Strategic Thinking Skills for Product Managers are essential – it’s what separates market leaders from laggards. As famed management consultant and author Michael Porter states, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” Product managers play a key role in strategic planning and decision-making. By cultivating strong strategic thinking skills, product managers can steer their products and organizations toward sustained success.
This blog post covers three main approaches product managers can take to strengthen their strategic thinking abilities:
- Adopting a strategic mindset that influences how they view their role
- Learning key analytical frameworks to thoroughly evaluate and understand critical strategic factors
- Fostering creativity and insight to reimagine market opportunities
Sharpening strategic thinking is a continuous process, but deliberately practicing these three areas will lead to better strategy development and execution.
Adopt a Strategic Mindset
Having a strategic orientation means focusing your sights on the broader context and long-term goals. Rather than getting stuck in the weeds of day-to-day tasks, you can pop up your head and take in the big picture. Some key aspects of a strategic mindset for product managers include:
Big Picture Perspective – Get above the noise of current tactics and short-term wins or losses to identify wider market shifts, technological disruptions, and competitive conditions that influence your product’s trajectory.
Future Orientation – Maintain a future-focused outlook that anticipates market needs 3-5 years out and considers how innovations can delight future customers. This longer time horizon stunts reactiveness.
Role Clarification – Understand that as a product manager, you are responsible for strategic product planning, not just feature building. This means guiding the product vision and high-level roadmap.
Holistic View – Consider how partnerships, organizational strengths/weaknesses, and industry ecosystem dynamics intersect to impact your product strategy.
Examples of product managers who exhibit a strong strategic orientation include Jobs (iPhone), Bezos (Amazon Web Services), and Holmes (Theranos…just kidding!). These product leaders maintained a keen perception of where market opportunities would arise and made bold strategic bets to capitalize at scale.
While adopting a strategic mindset starts with awareness, it also requires regularly carving out dedicated time for strategic thinking as opposed to getting trapped. Schedule 30-60 minutes each week to specifically reflect on the long-term strategic concerns outlined above while avoiding short-term distractions. This concentrated effort to “zoom out” trains your brain to habitually broaden the focus. Complement this reflective time with discussions with key leaders across departments to understand their perspectives and ideas. Soon strategic thinking becomes a natural component of your regular work, resulting in sharper product visions.
Learn Analytical Strategic Thinking Skills
While a strategic orientation provides a helpful perspective, we also need analytical frameworks to rigorously evaluate our situations. Strategic analysis gives the raw ingredients for good strategies. As the saying goes “in order to be interesting be interested” – strategic analysis allows us to deeply understand key factors that impact our products.
Some analytical techniques product managers should get familiar with include:
SWOT Analysis: Examines internal strengths and weaknesses along with external opportunities and threats. Helps reveal how to best leverage strengths into opportunities while navigating around weaknesses and threats.
PEST Analysis: Covers the political, economic, social, and technological macro-environmental factors that create the context for your product strategy. Keeps track of emerging regulatory constraints or cultural shifts.
Porter’s 5 Forces: Framework for gauging industry competition and attractiveness through the bargaining power of suppliers & customers, the threat of new entrants and substitutes, and jockeying between competitors. Reveals strategic positioning.
Competitor Analysis: Research not just current competitor products but also their business models, targeting, messaging, partnerships, and resources/capabilities. Generates insight into vulnerabilities and positioning.
Conducting diligent strategic analysis like this fuels ideas and helps pressure test them by revealing obstacles and pointing where the puck is moving. Make sure to question assumptions baked into frameworks and augment quantitative metrics with qualitative observations and opinions from customers and frontline staffers. The goal is strategic insight versus just amassing data for data’s sake.
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Foster Creativity and Insight
While rigorous analysis is indispensable, we also need flashes of imagination to conceive fresh alternatives and visions. In his book “The Opposable Mind,” author Roger Martin highlights that the pinnacle of strategic thinking involves considering opposing ideas simultaneously before forging novel solutions. This ability distinguishes great strategic leaders.
Some ways product managers can spark creativity for strategy include:
- Brainstorming sessions specifically intended to generate spur-of-the-moment ideas without allowing the inner critic to filter prematurely
- Exposing yourself to very different industries and companies outside your bubble to provoke new analogies
- Mind-mapping concepts to make new associations between ideas
- Exploring meditative techniques like journaling stream-of-conscious or taking long walks to invite unforced insights
- Soliciting opinions from employees, partners, or even new acquaintances with distinct perspectives
The goal of such techniques is out-of-the-box concepts that feel inspired rather than incrementalist. Of course, combining creativity with analytical rigor later for stress testing is key. But make sure you carve out time for unstructured pondering. Serendipitous flashes of strategic insight arise when we invite our minds to make kaleidoscopic new patterns out of familiar issues.
Turn Strategic Thinking into Action
With a strategic orientation, analytical diligence, and creative insights in hand, the final step is cascading ideas into executable strategic plans. This stage separates those who merely suggest good strategies from leaders who actualize them. Locking down commitments and aligning stakeholders is hard work but imperative.
Some best practices for activating strategy include:
Clearly Articulate Priorities – Condense swirls of data and opinions into a compelling strategic direction and defined objectives so everyone understands the thrust.
Construct Collaborative Roadmaps – Bridge strategy with implementation via product roadmaps that designate specific initiatives for pursuing key goals. Enlist other department heads in plotting realistic timelines and resource needs.
Communicate Direction – Keep strategy tangible for employees by relating it to their everyday efforts. Show how pursuing non-obvious ideas remains faithful to the core mission.
Embed Flexibility – While strategic plans create stakeholder alignment, they are not holy scripture. Continually re-evaluate in case fundamental assumptions shift or new obstacles arise. Strategy is a journey, not a document.
Conclusion
Practicing strategic thinking is an invaluable skill for guiding products to market leadership. By maintaining a broad vantage point, studying the competitive landscape, and brainstorming innovative alternatives, product managers can create strategies that outmaneuver rivals. However, analysis and ideas alone are insufficient without mobilizing robust strategic plans across their organizations.
As former boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Great product leaders anticipate market left hooks, roll with punches through agility, and ultimately keep pursuing their long-term strategic vision. Adopting the mindsets, analytical skills, and creativity-enhancing techniques covered in this post will have you dodging and weaving toward success.
Additional online resources are available via the Product School blog for deep diving into strategic thinking frameworks. But remember, thinking without doing is daydreaming – only by aligning teams to strategic priorities can we manifest market-winning products. Maintain intense discipline converting strategic thoughts into concrete roadmaps and tasks. The rest will unfold with a commitment to the long-term plan.
