Product strategy has been on my mind recently. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about ways to think about product strategies, that is, frameworks of thought. I’ll talk about one particular model that I thought about quite a bit over the past few days. I don’t imagine it being an original idea of mine, but I think it is nonetheless pretty interesting.

So first, the framework. A successful product strategy aims to optimize the following three desirable properties:

1. Incrementally approachable
2. Sellable
3. Have a coherent, larger vision

Incrementally approachable means that the product can be built (or scaled/deployed) gradually, in a step by step manner. For some projects, this can mean the ability to build piecewise, from scratch, in a relatively clear order. For others, this can also mean the ability to scale or deploy the product in an incremental way (e.g. ride sharing companies that expand one city at a time). Of course, many products actually straddle a combination of the two.

Sellable is fairly straightforward, it means the ability to sell the product in its present state. This can be actual sales in dollars, in the case of products that are directly sold for revenue, or sales in alternative forms of value (e.g. social currency), in the case of products that are more meant to gain mass adoption to capitalize on network effects.

And lastly, any successful product strategy, for any large scale product at least, should have a coherent vision for the long term future of the product. It is a grand narrative in a way, that ties all the separate pieces of the product together. It helps to align the team that is working on the product in a single direction, and also acts as “The Story” when selling the product to potential buyers.

Things get a bit more interesting when we examine the possible combinations of these traits.

Having 1 and 2, but not 3, results in a product with many fragmented, disconnected pieces. This can happen for example, when companies tailor their strategy based too much on raw customer feedback. Everyone will want something different, and if these requests are not kept in check by some mechanism (e.g. a guiding vision), the product will end up being pulled in various different directions, resulting in an incoherent mess. You will end up building the different pieces that customers want (incrementally, one request at a time), and while the people will continue to buy from you (since you did what they asked), the long term success of the product will be severely hampered.

1 and 3 together, without 2, gives rise to a situation where the product vision can be realized step by step from a builder’s perspective, but the incremental states are not easily sellable. This will typically result in the early death of the project or company, as without the extra income from selling the incremental stages, it’s difficult to have enough resources to get to the final finished product. Most commonly this happens to products where the partial phases/pieces are tedious to build and offer little value on their own, but when everything comes together as envisioned, the value greatly multiplies.

Having 2 and 3, but not 1, will typically result in a non-starter project, or one where it slowly devolves into one of the other two possibilities. This is when the grand vision for the product is there, and the value so obvious that it will most assuredly sell, but there is no clear incremental steps toward it. A typical cause of this situation is an overly ambitious vision that is too grandiose to approach, or too vague to grasp concretely. The lack of the step by step, piecewise approachability also takes away the iterative feedback process, where the vision and direction can be tweaked and refined based on how the initial pieces of the product are received by the market.

So of course we want to hit all 3 of these properties. The “Holy Grail” product strategy that hits the trifecta in this framework would be one where there is a clear, piece by piece ordered plan of building the product, guided by a coherent long-term high level vision, that people are willing to buy even in the incremental “unfinished” state. It seems almost too obvious in hindsight, when stated like that. Exactly how to come up with such a strategy is not easy, and will vary from one product to the next. But I think this model is at least one useful lens to evaluate product strategies.