3. Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting a Strategy

This document will walk you through the process of developing a one-pager strategy, a simple yet powerful tool to guide your team and stakeholders. The goal is to create a focused and actionable strategy that aligns with your company’s goals and drives meaningful results. Here’s how you can do it.

Timeline for Developing a Strategy

To develop a solid one-pager strategy, you’ll need approximately two weeks. Here’s a rough breakdown of the process:

• Days 1–3: Meet with stakeholders to gather insights and understand the broader context.
• Days 4–6: Draft the first version of your rationale and strategic direction.
• Days 7–10: Refine the plan based on feedback from leadership and stakeholders.
• Day 11: Present and communicate the final strategy to relevant teams and departments.

Step 1: Interviews with Stakeholders

Stakeholder interviews are critical to gaining insights into your company’s goals, challenges, and priorities. However, it's essential to approach these conversations effectively to avoid simply walking away with a list of requested features.

What Do You Want from These Conversations?

• Understand the current company context.
• Identify the challenges and problems faced by each stakeholder’s area.
• Explore potential opportunities to address these problems through your product.

Who Should You Talk To?

• Focus on leaders in departments that your product directly impacts, such as sales, marketing, support, or any other relevant areas.
• Speak with three to five leaders. Prioritize senior leadership for a more strategic view.

How Should the Conversation Happen?

• Schedule 45-minute meetings with stakeholders and send them a list of guiding questions in advance. Here's a suggested message:

  "Hi [Name], I’ve scheduled a meeting next week to discuss the upcoming quarter. I’d like to focus our conversation on these points:

  • Top 3 metrics your team is focusing on.
  • Top 3 challenges your team is currently facing.
  • Top 3 product ideas you believe we should focus on."

This approach ensures the stakeholder knows what you’re looking for and can prepare accordingly.

Key Questions to Ask

• Metrics: What success metrics does the stakeholder’s team focus on? This will help you understand their performance indicators and remove subjectivity from the conversation.
• Challenges: What are the top challenges or bottlenecks the team faces? Not all problems can be solved through product changes, but it's essential to map out the pain points.
• Ideas: What are their ideas for improving the product? Clarify that you’re gathering ideas from multiple people and that not all suggestions will be implemented.

Handling Vague or Irrelevant Ideas

If a stakeholder presents ideas that don’t align with their own challenges or metrics, respectfully question how the idea connects to the problems they identified. This can often lead to more meaningful brainstorming that produces better-aligned solutions.

Tabulating Your Conversations

Document the conversations using tools like Miro, FigJam, or even Google Sheets. Share your screen during the meeting so stakeholders can see what you’re noting down, ensuring alignment and immediate corrections if needed. After the interviews, review your notes for common themes, patterns, and actionable insights.

Step 2: Gathering Additional Information

If the stakeholder interviews don’t yield enough information, or if you need to dig deeper into specific areas, consider other sources of insight:

• Market benchmarks: What are competitors doing that could inform your strategy?
• Metrics analysis: Look at historical data and performance metrics to identify patterns.
• User interviews: If needed, conduct additional interviews to validate assumptions.
• Industry trends: Stay aware of broader market trends and developments.

Be cautious not to overwhelm yourself with data. The goal is to collect just enough information to make informed decisions, avoiding "analysis paralysis."

Step 3: Defining Your Point of View

Once you have a clear understanding of the problem, it’s time to define your point of view. This step requires you to choose one path and articulate why it’s the best solution.

What is the Point of View?

• The point of view is not the idea itself, but the approach or method you’ll use to solve the problem.
• A good point of view should leverage an advantage—something that multiplies the effect of the company’s resources or actions.

Key Questions to Identify Your Point of View

1. Have we faced similar challenges in the past, and can we apply the same solution here?
2. What are other companies doing to solve this problem, and can we adopt or improve upon their methods?
3. Are there any cognitive biases or user behaviors we can leverage to resolve the issue?

This phase is challenging and requires deep thinking. Block time in your schedule to work on this without distractions.

Step 4: Crafting the Action Plan

Now that you’ve defined the problem and chosen your approach, it’s time to develop a high-level action plan. The purpose is not to outline every detail, but to provide clear guidance on the key initiatives or projects your team will tackle.

Examples of Action Plan Items:

• Complete the integration with internal systems.
• Implement a new CRM workflow for leads who didn’t complete the funnel.
• Develop the first version of the dashboard for new companies.

Your action plan should be broad enough to give teams flexibility but specific enough that everyone understands the direction.

Adding Milestones

For added clarity, define milestones—key markers that indicate progress and help manage expectations. Milestones provide measurable targets and ensure everyone is aligned on what success looks like.

Examples of Milestones:

• For an internal product: "50% of the support team will be using the new dashboard by the end of the quarter."
• For a new product: "Reach 100 daily active users by the end of the quarter."
• For an optimization goal: "Increase lead-to-sales conversion by 20% this quarter."

Step 5: Validating and Communicating the Strategy

Once your one-pager is drafted, it’s time to validate and refine it with others.

Validate with Leadership

First, share the document with your direct leadership to ensure your assumptions are correct and your approach aligns with broader company goals. Leaders can help you spot any blind spots and provide critical feedback.

Feedback from Peers

Next, discuss the strategy with peers to further refine it. Having these discussions helps you spot areas that need adjustment and ensures cross-functional alignment.

Stakeholder Follow-up

After refining the strategy, follow up with the stakeholders you interviewed. Show them the finalized one-pager, explain how you considered their input, and provide a rationale for what was prioritized and what wasn’t. This transparency helps maintain strong relationships and keeps communication lines open for future planning.

Presenting to Your Team

Finally, present the strategy to your team. Walk them through the rationale behind the strategic choices, the challenges, and how you arrived at the final decisions. Allow room for the team to adjust milestones based on what they believe is feasible.

Step 6: Turning Strategy into Action

Once the team is aligned with the strategy, you can begin turning it into an actionable backlog. Evaluate which initiatives require further validation and which are ready to move forward.

Focus Areas:

• What needs further research or validation before moving into execution?
• What can go directly into the development pipeline?

Conclusion

In this guide, we’ve covered:

1. The distinction between vision and strategy and why product managers should focus on strategy.
2. The key elements of a good strategy.
3. The materials and timing required to begin the strategy work.
4. A step-by-step process to create and communicate a strategic one-pager.

By following this process, you’ll be well-equipped to craft and execute an actionable strategy that drives results for your product and company.