Product Strategy for Successful Future Positioning - with April Dunford
Hey! Nacho here. A few announcements before jumping to the episode:
Product Direction has now been published in Spanish as Dirección de Producto. Both English and Spanish versions are 50% off to celebrate the launch! -ending on 27/05.
Applications are open for the June cohort of my product leadership accelerator program (Spanish-only at the moment)
Today’s episode continues the interviews with thought leaders about hard strategy topics. In the past weeks, we released conversations with Teresa Torres, John Cutler, Jeff Gothelf, Martin Eriksson, and Marty Cagan.
So, if you are not a subscriber yet, this is a great time to join :)
Your product vision is a position you aspire to have in the future: be the best solution for a problem a set of customers care about. That should drive your strategy. And I had the fortune of discussing positioning in detail with April, the biggest guru.
We started in a very controversial way: you should not base your strategy on your positioning! Wait, what?
Positioning is an exercise to formulate how your current product is the best for a specific customer need.
Strategy is not about your current product! It is about the value you want to create in the future.
Confusing those can get you in trouble.
But there is a catch. Product Strategy is about “how you will achieve your Product Vision.” However, if your vision potentially goes 3, 5, or 10 years into the future, your 6, 12, 18 months strategy is getting you closer to smaller milestones that still need to be differentiated and sellable!
These milestones have a “positioning thesis,” and your strategy needs to build a product that can deliver on the promise you aim to make.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.