How to come up with a strategy when you don’t know where to start

I’ve studied a fair bit on how develop a strategy, but most of what I read felt like this:

Well how do I do that?

The steps depend on you to having already precisely defined all your goals, constraints, risks, tradeoffs, vision, and more. They communicate the what without enough of the how. Or they are written about doing strategy for an entire business, but you’re just trying to define one feature. Figuring out how to begin developing a strategy can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re new to a team or spinning up a new initiative.

In my work as a product manager, I have developed a process which has worked for me across several different teams and challenges. The process takes several weeks, but I have found it to be a low-stress, repeatable process which enables me to demonstrate and feel progress all the way along. Here are the ten simple steps that take you from nothing to a persuasive, well-defined strategy.

Step 1: Start a notes document

Every day, jot down a few notes about things you read or learned, and any half-baked ideas that come to mind. This document is a private, messy, judgment-free space for getting you in the habit of writing down your thoughts.

Nov 8
GSS = gift shopping site
What kinds of people buy gifts most often?

Step 2: Get to know your teammates

If you’re new to the team, set up 1:1s with your teammates, leads, collaborators. Show interest in them as individuals and ask them about their work. Focus on building trust. Encourage them to be open about challenges they face in their jobs and where there is uncertainty or friction on the team.

Even if you already know your teammates, it can help to ask them what challenges they and the project have been facing lately. Write down what you hear in your notes document.

Nov 9: meeting with Anna
Plays soccer on Fridays
Isn’t sure how our shopping site is going to compete with UltraShop

Nov 10: meeting with Dave
Product is targeting parents — he has data to back this up

Step 3: Write down the open questions

Review your notes document. You’ll start to see themes emerging. Write down the open questions that have been coming up. Note that these sometimes come up as problems (e.g. We don’t know what to prototype first). Reframe them as questions; it helps make them feel addressable.

Under each question, copy any notes that seem relevant. This helps organize your understanding of the issues.

What should we prototype first?

How are we going to differentiate our product from what is on the market?
- UltraShop?

Which users should we target?
- What kinds of people buy gifts most often?
- Product is targeting parents — Dave has data to back this up

Which teams should we collaborate with?

Step 4: Pick a question

Discussing the list of open questions with your manager and other stakeholders. Maybe some of these issues are already resolved. Maybe some are majorly blocking progress.

Pick the the question that seems to the most important. Here are some ways you’ll know which one is important: leadership cares about it, the team is stressed about it, it’s essential to your product’s success, answering the other questions depends on figuring out this one first. After you address the first question, you can repeat the following steps to address the others if needed.

“The team is worried about differentiation and users need to understand how we’re different if they’re going to switch to us. I’ll start with differentiation.”

Step 5: Audit the options

Figure out what options already exist. Depending on your question, you might be reading about and trying competitive products, gathering ideas for prototypes from the team, reading user research reports, or asking leadership what other teams are doing. Do some digging and write down everything you find.

Even if at first it seems like this information must be obvious to everyone on the team, organizing the information in one place is useful and most people actually only know fragments. This doesn’t require any creative genius and produces your first useful artifact. The audit demonstrates that you’re doing your research, which helps to establish your credibility.

UltraShop: online and brick-and-mortar stores. Huge inventory
Gifty: targets millennials. Bespoke. Online only.
MyGift: based in the UK. Expensive

Step 6: Make comparisons

Start making comparisons from the audit. Look for patterns. Try structuring what you know into a table. How are all the things in the audit similar and different? How might you sort them into groups? Try picking two axes and plotting the items on a graph. What’s missing? Maybe add a few more columns to your table. Now you have some data you can share with your team. You’re making progress.

Company | Target market | Annual revenue | Themes from reviews
…

“Comparing across this table, it looks like Gifty has a niche market and rave reviews, whereas UltraShop targets a broad user base and has mixed reviews”

Step 7: Make judgments

Start making judgments and inferences about these comparisons. In what ways is one better than another? What are the tradeoffs? What’s the ideal state? Answering these questions helps you develop informed opinions about the landscape.

Ask for feedback. If experienced people on the team disagree, revisit your evidence to see whether you might be off track or whether you may have uncovered new insights that challenge conventional wisdom. Either way is progress.

Gifty builds stronger brand loyalty by crafting a bespoke experience for a narrower group of users. It’s not very scalable though.

Step 8: Consider your resources and constraints

This is where you characterize what’s realistic in your current position. What does your leadership care about? What does your team do well? What’s out of scope? What forces or pressures exist in your company and in the market? These can be hard to characterize in the abstract, but it’s easier to focus on the relevant pieces now that you have some context.

Leadership wants us to show impact quickly. User researchers can validate insights quickly. Small engineering team. Pressure to work on AI, but the eng team can’t take on too much technical complexity. Decent marketing budget. Small current user base.

Step 9: Define the strategy

See how your judgments (what would be great to do) are shaped by your resources and constraints (what you can and can not do). Putting these together leads you to what you will and will not do. And that’s your strategy!

The goal is to make our site the top gifting site for parents. We’re going to prioritize building brand loyalty, starting by running in-depth research with current users and experimenting with different marketing campaigns. We are not focusing on scale or AI until we demonstrate product market fit.

Step 10: Share your strategy

Now, not only do you have a strategy, you also have the context and artifacts to justify your position. When you first start sharing the strategy, present it to individual stakeholders as a work in progress and ask them for feedback. This lowers the pressure and gives you space to make revisions if you’ve missed something. Once the key people are on board, then you can share it broadly and solidify it as the plan of record.

If you give this a try, let me know how it goes!