5 Practical Tips to Define a Winning Product Strategy & Make Your Competition Irrelevant

Welcome to the latest issue of the Product Management Learning Series - a series of live streaming events and newsletter articles to help you level up your product career! 🚀

In our 25th installment, our speaker was Moe Ali , the Founder and CEO of Product Faculty, North America's most advanced product management training institute specifically designed for senior product leaders. Over the last eight years, he has trained and mentored over 3,000 PMs at the world's best companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Shopify. Prior to Product Faculty, Moe has worked at various B2B and B2C companies, including Apple, Bell, Loblaw Digital and Path Factory.

If you missed the event, you can watch the full event recording here. 

The essence of a strong product strategy is “don't compete, contrast instead”, as seen with the failed launch of Google+ and the groundbreaking success of Chat GPT.

Moe started the talk by posting a question to the audience: why is it that companies with strong network effects, reputable brands, great talent, that set big goals (factors that traditional product strategy books argue are success factors), still launch failed products? Moe shared that what it really takes to launch a successful product, also the essence of product strategy, is don't compete, contrast instead. The best way to build a product is to find the biggest complaint that your customer has for your or your competitor’s product, and build a solution for it. 

Moe shared two examples to illustrate this. The failure example Moe shared was Google+. Google, a very reputable brand, tried many years ago to launch a social media network and failed. Moe mentioned that if you analyze the launch of Google+ through the lens of “don't compete, contrast instead” against your customers biggest complaint, the alternative at the time, Facebook was doing its job just fine.Google+ failed to contrast and differentiate itself. 

Moe then transitioned to a successful example. Chat GPT, an AI chatbot, has taken off like wildfire. Moe mentioned that if you look at many of the segments that Chat GPT is serving: content marketing, SEO, sales, email generation, productivity, essay writing, etc., all of these segments have such big complaints that Chat GPT had the opportunity to differentiate and add value right away. This is even more telling when you acknowledge that Chat GPT’s parent company, Open AI, has never launched a zero to one product. But they had lots of customer complaints that they found solutions to, which was the key to their rapid growth.

Lay out assumptions of the current state of the business and share with your stakeholders to align on a shared worldview to get buy-in.

Moe discussed that when you're a PM individual contributor and want to guide your company's strategy, it can be challenging to have strategic discussions with senior execs. Acting like you know it all is not a good strategy. Moe shared that to get buy-in, it is important to get all of your stakeholders to converge on a shared worldview. So instead of entering a discussion and sharing that you’ve done your own analysis, and discussing what you think the strategy should be, align on a worldview by creating a document and summarize all the assumptions that you have. Clearly lay out who are your customers, what's your value proposition, what are the headwinds or tailwinds, and what are the big complaints. By asking these questions and sharing your initial take, you can get your stakeholders, including senior execs, to debate and align on your worldview, which can later get them to move to the direction that you want.

Flex your influencing approach based on your trust battery level.

Moe pointed out that depending on your trust battery, you may approach influencing your stakeholders differently. If you’ve spent a long time at the company and have built credibility delivering successful products, people will trust you more and listen to you. However, if you are new to an organization, your trust battery is likely low and you will need to focus on getting alignment on a shared worldview (see previous takeaway). If your trust battery is somewhere in the middle, you can start to leverage that “trust cache” (things you accomplished in the past) to propose new ways of doing things, and create a compelling vision to move your organization in the right direction.  

A quick way to build trust is to ask great questions and listen attentively.

Moe shared that a quick way to build trust is to ask great questions. Instead of making suggestions like ‘we should do this and that’, align on key questions and assumptions. By asking questions, you get people to start thinking, and their perspectives will help refine the answers you have in mind and sometimes guide them towards the direction you want them to go. When you're the person asking great questions, you have the center of gravity and you're building trust because you aren’t projecting answers and you are here to listen.

Moe also mentioned that most people fail to listen attentively, because active listening is exhausting and people are often preoccupied with thinking about what they're going to say next. So when you begin by actively, genuinely listening to your stakeholders, you build trust faster and deeper and you can form a more holistic point of view.

Read strategy books, write one-pagers on past product launches, and reference the Product Faculty resources to improve as a strategic thinker. 

Moe shared three practical tips on how to level up your strategic thinking muscle. The first tip is to fall in love with the craft of strategy by building a habit to read strategy books over time. The second tip is to analyze product launches and write your own strategy docs about them. For example, you can write a one-pager on Airbnb Experiences, by doing your own analysis and answering the questions like, why Airbnb decided to build this product? How does this align to their core product? How are they planning to expand? Which segments are they going after? How big is that market? By analyzing launches and writing your version of the product strategy, you can improve your strategic thinking skills consistently. The third tip is access valuable strategy frameworks and explainer videos from The Product Faculty and learn what makes products like Facebook Marketplace successful.

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Additional gems from Moe:

💎 Moe’s favorite product is Focus Mate, a tool for virtual coworking to get anything done. Moe has done over 2000 sessions with Focus Mate! 🍒 Marty Cagan , the author of INSPIRED and EMPOWERED, and the founder of Silicon Valley Product Group, is Moe’s product role model. Moe was inspired by how truly passionate and caring Marty is for building great products. If you are seeking jobs this Spring and wanted to be inspired by Marty, join us for a special product job search discussion with Marty: https://lnkd.in/gbt6veTx  

🍪 Moe’s final piece of advice was to put your egos aside and elevate what your customers are really looking for. Being an egoless PM with a lot of grit is the way to go! 

🎉 Special kudos to Andrew Altschuler for writing this article.

Next up,

• January 27: Developing a Strong Product & Design Sense with Bob Baxley
• February 3: Building Great Products with Data and Analytics with Justin Bauer
• February 10: Better Product-Led Onboarding with Pulkit Agrawal
• February 17: Charting Your Product Career Paths with Tricia Lee
• February 24: Building Enterprise Products & Scaling in Emerging Markets with Karan Anand

🍒 A Special 4-part Product Job Search Series with Phyl Terry 🍒 

• January 26: Never Search Alone with Marty Cagan
• February 2: The Power of Job Search Council
• February 9: How to find candidate-market fit to land GOOD jobs
• February 16: 4 Legs of the Job Negotiations Stool

More sessions coming… subscribe to stay tuned! 

Learn more about the Product Management Learning Series and view past recordings here.