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What is product strategy? The short answer is, it’s all the product decisions that aren’t tactical: analytics, onboarding, retention modules, virality features, and even monetization models.
The long answer, though, is a lot more helpful:
When I worked as a product consultant with a top-notch firm, my colleagues and I would usually “swoop in to the rescue” with precise, surgical solutions for clients.
Once we’d implemented our instructions, the product would show a significant spike in the selected goals’ metrics. But our job was easy. 95 percent of the time we came up with tactical tricks that most product managers are not familiar with. Don’t get me wrong. We weren’t fooling anyone. These tricks work and they have that “why didn’t I think of that?” taste to them. So our clients were happy.What’s wrong with that, you ask? Why not implement tactics that would raise onboarding conversions by 20-30 percent or day-seven retention rates by 10 percent?! Because most growing startups must grow an X-times factor and not +XX percent. That’s usually just not enough.
If your product manager is focusing on pushing onboarding conversion from 30-60 percent (even if they succeed) while your average user acquisition cost is 10 times their average lifetime value (and from what I’ve seen, those are the typical numbers for an early stage product), then your problem is not your product manager; the problem is your product strategist… Oh, you never hired (or heard of) one? Well, then I guess that’s on you.
Why most startups fail
Here’s why most startups fail.
- It’s not because their onboarding wasn’t perfect — they probably improved the heck out of it.
- It’s not because their Call-To-Action buttons weren’t rigorously A/B tested.
- It’s…
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