Strategy Playbooks
How to recognize and apply different strategic patterns depending on your level of uncertainty and investment
👋 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.
The key drivers of your strategy can be radically different in nature: are we optimizing on a well-known topic? Are we doing a new big bet into uncharted territory?
Unfortunately, many times we are not conscious of the type of decision we are making, and how this affects the strategy “health,” risk, time horizons, and execution process.
Luckily, our guest in this episode of 100 Product Strategies, doesn’t fall into that trap. Alessandro Pintuadi has a well-established Playbook, that he uses with the team at Amenitiz to balance the strategy and communicate the proper level of uncertainties and how they plan to reduce them.
On top of that, he has a structured approach to uncovering opportunities using a combination of different levels of Jobs To Be Done and Opportunity trees that we explored at length.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
My takeaways from this episode
Alessandro starts by clarifying the company mission and vision. Then, he proceeds to gather insights from 2 sides: 1. Mapping market and competitor’s landscape, and 2. deeply understanding customers needs, mixing a few frameworks.
For example, they use the Opportunity Solution tree framework, which is limited because when doing strategy you can’t focus yet on a single desired outcome, but you can diversify the possibilities and prioritize.
When tackling Jobs To Be Done, they create different layers. For example, the business jobs, the reason for users to hire Amenitiz. Then the grouping user jobs, how would the “real user” (in this case the receptionist) use the product.
By understanding the competitive landscape and users JTBD, they create a customer Journey and are able to see the “opportunities” or problems to solve that are preventing customers from achieving their goals.
Their JTBD Opportunity space is constantly evolving, and being shared across the company. One key area he mentioned was getting input from all customer representatives and sales people: they gather discovery data points that they will directly collect in the tool and map to the opportunities, making the confidence go higher. And also giving them a clear understanding of how they can affect the product roadmap.
They are leveraging a Product Ops team, to streamline and “guard” the standards of the tooling they are using, to make the information accurate and easy to access by anyone in the company.
Alessandro described a rolling prioritization, based on learning through discovery during execution. Yearly strategy stays at a higher level, in the areas of investment, that they prioritize with a matrix including the most relevant dimensions for the user and business.
The playbook: why - spending 2 weeks or 2 months on discovery can be wrong or right depending on the situation you are in. They define it with 3 “categories”, that resemble
New opportunities: risky and costly new bets we don’t know much about. Start by understanding.
Core Development: the objective is clear, iterative approach on a quarterly basis, doing discovery and delivery cycles.
Fast optimization: short term bets without discovery, you build to learn.
Each phase comes with a toolbox: for example for new opportunities can be JTBD interviews, Business plan definition, Surveys, etcetera.
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