I'm gonna grab one then. This is coming from Alexa— oh, Erica. is on the stage. So how about we start with you and then I'll read a few after that? Erica, I think you're here. I don't see you though, but I think you're on stage. Can you hear us? Would you like to ask your— oh, there you are.

Hi, sorry, I had to allow permissions.

I apologize, I didn't do that ahead of time.

No worries.

My question centered around your timeline. Right. It's really easy after we finish something to say, hey, these are the steps, this is how successful it was. What did your timeline look like on how you broke up with when you were researching, figuring out your answer, maybe cultivating feedback from a couple closer friends internally before you talked with leadership? And then also your customer testing, how long you took to evaluate the data and then getting leadership buy-in to kind of your final plan to roll this out to a Yeah, that's a great question.

Let me answer it in kind of multiple ways. One is like this particular project, you know, and when we have ideas like this, when you take it through this framework, first of all, there are a few things to think about, ideas and features and categories versus products versus product lines. So the effort will change as you go up that chain because like the investments that you need to commit will probably be bigger as you go into a, you know, product or product line versus feature or category. So with that, this kind of counted as a feature or category within Fitbit, right? So we moved fast and we were evaluating, building other things simultaneously. So it wasn't like all of our time was going through this, but it was about a month or 2 that we were evaluating, doing the kind of easy stuff like competitive work, the kind of hypothesis, market research, things like that. We've done it kind of as we were doing other projects for a couple of months, myself, R&D, we partner up and did that work. So we built our own conviction first. And then when we kind of shared some of that with our execs and still had some resistance, we start building, you know, the prototypes and ship it. So I forgot exactly how many weeks we did the prototype at scale because like we had many that we had to send, but the actual test itself, that when we send the prototype and watch the behavior was about 2 months. And then we kind of had the data coming pretty real time. So we pretty much have everything ready. by the end of that and schedule that, you know, exec meeting to get the green light for kind of moving forward. So I would say like in total, I wanna say about 3-ish, 4 months at the max, but like was while we were doing other things and then we kind of built our conviction for this one.

Thank you so much.

And one more thing around that, just one more thing to add. When, for instance, at Clio, when I initially create the product strategy, depends on how much foundational work has been done that you can kind of rely on. as a product exec or as a product manager versus you start kind of from scratch. And again, if it's like for product line launches, you probably wanted to do more work. This doesn't mean it needs to be longer. You just need to kind of stack some of this work better. And what we did really successfully at Clio, we assigned different types of work to different people. Data team was bringing data to us. Marketing team was doing the competitive research. You know, everyone was doing their part to bring us all the, you know, picture we need to be able to make decisions.

That's really helpful.

Thanks.

So wonderful. I know we have one more person waiting to come up on stage. I did want to grab one of the more popular questions in the chat, and then I'll bring you up on stage. It's, how do you determine— this is from Alexa— how do you determine the type of change outcomes you're trying to make for customers?

Can you expand on that a little bit?

Alexa, would you like to come up on stage and maybe talk about that a little more or type in the chat? Here she is. Hold on.

All right.

Hey.

So yeah, so like where I was going with that question is like in your example, you walked us through like a measurable outcome you were trying to achieve for users, right? I saw like a big red line at the top and then you showed the drop at the blue line. You're like, look, people are moving now more or something. So when you're thinking about like an overall strategy for a product and what those outcomes you're trying to drive are, like how do you go about Determining those outcomes or those behavior changes that you were talking about, and then also prioritizing them. Because I think this was a great example of one feature or product and a use case, but I feel like the conversations I enter the room in are, okay, but why this over that? Or why this behavior change over that behavior change? And trying to show how it's all connected. But I think that story can be a little challenging to tell sometimes.

It is.

Absolutely.

It's very similar to what I mentioned before. When you go about like making this a whole product strategy, it becomes a lot more complicated because you have more competing priorities. So I think the way to think about it is, first of all, start with problem, like understand your customers really well, like understand what problems you're solving for them and where are you lacking. And there might be opportunities. You may not— your product may be not lacking in any area, but you have 4 new category opportunities or product line opportunities ahead of you. that you and your executive team and the rest of the organization is considering. So the question is like, how can you take those big opportunities that actually solving your customer problems through this framework and then be able to like compare them against each other? So that's one way to do it. Like then it starts, it should start giving you signals where the opportunity is stronger. Talk to your customer, look at what competitors are doing in that area, look at how this could change your business trajectory. You know, like put those in the framework and then compare them against each other. Another way to think about this is like all of those big kind of opportunities, how are they moving your business and the OKRs, the key OKRs that you're trying to move? Like, because some of the categories you may be considering may really help with retention of the customers. Some might help with expansion of customers. Some things may help with activation or engagement. What are the big problems you're trying to solve for your customers? Like if engagement is a problem, how can the product team solve for that problem? Again, it still needs same framework. It needs to go through the voice of customer, understanding all of those, but then solutions you have, you need to consider and say, okay, which of those solutions will move that needle, will help us to achieve that goal, right? As a whole. And it then ties to some extent also to the vision and company goals and things like that as well. which then you kind of— the product strategy crafting is a bit more complex, but the similar aspects should absolutely help you to do that. And if you have questions, you're like actively thinking about some specific topics, feel free to reach out to me. I'll help you to kind of go about the process. Cool.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I'll get off the stage now for the next person.

Thank you. Appreciate you coming up. Okay, I'm bringing you up now. Thank you for waiting. Are you still with us? Okay, well, um, while the other person's waiting, I'm gonna read another popular question in the chat. So this is from Mariana. How do you manage the framework across a large SaaS product when there are many areas of the product that each have their own priorities?

That's a great question. Again, because it's easy when we look at a snapshot of something, but we all know the sausage-making in product department is a lot more complex. So I think that there are 2 ways to think about it. One is at the kind of product strategy level, One is at a team or feature area or OKR level.

OK, Mariana.

So as a, you know, head of product or CPO in the company, they go through similar exercise, like put some of the strategy in place. They definitely bring some of these aspects together to kind of say, OK, these are the things we are moving towards. These are the areas we are investing in. These are why we are doing that. And these are the things we're you're not investing in as much, right? But then within that kind of North Star in mind, each team has their own hopefully OKRs and clarity and mandate, right? Then you should also go and— our team was very much of a team within a much larger product organization when we were doing this work. Our mandate was like helping people to like bring wellness to people. So, right, my team mandate at that point was that ultimately I start overseeing all of our software experiences, but At that point, we were very much focused on wellness category. And with that, we had a lot of different ideas, like weight management ideas. We had mindfulness and meditation ideas. And as we were kind of taking each of them through this framework, we were like, does this make more sense or the other one? Which one should be of higher priority? Which one do we think it will help us to move our OKRs better? Which is like back to data. Which one creates more engagement? So you go through the same process with the mandate of your team, but the same framework should help you to kind of prioritize across, you know, your team. And then you need some processes, like that goes back to the process across organization, your product development process, how you, you know, understand and identify dependencies that you have. So it gets a bit more complex when it gets to actual execution. If you need depend— if you have dependency to other team and you need them to also put this as a higher priority on their roadmap so you can deliver. So from that perspective, in the execution, if, you know, depending on how your teams are structured, it could be a bit more, you know, challenging. But still, like, in terms of should we do this or not, it should give you a pretty good sense going through the same framework.

Great.

I have another question. What would be the best way to differentiate Strategy versus tactics or a plan.

Yeah, I would love to hear a little bit more from the person who put that in because I was looking at it. We can take that to many different directions. Like, do you want to add a bit more context in terms of what's top of mind for you so I can better help answer that?

Again, feel free to type in the chat if you don't want to come up on stage. If you can give us some more clarity. A number of people upvoted it, so I think it's of interest to many people.

Yeah, and, and anyone else wanted to chime in and come on stage also? I'm curious because I can answer that multiple ways.

Um, okay.

So I can, I can maybe help answer it.

Okay.

And let me know if this addresses the questions that you have. First of all, a couple of things. Everyone should think about any small feature or any small improvements strategically, while also be tactical and execute and do that. That's always what I share with my teams. What do I mean by that? Because any small kind of reaction event we have or reactive build or small investments should be vetted and the whys need to be answered very well, right? So like the 5 Whys, if you go through this, like, and the 5 elements, you go and say, you know, does this specific tactical improvement meet some of the goals we have? Does it help us with the strategic investment or vision work, basically? Does it help the customer? voice? Does it help customer problems? Does it help with, you know, our competitive advantage? So even for small things, tactical things, I think it's important to do that at a much smaller level. You know, if it's something small, you just like spend an hour trying to respond to these things in your own head and maybe in your PRD or in your epic that you're writing. Of course, when it gets bigger and it gets more complicated, you need a much bigger elaborative strategy work. So that's one way to think about that. Did that answer the kind of the questions that you all had? You can say yes or no in the chat.

Thumbs up, thumbs down, anybody? Oh, we can move on if you want to give some thought to that. And yeah, feel free to follow up.

I see this.

I do see something. Uh, here, uh, from anonymous. Uh, yeah, just typing, sorry for the delay. Okay, in our org we have a lot of different products, but they don't feel connected to something. Leadership has come up with a strategy, and that's in quotes, but it feels like a concept.

The strategy?

Yeah, and then there was also, how do you best— oh, I think this is a separate question. Sorry. Okay, so yeah, that's— I think that's an explanation for that question. Um, I do have someone waiting to come on stage, so, um, maybe we should move on and come back to that a little bit later. Here we go. This is Jessica coming up on stage.

Awesome. Tracy, thank you. So the question that I had was, what are the ways to measure success? So in my organization, we actually are struggling to define what success is. We do want to adopt OKRs, but there's so many different aspects that we could measure. I think maybe my question is in 2 parts. So how— what's the best way to measure success? And then the second piece is, What should we be measuring? Because I feel like we originally had 50 things that we wanted to measure, and I don't think that's an effective way. How could we kind of narrow that down to maybe 3 things? Value success metrics?

Yeah, that's— I've seen that before quite often. So I can tell you a few things that hopefully you can, you know, also share with the rest of your team and make things easier. I think I've never seen Unless like you're Microsoft, you're a gigantic team with a lot of project management, with a lot of rigor to help kind of, you know, manage that whole process. But, you know, like smaller companies, like more than a handful of OKRs and KRs that you're trying to move, it will not be effective. So it's really important, especially when you get to the team level, they need to have their objectives very clearly. So one team is either responsible for moving engagement, or activation or NPS. Like, you want— like, sometimes you can have 2 things. You can increase engagement and you can increase NPS, right? But if you're responsible for all, or if you're not clearly responsible for any, it's much, much harder to actually effectively make decisions, right? Because, like, again, when you're in that idea mode, then you don't know what data you're trying to move, what KPI or KR you're trying to move. So it gets really hard. So that's one thing. Just make sure you're very clear on the mandate of the team and then try to narrow down the OKRs. And ideally within a team level, and I'm happy to, again, take this offline with you to better understand your team size, your team structure, but at the team level, you generally want to have one objective, maybe 2, and then there should be a few KRs tied to that, that you measure it. If you have 15 KRs tied to that objective, you probably set it in a way that is very hard to see if your team is moving the needle or not. And if you have too many Objectives as a team, depending on what size your team is, again, that could not necessarily allow you to effectively measure what you're moving or you're not and actually prioritize and work on things that you need to move. So my short answer is focus. Try to focus both on Objectives and KRs. But the best way to measure them is through the OKRs.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. And OKRs should tie very well to the business OKRs, like top-level OKRs. So you start from there generally and then kind of trickle down to the team level.

Yeah. So just another question, a follow-up question to that. So my team, how it's structured is a little bit interesting. So my team level is kind of on the bottom. We do have like the overarching, which They do not have OKRs, and I'm trying to start them from our product level. So I think it's a little bit difficult. I think, I guess what you're trying to say too is I should probably be maybe reaching out to the higher strategy team to kind of build out what those umbrella OKRs are so that I can kind of cascade down into my team, make it easier to find that stuff.

Ping me on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to help with you. And there are a couple of documents I'll send you to help you with kind of understanding their bottoms-up and top-down. You can build strategy. One way to go bottoms-up is to have from OKRs start kind of work your way and kind of go that way. But you need to have some buy-in and some support from other people to actually in practice your team can effectively do that. So I'm happy to kind of take it offline and better understand the situation and help you to, you know, champion for them.

Okay, fantastic. Well, I'll reach out.

There's a related question on the chat from Victoria about what if your team doesn't have OKRs, isn't very mature with success metrics, and even less with North Star concepts? Where would you recommend starting and what steps to go through to set up for success? So it sounds very similar to the last question, and perhaps Victoria can reach out to you as well.

Yes. Or do you have some more to say about that? Yeah, I think generally speaking, yeah, it's Those are some of the good best practices that product leaders generally put in place. Try to have some North Star, try to have some clarity on OKRs. But I know that that doesn't happen for many different reasons in organizations. It's not easy. I'll just tell you short answer, it's not easy, but that's best practices. And yeah, Victoria, feel free to reach out to me to see if I can help with kind of putting some of that in place or champion for some of those changes.

That's great. Let's see, I think we have a few more here. Do we have time to do a couple more? Okay, so this is another one from Alexa. Do you have any examples of strategy on a page? I don't know if she addressed that earlier, but strategy on a page, communicating overall strategy and the direction you're heading to a team or broader organization.

It's like a one-pager for strategy.

That's what it's sounding like.

I don't have one, but it's an interesting one to put in place. I can definitely think of one. I typically, when we do this exercise, then the output of it is a strategy presentation doc that we put in place with my teams. But I'm sure like we can kind of think about at least a presentation deck that has some framework that hopefully you all can kind of fit in things to that or like a one-pager. So let me think about that. We are planning to do some follow-ups on this conversation, so I may be able to put something together and then kind of share within the channels that Women in Product has.

Wonderful. One more. How did you improve— this is from Punita— how did you improve this feature after it was launched on all other Fitbit devices? Also, did your strategy change when competitors were coming up with similar features? Move feature in the Apple Watch?

Yeah, great question. So there are a couple of things. One is this particular feature, we, given that we went through such a rigorous process to get to the green light, similarly with women, like female health product, some product, some products and categories at Fitbit and other organizations have been, there's a lot more alignment. So you move faster to get the MVP out and then you iterate. For this particular one, and I think hardware is a little bit different, some of you who are familiar, the bar is generally higher. We bring something to the, to the product versus purely software because there's less chances for iteration. And when you launch a hardware product, you launch this marquee category feature, which then helps sell the device. You can't really launch them twice, right? You can't have like a very MVP. So we did a lot of testing in advance. And by the time we brought it to the market, we had like pretty, you know, good conviction that this is a good experience. There have been a bunch of things we wanted to do to expand the opportunity, but honestly, I feel like what all of us feel at, you know, uh, product teams, like you always move to the next big thing and you never kind of come back to do the— some of the, you know, um, thoughts that you have for that, you know, feature or category or product line that you launched. So we never kind of went back and did a big rehaul on that. We add some capabilities to it, but not a big rehaul. And when competitors came, I think like some of that was like, you know, similar experiences. We never went back and changed anything, you know, in the core of that particular, you know, reminders to move. But it is a good thing to do, like thinking about what is the next generation of that. But again, in hardware is a little bit, a little bit different. Like you just kind of move on to the next big thing to then have like a big announcement. And then some of the things that we had, you know, like for instance with sleep, we had a lot of other types of investment we did just because like it either introduced a brand new, you know, metric or a brand new category that helped us to identify people who have apnea if we can measure their oxygen level. So investments always competed against wellness category within those things. So that's where kind of we decided to, you know, allocate more budget. But it's always, I think it's a best practice to go back and try to improve, you know, your launch and your product or category or feature.

That's great. We have one more person I'd love to bring up on stage. Here we go. It's always a lag. Well, maybe not. Okay, uh, one more. I'm gonna grab one more question, then we can, uh, wrap up. Um, okay, this is a good one. Monica, what's— 2 questions actually, but what's the recommended time frame, 3, 5, 8 years to draft a strategy? How do you best visualize and share your strategy with stakeholders, i.e., artifact or roadmap?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it depends on what category and product you're in and how much predictability you have and how much change you have in your market, right? It's very hard to for most of the products I predict out like 8 years out, but for very innovative, very, you know, revolutionary products, maybe you need to work on them for 5 years. So you need to have that, you know, vision 5 years out. For instance, for hardware product, we had our roadmap and, you know, top priorities 3 years out. Of course, like any other roadmap and strategy, things that are closer months would have more opportunity to change, but you lock out pretty much marquee features and the product attributes for the hardware 18 months out, and everyone worked towards that. In software world, you know, your roadmap altogether maybe go out for 12 or 18 months out. Everything beyond that is, you know, it's very much up to change. So it depends on your category. I personally never put out, you know, roadmap and strategy beyond 3 years. I think most of the things I worked on were kind of bucketed under software. Even sometimes coupled with hardware at Fitbit, it was still like software. So like 18 months to 3 years is like very much, you know, like longest I have done. And again, like things that are beyond 12 months are always more understanding from either B2B clients or your consumer that there's more chances to change. And another thing to notice is like when you put a product strategy together, that's then what dictates your product roadmap. In consumer world, we don't necessarily change our roadmap with our users, but in B2B, you do change, you know, you do share your roadmap with your clients. So some commitments and some obligations are created by that. So there's some delicacy to pay attention to there. But to your other question, in terms of how do you share this, you know, I think the best way to actually get strategies like this take off the ground, especially if you're doing it for the whole product department, for a product line, something much bigger than a feature, is to to involve other people, even within Fitbit, in the work that we have done. R&D was involved, research team was involved, our hardware prototyping team was involved, software team, design, everyone. At Clio, the same thing, data team, marketing, product, clinical team, collaboration among everyone. So involve people early so that they feel like they're part of the process. They're just not getting the answer at the end of the process because it's much harder to then buy into that. The second thing in terms of the artifacts, again, when I've done the product strategy, we then crystallize some of this information into slides and start sharing with the stakeholders. And then that is our product strategy doc. And then out of that, we'll create a product roadmap, which then will basically lay out what needs to be built over time within the next quarter and 2 or 3 quarters out, and then 2 years or 3 years out. to then execute on this strategy and North Star.

What a great way to wrap up. There are a few lingering questions in queue and we will try to address them after the event. Thank you so much, Yasi. I did want to ask everyone that's attending today to please fill out our survey. As Yasi just mentioned, surveys are important. We want to get your feedback and we want to constantly improve. Feel free to just click on that survey link, give us your feedback, and we'll continue to keep making these great events. I can't tell you how privileged I feel to be sitting in this session. I've learned so much today, Yasi, and just looking forward to following up with you and learning even more. Thank you so much today. It was a great presentation. Just giving you a little round of applause.

Thanks everyone for joining and making a conversation engaging and fun. I appreciate that. And thank you, Tracy and team, for making this happen.