3. Planning - Translating Strategy into Action

We’ve now reached the third and most anticipated part: how to make everything we’ve discussed a reality within your product. We’ve already covered the company’s purpose, vision, and product vision, and now it’s time to talk about strategic planning.

This section is based on a real-world experience from a company I worked with. It’s not tied to a specific methodology, so the goal is for you to understand, adapt, and apply it to your own context.

Common Challenges in Companies

Most companies face the same set of challenges in product development. To address these, we implemented a series of activities that not only enhanced the team's ownership but also built stakeholder confidence in the direction we were heading.

The key challenges we identified were:

  1. Distant stakeholders: Stakeholders were disconnected from the product team's priorities.
  2. Predefined feature lists: Teams were handed lists of features or told exactly what to build, rather than being involved in the problem-solving process.
  3. Low autonomy: Teams had little autonomy because the solution was often already defined for them.
  4. Speed issues: There was no clear mapping of dependencies between teams, which affected overall velocity.
  5. Fragmented strategies: Product strategies were created in isolation, leading to teams solving the same problem or working with conflicting goals.

Sound familiar?

To address these issues, we collaborated with the Agile, Product, and Design teams to create a governance model that brought more robustness to our product development processes.

Shifting the Mindset

The first step was to shift the mindset of stakeholders. We needed them to approach the product with a clear objective and desired outcomes in mind, rather than a list of features. The goal was to align the business vision with the product strategy and establish clear investment theses to guide decision-making.

Stakeholders—whether business directors or VPs—often know where they want to take the business but don’t always know how to translate that into product terms. Our job was to help them define the product vision that aligns with their business goals. By sharing a unified vision across the entire tribe (or team), we made it easier to address uncertainties and maintain focus.

Key participants in this process:

In my experience, we initially defined this vision quarterly, but for us, three months wasn’t long enough to execute, launch, and measure results. So, we extended the governance model to a six-month horizon while still reviewing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) every three months.

Creating a Governance Model

The first key element of our governance model was to define a six-month vision across the entire value stream, which helped us clarify the business priorities and define where we needed to go.

The second key element was ensuring clarity on the challenges and dependencies we would face, such as legacy systems or technical debt, and what results we expected from achieving our goals.

Another major issue we tackled was the disconnect between stakeholders and the product team. Our governance model aimed to bring them closer together, creating transparency and ensuring their participation in the portfolio process.

We also introduced a dashboard to track OKRs and monitor key indicators. Ultimately, this governance model helped align the value proposition with business and customer expectations, coordinating efforts across teams to act as a unified organization rather than isolated teams.

Redefining Roles and Responsibilities

A significant change we made was giving more autonomy and responsibility to different roles. The stakeholders, who were previously seen as task assigners, were now treated as investors in a startup. They were responsible for defining the vision, purpose, investment theses, and the desired impact. Meanwhile, the product teams acted as entrepreneurs, with full ownership of the end-to-end product development process.

By thinking of the tribe or squad as a startup, stakeholders became investors who set the direction but left the details to the teams, giving them the autonomy to make decisions.

The Planning Process: 3 Key Stages

The planning process was divided into three key stages:

  1. Investment thesis presentation: Stakeholders presented their theses and priorities for the next six months to the entire tribe.
  2. Dependency analysis: Leaders of the tribe identified existing hypotheses, completed discoveries, and highlighted opportunities and customer pain points.
  3. Roadmap and dependency presentation: The tribe leaders presented the roadmap, dependencies, and prioritized initiatives.

This planning process, in a company with about 40 squads, took roughly five days. The first day involved a workshop with stakeholders, and the rest was spent mapping OKRs, defining short-, medium-, and long-term goals, and presenting the final integrated roadmap.

Day 0: The Workshop

The workshop was essential for ensuring that the stakeholder's strategic goals were aligned with the product team's understanding. During the workshop, stakeholders learned how to build an investment thesis and articulate priorities clearly.

Investment Thesis Example: Netflix Payments

Let’s walk through an example of how we applied this model to Netflix Payments:

  1. Area of focus: Payments.
  2. Opportunity: Reducing churn due to credit card issues, focusing on Brazilian customers with low credit limits.
  3. Benefits: Easier recurring payments with a focus on the app, followed by the website.
  4. Business value: Reduce churn caused by payment issues by X%.
  5. Metrics: Churn reduction, active recurring payment customers, total active subscribers.

Final Thoughts

By breaking down strategic planning into clear steps and aligning business objectives with product execution, we were able to create a system that provided autonomy, accountability, and, most importantly, results.

The key to success is ensuring that stakeholders and product teams share a unified vision, giving the team the autonomy to make decisions and adapt to changes while staying aligned with the company’s long-term goals.