Collaborate on Childcare Invoice Template for Product Management with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Childcare invoice template for Product Management

so this is the product strategy document template you can find it on product pathways on the free free resources um I'll also provide a link right here so you can go straight to it but essentially the document is broken down into three sections so you can think of the first section as really um the state of the market state of the business and state of the product that's the first section and this is all focused on context and diagnosis right so we'll talk more about that in a second the next section is really the meat of the the strategy document which your product principles help you guide towards that but then it's really this area which is our focuses what are those strategic themes and those strategic um priorities that we're going to actually work on and realize our vision and what steps are we going to make and what choices are we going to make and um also our business model and then the last section is really the appendix right so this is anything or a section that you can attach any additional things or additional context that you want to actually add to the strategy document now was no surprise that I actually came up with a lot of these elements before I went and read Richard rumelt's book good strategy bad strategy and definitely worthwhile read a brilliant book but in that book it actually frames a product strategy or a strategy I should say a strategy as three key elements the first one being a diagnosis the second one being a guiding policy and the last being a coherent action and it wasn't a surprise to me that when I started looking at how I was structuring my documents I had elements of all three and this is all about the diagnosis and obviously this has an element of guiding policy and this starts to become a coherent action right and we'll walk through each of these sections in a little bit more detail so let's start with the diagnosis in these three sections so why do I get you to do this why do I get you to think about the state of the market the state of the business and the state of the product well through my own learning around strategy some key elements that make great strategies great is actually context right like how did you come to the choices that you came to these choices shouldn't just happen they should be informed by data and research and what these sections do is it actually creates a forcing function to go and get that data and to do that research so in order to fill out these sections you need to have an understanding a element or a level of data and insight into the state of the market and into the state of the business and into the state of your product too and obviously the more data Rich these sections can become the more informed your strategy is going to be and therefore the more impactful it's going to be right so it creates a forcing function for Discovery the other thing it does is it actually helps create reflection I used to do this because it used to help me I used to find this super valuable for me to sit down and to reflect on things right what is happening in the market what is the research telling me what's the data telling me um has anything happened around my target market all those target market segments um what are our competitors doing um you know what some has there been seismic shifts in the market or anything like that have covid-19 happened or something like that right what we're doing is we're starting with everything that's really external to the company right what's happening outside the company and what are some of those elements that might have an impact on me and my product and what we're thinking about doing the next section makes you start to look a bit more inwards but still not to your product you're still looking across the organization and we do a same activity or a similar activity we start to reflect on the business what's happening in the business is the business growing is it not has it been profitable uh is you know what are the other products doing what is the business strategy today has the business strategy changed how does that have an impact on me and my product right and then finally we get down to your own product and we start to think about well what's the health of the the product how is it actually performing what are our customers doing what are those behavioral things what's our aspirations is our vision still true do we still have the same vision or does that need to be updated or changed we start looking at things like do we have product Market fit are we growing are we shrinking what's our unique value proposition do we have a mode um if if we did have a mode did we lose it is our unique value proposition no longer unique because competitors have saturated the market we start to reflect on you know our own product so we start really broad we start to work our way in now I used to find this really valuable for me cuz this creates the context on which you're going to make the set of choices um inside your strategy that coherent action part um around right like what are you going to base those decisions on since actually working with a lot of product managers around the world and coaching product managers and actually doing this for real with them I've also realized that this reflection Activity Works really well um to get them to think about things they might be missing I've since done this workshop and I've helped company's Implement strategy and help them with this exact thing and even when I train it to and I get them to actually do this as an exercise it always gets their brain ticking right like you can see these aha moments where they actually go through this reflection and they start to like really think about the choices that they're already making and they start to think about their road map and they start to think about you know the current strategy and it really gets them to reflect on that and whether the choices that they've made are actually the right choices and I've had moments where they've really realized oh we're missing something here now that I've done this exercise I've realized that we're really really missing something and we've got to fundamentally change or pivot the way that we're doing something as a result of it and that is exactly what you want that's exactly what you want out of strategy right and this is the hard part of strategy is making those choices and basically getting the data to inform them right so that's the first section the first first section is all diagnosis it's all reflection start with the market start really Broad and external look at the company external to you and then look at yourself and your product last once we have that we now need to actually start to make a bunch of choices and this is where product principles can really come into the mix right so for me Product principles are actually optional so it's up to you if you actually want to use and have product principles but I think that they are highly like highly valuable and very power powerful and they're not leveraged enough in the product world I don't see enough product managers actually creating principles so what principles are they're essentially guiding policies that you're going to make decisions around right so for example up Bank probably has a principle which is that they are mobile first or 100% mobile at today right so everything that they do they need to work within that principle and work within the constraint of it having to be mobile so for example they just launched home loans and they did that 100% mobile so the way that you actually apply for a home loan is a mixture of through the mobile app and some emails right and once they get your contact details they can then discuss with you offline but this is a principle that you're going to basically make some choices around so when you get to doing home loans it's not about you know whether we can or not can't do Home Loans it's more how do we do Home Loans within the principle of being 100% mobile right so this is very powerful because it can help you make decisions around what do you want to be versus what do you not want to be and some of your other principles might be things like and probably more at the company level as I use those examples of whether you're going to do bespoke things for customers or whether you're not and if you set these principles up front then it makes some of your decisions later on a lot easier right so product principles are really powerful I think it's worthwhile doing it's worthwhile having a handful of product principles less is more generally here so don't have 12 principles have like three to five and make them actionable action orientated and what I would really do at this section is I'll actually create dot points of what the principles are I'll give the principles like a short description like 100% mobile or mobile first and then I will actually write a sentence to describe the principle why do I do that well because principles on their own can be left up to interpretation and sometimes we have these one-word principles which are terrible principles by the way or we have like a 2 three four word principle a very short sentence and but it's lacking some of that context and adding that description to the end adding that context to the end can just remove some ambiguity and make it easier to actually interpret and create alignment around those those principles so it's worthwhile doing that so that's how I'll do this section the dot points right the next section that we get into is our focuses so this is the meat this is the bulk of it this is where you probably going to spend well you should spend the majority of your time now this section is called focuses but really these are what of those strategic choices you're going to make and it's framed as strategic themes you can think of them as strategic choice you can think of them as strategic um initiatives or strategic pillars or whatever you want to call it companies call it all kinds of different things but the really the the notion of these and each one of these is it is a strategic choice now your choice is going to then break down into what is it why do we care about it who are we targeting within it how are we going to measure success and maybe even some more details around implementation right so you might actually have some choices around we're actually going to do this as phase one phase two phase three those types of choices now we don't need to get to the end degree of describing every single implementation and design detail but we need enough depth and detail that people can read it and really understand what that strategy is and how things ladder up together the last section we then have before we have the appendix is the pricing and business model section now originally this section was actually contained within the Strategic themes because sometimes we're going to make decisions around pricing around our business model and they're actually going to be strategic choices now the reason why I separated this was because through my coaching and Consulting and working with a lot of product managers around the world I I realized that the commercial elements inside a product strategy were often lacking and missing we were missing out on what are those choices we're making on a pricing point of view what's our pricing strategy um what's our business model how are we going to sustain Revenue you know are we changing our business model do we have a flywheel those types of things um a lot of those elements were lacking a lot of the strategies that I saw were very focused more on the customer and what we're doing for the customer and how do we differentiate and have a unique value offering and they'll lack in that commercial side so I decided to separate it inside the document to really create a force in function to make you think about those more commercial elements so what I want to take you through now that we walk through the product strategy document I want to walk you through an example and I thought I'll use of Tesla obviously this is my interpretation of it it's obviously not Tesla's actual strategy but I tried as much as possible to pull elements from you know actual sources and Tesla's actual sources as well from the blog and stuff like that and from a date point of view we we're basically saying cursa 2006 when Elon Musk wrote that three step master plan blog post right so some of the things we can draw out and how we would actually fill out the strategy document if we were you know following what I talked about in the Tesla example and we talk about from their blog and we think about at that point in time with the company you know when we think about the state of the market some of the things that we were looking at here were like again what's happening right like what's happening in the world what's happening external to the company so some of the things I was drawing here and I tried to pull data so this is from the actual blog there as well but obviously climate change is a big thing so there's an increase awareness around sustainability so if you think about the market and people there's people becoming more aw Ware of sustainability they being more sustainable conscious of you know what type of carbon impact they're having inside the world and we also have that the market is growing um it was difficult to find numbers back in 2006 but you can imagine you would actually go and get those numbers so how much is the market growing year on year it is growing it's a very big space it's continuing to grow today uh petrol Vehicles obviously a major contributor to carbon emissions so that's something else to be considering here as well especially if we're thinking about cars um obviously there's more laws coming in so over the last you know couple of decades there's been increas in laws around carbon emissions and companies needing to be carbon neutral and countries even trying to you know again be carbon neutral as well so those things are coming into it we obviously have the clean energy market so there's a sustainability Market but then there's also the market around you know people who in industries that produce clean energy that's obviously growing so this is an important consideration when we think about batteries and we think about even things like mining right so the cost of some of the minerals and some of the things that we need in order to produce the car or even anything inside this industry that's obviously going to change and the price is going to change as supply and demand changes there as well uh currently from a car specific point of view there is no EV car at the moment um at least there's no Mass Market one so obviously car manufacturers have built electric vehicles in the past but they've always had very low range those types of things hybrid obviously dominates the industry at this point in time um also other important considerations and this is just a good example of when we think externally we're also looking at things like well what's the political landscape so like I talked about the laws before but there's also elements like there there's Government funding so Elon actually talked about the government funding and it's in some of the other posts around that about I think even even if you look at Wikipedia that they actually ended up getting Government funding around theate initiatives as well so Government funding was available and that's something to consider as well when we're thinking about having to get funding and those types of things well we have Government funding available so it makes you know if you think about from a viability point of view around the business these elements help build the case to say yes I think this is viable and yes we can kind of go down this path um another thing I put here as well which I pulled from that that Master Plan blog article was the fact that in order to BU build a more sustainable future obviously we need to find an alternative to those you know ice vehicles or internal combustion engine vehicles and he actually had some data there as well so you can look at like the efficiencies and and those types of things and you can show and at least build a case to say well yes we do need to move away from this and we think that we can actually do something that's going to be way better a lot more you can put in there but you can see the type of thinking that is going on here now from a state of a business point of view I started with the mission and I took it from the 2013 blog article which he said was the same as a decade ago which was to accelerate the Advent of his sustainable transport by bringing compelling Mass Market electric vehicles to Market as soon as possible and that Vision em mission statement has actually evolved and it's become a little bit more uh generic these days we've just accelerating the world to a sustainable future which is what Tesla's mission statement is today but back then they were very focused on Transportation so and very focused on that mass market so I think this is an important important element to bring into the context when you think about the state of business the question is like what is the business goals what is the business Vision what is the business strategy now obviously we don't have full insight into all those other elements but the things that I could pull out and the things that were immediately obvious was obviously they were still small um they were small Factory small company uh they had a high R&D cost because they're dealing with new technology which is something that Elon talked a lot about in that blog post uh they raised $105 million in series B which I think was across four funding rounds but that's $105 million in funding they weren't profitable their revenue was low but they did have a substantial amount of You Know series B funding so this was about 2006 and this is where they were they were sitting from a business point of view now from a product point of view they were still building their first product and the Roadster was only first coming out so you know currently a prototype not really any revenue from what we knew about um no customers or very little customers they were looking at very high production cost needs a lot of R&D they didn't have the economies of scale there was still a small Factory obviously building a car requires regulatory approval he talked about the fact that new technology comes under increased scrutiny and also the fact that being an electric vehicle cannot be its only selling point it needs to be an EV with our compromises which kind of ties into the fact that new technology comes under scrutiny and which could be something that you could put in the state of Market as well as well as that but it can kind of sit in either one I I wouldn't get too caught up with where you put it on here as long as it's somewhere where you feel like it's the most appropriate I feel like these elements are the most applicable to the product itself and that's why I put it here um yeah he talks about like it can't have compromises can't be its only selling point it needs to be the current Alternatives it needs to be way better than as current Alternatives so if you think about this again we talked about how this is the D agnosis section what we're really looking at is well the world is trying to become more sustainable there's obviously funding available to it the market is growing currently there's no one really playing in this 100% EV Market not from an actal viability point of view and we know that we need to do this from a sustainability point of view and if we are looking into the future and want to tackle things like climate change and from a business point of view was really small we know that we're dealing with we got a big hill de Cline we're dealing with new technology that means there going to be high R&D cost uh but we have got a substantial amount of funding but that's funding is not going to go too far because we do have such high R&D costs from a product point of view we've built a prototype we've played with a few things we know that we're leaning towards being able to do something we know that that something is going to incur a high amount of cost but we know that if we do that we can also learn a lot more from an R&D point of view and also take those steps towards getting a you know the next step in economies of scale we know that if we do build a car it requires regulatory approval we know that if we did do something it can't be its only selling point it's got to be able to beat and have no compromises and beat the current Alternatives out there so that is the state of the market and the state of the business and the state of the product and this is our diagnosis you can see we're pulling in data here we're pulling in elements and what we're going to talk about when I take you through the step-by-step process of actually building a strategy what we're trying to build here is essentially strategic narratives a narrative around our strategy and you can see how I kind of talked about a narrative there about sustainability is is growing it's becoming a core Focus it's something that we need to do we must do from a business point of view we got funding but we're staring at this big hill decline so how do we tackle all these elements and that's when we get into the next part when we start to have that set of coherent action that we talked about and actually making some choices we use those narratives in this diagnosis in order to to make those choices so from the next point of view obviously we don't know if they had product principles back there we don't know what those principles were but I actually went on to Tesla's website and Tesla has a set of principles as a company level these are the ones that they have today uh and I thought I'll pull them in just so you can see how this kind of fits and you can see how when I talked about principles how you know you have that kind of you know title and then you have that longer description Tesla does exactly that which is super awesome to see makes it super impactful and removes that ambiguity as I talked about but you could see how some of these elements actually came out inside their actual cards today like this one in particular like make it ridiculously fun you know whilst you know safety is their goal they want the vehicle to be fun they want it to be enjoyable they want it to be different they wanted to have things like gaming and movies and little Easter eggs and more so when you think about this product principle and they actually went and built the car it meant that they invested into these things like they spent time money and energy to build these little Easter eggs that may serve no actual functional value but from a principal point of view it was really important for them to do and it was something that you know defines Tesla and defines them so again this is how those product principles can help guide what you actually go and build but let's get into the next section let's talk about the coherent action and actually come up with those themes so now that we have a narrative and now that we have some data we need to start to think about what our focuses are and I just put down two here cuz I think there was two really key ones that we could see from back then in 2006 and obviously the first one was to build that sports car and now as Elon talked about it wasn't just about building the sports car so this is where you know creating that detail in this section is so important so whilst we may say that the Strategic theme is to build a sports car we might even call it the Tesla Roadster we need to explain why we're doing it what is it why do we believe believe in it how does it support our business you know what are our okrs or how we going to measure success Etc you can have more things in here if you want like who are you targeting those types of things but we want to start to answer these types of questions so the details here are super important because we're not just building a sports car it's easy as Elon said in the blog past it's post it's easy to think or mistakenly think that we believe there's some type of Gap in the market around sports cars no we're going to build a Tesla Roadster it's going to be better than a Porsche Ferrari it's going to have less emissions than the leading hybrid cars today it's probably going to be fun too like you could say that as well right but why are we doing it why do we believe we should well we need to do it because we believe that our first product is going to be expensive no matter what regardless of whether they tried to build an affordable car or not they don't have the economies of scale they don't have the R&D yet they don't have the size again going back to all those things inside the diagnosis and that strategic narrative we don't have those things so we know it's going to be expensive therefore why not build a really expensive car why not focus on the high end of the market and you can see how these choices start to link together and this means that we'll be able to cover the costs in fact we hope and we believe that we don't want to just cover the cost we want to actually be able to make profit we want to be able to fund the development costs and basically make a profit and we know that we need to do this because it's not the end State it's a necessary step towards learning doing R&D and building towards scale and eventually that Affordable Electric Vehicle it supports our business strategy because we're going to basically be able to fund that R&D and be able to make those steps towards it now how to stab it just one okr you can have others but the question you're asking yourself is how do we measure success and I think success here is not necessarily the car itself it's actually generated enough free cash flow in order to fund you know our next R&D project and that's kind of a key result in it you could take the x% of R&D into a key result but we want to basically generate key um free cash flow and we might measure that by you know x amount of sales and x amount of profit which means that we can have X amount of R&D funded all those types of things but ultimately that's how we're going to measure success um on this theme and this pillar now we'll repeat that for other themes I didn't you know outline it all here but the second theme would be to use the profits to fund R&D or maybe the second theme would be something around just R&D in general like maybe they have some focuses like let's hone in on Battery Technology For example and can we just half the cost of Battery Technology we're going to use build-in the Roadster in order to learn as much as possible about Battery Technology so we can half the cost of it cuz we know that that's one of our highest costs and then when we move into building the next car it should be theoretically roughly you know 2third of the cost or less because we know we can have one of our biggest expenses and we can also get other economies of scale um so again objective there being build towards economies of scale key results could be scale production from x amount to Y amount lower production cost from again X to Y Etc but this is what we're doing here and what you can start to see here is we're really starting to you know take these narratives and we're taking you know elements like we're taking the fact that uh all of this right like the mass Market climate change everything all of this points towards okay well let's build a sports car right let's well let's build a car I should say an electric vehicle uh this type of stuff like we know it needs to be you know more sustainable future those types of things point to things like like this like the less emissions part and we look at elements like okay we're not profitable we've only had so much R&D uh I mean sorry so much series B race we have high R&D cost we have a small Factory these things point to well well maybe we do need to do a Tesla Roadster because we don't have that scale uh we know that the first product's going to be expensive we know we need to use that money to fund development costs because we don't have enough cash flow maybe even you know when we crunch the numbers building that Tesla Roadster might have been the only thing that they could have actually afforded with that $105 million right those things also point to the fact that we need to do theme two we need to lower those costs um obviously the the price point here and the profits those things start to link back down to the fact that we have no customers we have no Revenue we want to be able to do that H again you know EV without compromises that links back up to the fact that we wanted to be faster than a Porsche we wanted to be fine that also links into our principle but you can see how these narratives start to work together here the the two things go together diagnosis leads to coherent set of actions our strategic narratives in our diagnosis needs to be the thing that is informing the choices that we're making and the two things need to link together that's probably the key thing about this whole document and probably the key thing about strategy in general here so hopefully you can see how these things start to link together I wanted to just give you this example so you can see how these things link together and then of course down the bottom here we have additional sections like a business model obviously we're just going to do a per unit sales to begin with but in the future would love to do other sustainable products maybe even generate revenue from the charge Network those types of things uh and then anything else you want to attach inside the [Music] appendix so that's it so that's an example of how this strategy document can actually look in practice uh just walk through a simple example that hopefully we can all resonate with and all understand as opposed to something that's very unique and have to give you all the context um so key things to take away from this is the first three sections is the diagnosis and it's all about building those strategic narratives and you can see with all these red lines that the narrative and then your focuses and your set of coherent actions need to link together and that is the product strategy document template as I mentioned before this is the com ensive product strategy document and this is the level of depth that you should really be going into inside your product strategies I hope you got value out of this and if you want to learn more about product strategy check out the product strategy course over on product Pathways where we go through product strategy in detail there's a link in the description to it I hope you find it very valuable and useful I hope you get a lot of value out of it and thanks for watching and thanks for all the support I'll see you at the next [Music] one