Set “Non-Goals” and Build a Product Strategy Stack — Lessons For Product Leaders

Ravi Mehta, former CPO at Tinder & Product Exec at TripAdvisor, shares his framework for crafting a crisp product strategy for startups — a 5-step system called the "Product Strategy Stack." He also makes the case for setting "non-goals" and using an alternative to OKRs.

DO YOU HAVE A PRODUCT STRATEGY PROBLEM?

Before excavating the key pillars of the Product Strategy Stack, Mehta flags a few common failure modes he sees from teams across the ecosystem — from early-stage startups still searching for product/market fit to larger orgs with a multi-product suite. Mehta leans on a set of high-level questions to frame the frequent disconnects between strategy and day-to-day execution:

• How are teams making decisions?
• How are those decisions manifesting in the product?
• Are most decisions aligned towards the short-term? Or are they laddered up to a long-term objective?

He points to three sneaky anchors that might be dragging down your product strategy momentum.

1. Goals ≠ strategy

“Especially today when there’s so much data to work with, I see a lot of teams underemphasize strategy and overemphasize goals — or they conflate the two,” he says. “You’ll sometimes hear: ‘Our strategy is to increase revenue by 5%’ or ‘Increase retention by 10%.’ That’s not a strategy, that’s a goal. It’s great if you can achieve that goal, but only if it’s actually part of a larger strategy that the company is trying to advance,” Mehta says.

2. Product strategy should not exclusively live in the product org.

On the quest for product traction, Mehta also sees product leaders get stuck in tunnel vision. “As companies have gotten more product-oriented and product-centric, product strategy accounts for a really big percentage of the overall company strategy — but it’s not the whole thing. A product strategy needs to fit into the broader ambitions of the company. It needs to plug into what’s happening on the marketing, sales and technology sides. It’s one piece of a broader puzzle,” says Mehta.

3. Good strategy hygiene makes prioritization easier — not harder.

One of the key signals that startups have a product strategy problem doesn’t come from those big roundtable strategic discussions — it shows up in the day-to-day execution level. “The first thing that I look for is individual teams that are having a hard time prioritizing. As part of developing the roadmap, there will be questions such as should we do Feature A or Feature B? And teams have a hard time making that decision, not because of opportunity sizing around those features, but because there’s no context within which they’re making that decision,” says Mehta.

THE PRODUCT STRATEGY STACK: 5 STEPS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

In developing his frameworks to share in his Reforge course, Mehta teamed up with product pro Zainab Ghadiyali to put fuzzy concepts like “mission” into clearer focus. The five components of what the duo termed the Product Strategy Stack include:

Mehta’s strong recommendation is to move through each piece of the product strategy stack in order. “Goals are at the bottom of the stack, not at the top, because goals should come from the roadmap, not the other way around. But that’s not how most companies work.”

How to create stickier products with the Product Strategy Stack.

Mehta sketches out a story from his own product career that illustrates the Product Strategy Stack in action — and highlights how it smooths over some of the most frequent potholes product teams can come across:

“Tripadvisor is an interesting example of a web1 business that has had fantastic durability over the years. The company was started in 2000 and was founded on the insight that people were going to move away from travel agents and make more of their travel purchases online. The founding team realized that if you go into a travel agent's office and asked to book a hotel, you're going to get three different brochures for your hotel options. They’re going to be different prices, but all of the pictures are going to look the same because every single property is going to be presenting itself in the best light. And so the insight at the time was that the internet will allow us to make that decision, not just based on what the hotels say about themselves, but based on the reviews and opinions of travelers all around the world.”

TIPS FOR CRAFTING YOUR OWN PRODUCT STRATEGY DOCUMENT.

Even if your company already has a snazzy website with a mission statement or an annual plan that you think is good enough — Mehta’s recommendation is to start this product strategy exercise from scratch. “It's helpful to take a fresh look at every piece of the Product Strategy Stack, because oftentimes even if a company feels like they have a really good strategy, there may be gaps that the team is hitting on,” says Mehta.

Here are a few tips on how to structure your own slide deck:

• Start with the mission. “The first slide should always have a clear company mission — not how you’re going to execute the mission or measure it, but a clear, aspirational message that folks get emotionally excited about solving.”
• Bring in the customer. “Next, I recommend having 1-2 slides on the company strategy, which is the logical plan for how the company will achieve that mission. It should account for the company's position in the market, unique strengths, and the set of situational risks and assumptions that factor into the plan.”
• Sketch it out. “I recommend having 10-20 wireframes because really good product strategy isn’t broad and vague. It’s big, conceptual and ambitious — but also specific and concrete. It needs to be something that the team can execute.”
• Start planning your roadmap. “List out your next 100 days with the initial sequence for how you're going to start to build towards the north star for what the product looks like.”
• Track your progress. “The final piece is the goals for the next quarter. How are you going to measure progress against your product strategy?”

Who should you bring into the process?

Rather than sticking to a product-only huddle, it’s critical to connect the dots across the org. “Anyone who’s going to be touched by the product strategy — whether that’s design, engineering, user insights, data science, marketing, sales, etc. — should have at least one leader involved in crafting the product strategy documentation.”

Get specific about what you’re not going to do.

“Non-goals. One of the hardest things that happen with these strategy processes is people come with their own expectations about what they want to see from the company and from the product. It’s important to document those concrete choices — not just that we’ve chosen to do A, but also to reinforce that we’re not going to do B,” he says.

NOT A FAN OF OKRs? TRY NCTs FOR CLEARER GOAL-SETTING.

With the product strategy document in place, the next piece of the puzzle is architecting a system for holding teams accountable to what they’ve committed to achieving. The most common framework leaders reach for is OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

Introducing NCTs: Narratives, Commitments, Tasks

• Narrative: “The narrative is similar to the objective in an OKR, but teams are specifically recommended to make it longer. Describe the strategic narrative that the team wants to accomplish in at least a few sentences.”
• Commitment: “Each narrative will have 3-5 objectively measurable commitments.”
• Tasks: “What work needs to be done in order for the team to achieve its commitments and make progress on the narrative?”

Here’s a sample NCT using the previous Tripadvisor example:

• Narrative: “Today, travelers who navigate Tripadvisor using Google are often leaving and re-entering Tripadvisor multiple times in a day.”
• Commitments: “Increase the number of unique savers from X to Y by the end of Q1.”
• Tasks: “Launch new backend saves service.

When it comes to goals and strategy — whether it’s working through your own Product Strategy Stack, or trying out a different approach to OKRs, Mehta’s final piece of advice is to be patient. “Teams want to be great at goal-setting out of the gate. But that’s like going into a new workout program, doing a single rep of a new exercise and then saying, ‘That didn’t work! I didn’t build any more muscle.’ You’ve got to be consistent to really see the effects over the long term,” he says.