Painkiller vs Vitamin Strategies
My takeaways about how the Runtastic "social" tribe found the insights that drive their successful product strategy
👋 Hey, Nacho here! This edition of our newsletter is about the latest podcast episode. The next release will bring the Product Vision Workshop, continuing with the vision series.
I interviewed Diogo Novaes, who led the “Social” tribe at Adidas Runtastic. He started with a lot of uncertainty about the team’s contribution to the product experience and value proposition, and they lacked strong input from upper management.
Depending on your product, a team’s mission can be very clear or a bit fuzzier. Going back to the old “painkiller” versus “vitamin” problem, many companies will have across their portfolio teams that are an integral part of their core proposition, and others that add value “around” it. And that has interesting implications for your product strategy.
Diogo shared how he managed to identify and consolidate the right insights to formulate and execute a solid strategy in this context.
My takeaways from this episode
Where to start when your value proposition is unclear? As usual with data :) Partnering with data science experts, you can dig insights and understand how existing users that interact with certain features of your product have a different behavior from the rest. This helps you have an initial view of the value (or lack thereof) of your part of the product portfolio.
(Diogo spent an entire quarter iterating over these findings!)How social products deal with the chicken and egg problem: do we first add social value (features) when no one has connections (so there is a reason to connect), or do we focus on increasing connections even when there is not much social value or interactions built in the product yet.
In peer-to-peer products, there is an extra challenge when analyzing data, because you need to make sure both “ends” of the interaction are active to make it meaningful (sending “likes” to an inactive account has no value).
Another interesting strategic view of “social in running” is really understanding what “this user” (runner) is expecting from “this vitamin” (social features). Diogo explained how topics like the type of interaction, motivations, and privacy concerns shaped the strategy of this vertical that can be otherwise thought of as “very generic”.
For products that add value on top of core solutions, it’s important that the strategic artifacts maintain a high level of connection to their core products, and are shared broadly.
As a product leader evangelizing your strategy, you must be ready to have multiple conversations, not only good storytelling for bigger rounds, but also challenging 1:1s where you need to “convince” people that can be skeptical about the selected direction, or have good questions that “poke holes” in how your strategy is showcased.
Your engineering counterparts usually will keep you grounded when your strategy communication starts to become too “fluffy”.
To give more strategic context to teams, they created principles, and a series of “guiding questions” that teams could use to confirm that what they were doing adhered to the principles. This guiding question are a very strong way to make the usually generic principles more tangible and unique to your company.
If you are lacking strategic context, and you are not getting it from your leaders, that shouldn’t prevent you from formulating strategic choices and present them to your leaders.
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