Creating Impactful Products: A Guide to Mastering Product Development Strategy
Great products and services are driven by great product strategy. But too often we get stuck in the strategy part of product strategy, failing to get tangible enough to make insight-driven decisions about our roadmaps.
A great product strategy allows you to uncover tangible insights to drive product decisions that deliver on customer and business needs. The key is to consider the entire business ecosystem—not just what’s desirable from a consumer perspective, but also what’s possible to build and whether it’s sustainable for business.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, we speak with YC Sun, Design Director at IDEO. He shares common challenges for leaders when it comes to product strategy, the keys to building great product strategy, tips and tools for getting tangible with your product strategy, and how to navigate decision trade offs.
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The Key to Effective Product Leadership
Common Product Strategy Challenges & How to Overcome Them
Real-Life Product Strategy Case Studies
What is a Product Strategy?
According to YC, product strategy is the marriage between the strategic, blue-sky vision of where you want the company to go and the tactical, operational day-to-day leadership. Product strategy is a way to bring those two ends together in the form of roadmaps, product initiatives, product priorities, product KPIs, and metrics.
Product strategy allows you to get tangible so that customers and stakeholders within the ecosystem you’re building the product in can feel the impact of your strategic vision. Additionally, it’s a way to align different groups within an organization, including management, engineering, operations, and design, in a clear direction internally.
“Product strategy is the marriage between the strategic, blue-sky vision of where you want the company to go and the tactical, operational day-to-day leadership.”
YC Sun, Design Director, IDEO
The Key to Effective Product Leadership
YC likes to think of product leadership as a hat that anyone can put on to bring in the perspective of considering the whole ecosystem. It’s a role that any person can embody, not just a product manager or CEO. To wear the product leader hat well means breaking down the silos between feasibility (technical and engineering constraints), viability (earning sustainable revenue), and desirability (user and customer needs).
It means answering questions like: Is this technology possible, and can you build it quickly enough? Do you have the runway to get to your North Star vision, or will you run out of funding? Can you get to sustainable revenue and align stakeholders in your organization? Do you understand your user needs and feedback?
It’s easy to over-focus on one part of a product strategy, but being an effective product leader means balancing the three areas, being a conduit between different needs, and making necessary trade-offs.
Learn more about how to design products and services for impact in our 5-week course Designing a Business.
Common Product Strategy Challenges & How to Overcome Them
YC sees two common challenges for leaders, which often depend on the size of the company. In larger organizations with many employees and various products, he often sees product leaders spending too much time on creating a perfect North Star, trying to align all the stakeholders to build something beautiful with the vision exactly defined, but without being in the market and getting tangible early enough. For smaller organizations, he sees the common trap of over-prioritizing a small set of users and focusing too much on individual user interview sessions.
Both problems are extremes on the same spectrum—on one side, you’re anchoring strategy on far-flung visionary ambitions, while on the other, you’re anchoring or being too tactical and reactive to a small set of users. YC says that there’s a big chasm of uncertainty in the middle of these two extremes, and product strategy is about prioritizing impact to navigate that chasm.
“Rather than spend your time trying to identify that perfect North Star product, treat product building as exploratory. ”
YC Sun, Design Director, IDEO
For teams over-indexing on a perfect North Star vision, it can be helpful to build to learn. This gives you the space to explore within the ambiguities of your product. YC says there's no such thing as a perfect product roadmap—instead, a good product roadmap is a practice that you're constantly updating. Rather than spend your time trying to identify that perfect North Star product, treat product building as exploratory. When you build a feature, what is the question that you're trying to ask to the market or to your users?
For teams overly focused on a narrow set of users, it’s important to think about the entire ecosystem you’re designing for. For example, if you’re creating a healthcare product, you might be focused on creating the best patient experience. But the doctors will have their own experience, as well as their support staff. There's a whole ecosystem of less obvious users that goes beyond the patient; if you only design for that patient, you may unintentionally create a negative experience for another group.
“You have to consider the entire ecosystem of who you’re designing for.”
YC Sun, Design Director, IDEO
Real-Life Product Strategy Case Studies And Tips
Creating a mental health resource for California youth
YC talks about IDEO’s work with Kooth, a company that delivers mental health services. The project involved expanding free mental health services for millions of youth in the state of California. With two-thirds of young people reported as having untreated depression, the goal was to deliver mental health at scale in a way that was completely centered on youth voices.
The team knew that behavioral health coaching, where young people had a one-to-one relationship with a coach, was incredibly therapeutic. It allowed them to think about their values, goals, and day-to-day challenges. Instead of thinking of the product they wanted to create, the team reflected on the question they wanted to ask. This allowed them to reframe their guiding question from, “How do we build a product that is a personalized coaching experience?” to “How do we build trust within the platform and ensure that youth feel their unique needs around their mental health are met?”
IDEO and Kooth went beyond basic coach matching and conducted small experiments to test their hypotheses. For example, one of the bigger debates was around whether the product should share a video of the coach in their profile, or if it should be text-based. They went back to the question of trust, and looked into what created a sense of trust. They found that needing videos or photos of each coach to build trust was an assumption and that more important was if the young person felt the coach resembled them and fit them culturally—something that the team found even Apple Memojis could effectively communicate.
Another assumption was that having coaches share their interests, such as sports, would help to create trust and connection. Instead, young people cared more about the values behind their interests. For example, playing sports might indicate resilience and determination. By framing the right question, the team was able to get much closer to the core of what the youth needed, especially around personalized coaching. Through experimentation and rapid prototyping, they were able to work in smaller, faster cycles, save time and resources, and create a better product experience.
“Treat product building as exploratory. When you build a feature, what is a question you want to learn about your product and who you’re building for?”
YC Sun, Design Director, IDEO
Creating digital solutions to combat cognitive decline
Another venture IDEO partnered with is Together Senior Health, which focuses on neurological disease prevention and treatment. With rates of dementia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's increasing worldwide, Together Senior Health created a program clinically proven to slow down the progression of cognitive impairment.
The initial question the team was asked was, “How do we create an amazing digital health program platform for seniors?” The team took a step back to think about the end goal of Together Senior Health, and shifted the question to, “How do we increase the rates of diagnoses so people know and can care about their brain health?” This was a shift from single-user thinking to ecosystem-level thinking. To leverage the whole healthcare ecosystem, the team started talking to patients, primary care physicians, and insurance companies.
After a series of sprints, one insight that the team found was that for a senior with dementia who was told that their neurodegenerative disease was getting worse, they didn’t have the context of what that meant. Did it mean that they needed to prepare something, or tell their family?
Thinking from a patient-centric point of view might lead you to believe it’s an education problem for the patient, and then build educational materials into the product. But from an ecosystem level, we want more people diagnosed so they can take action—and in this case, the primary care physician has the highest leverage because they are the people who are authorizing the workup for the diagnosis.
However, they're also poorly equipped and typically send patients to a neurological specialty. Rather than building an education platform for patients, the team realized they needed to build an education platform for the primary care physicians to teach them to understand risk factors, see the links between brain decline and the patient experience, and have those conversations with them.
This led to a complete shift in Together Senior Health’s product strategy. The original product strategy was about building more sophisticated features for a better community program, with video chats amongst different cohorts of people. Through the process, the team worked to understand the workflows of primary care physicians, map out the user journey with opportunities, and go beyond patients to include healthcare providers.
About the Speaker
YC Sun
Design Director, IDEO
YC Sun leads IDEO’s portfolio in digital health and emerging technologies. He collaborates with startups and Fortune 500 companies to create human-centered products that empower personal wellbeing and unite a fragmented healthcare system. Some of YC’s market-facing impacts include designing the future of clinical trials experience for underserved populations, improving Parkinson’s treatment through wearables and data visualization, and making personal health engaging through digital therapeutics in sleep, mental health, and movement.
Embracing the mindset of a player-coach, YC also shares his expertise as a sought-after conference speaker, workshop facilitator, startup advisory board member, and graduate-level lecturer. He advises executive leaders to define realistic product strategy, navigate the creative process, and enable the right conditions for digital transformation. YC also co-teaches "Design for Healthy Behaviors,” a graduate-level course at Stanford d.school, where students apply design thinking alongside patient-volunteers with chronic conditions to improve their long term health.
If you want to learn how to design products and services for impact, check out our course Designing a Business.
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