Product Strategy questions can be categorised into 3 main buckets:
- Define a company strategy
- Expand to new markets (new products, new use cases of existing products, expanding into new customer segments with an existing use case)
- Building a business on top of a new technology
How to solve?
- Come up with a genuine answer as if you were in the leadership of this company
- Read about the strategies of different businesses by reading recent keynotes from the leadership and develop your own perspective on these strategies
- Always consider tradeoffs
Broad framework:
- Clarifying questions to scope the problem effectively, state assumptions clearly and confirm
- clarify keywords form the question
- timeframe / resource constraints
- Competition: What are their products? What features are different from ours? Where they might be better than us in solving customer problems? Where they might be weak.
- Broader market: consumer trends, macro environment, forces impact supply-chain etc. Apply Porter 5 forces (suppliers, buyers, new entrants, substitutes)
- Our own business
- Product / Placement (distribution channels)/ Pricing
- Strengths, weakness
- Current strategy
- Products on the roadmap
- Tradeoffs
Define a 10-year strategy for Uber?
Mission: Set an ambitious vision: Move things (not just people)
Customer tenets