Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium TheRobHayes

How to implement a product strategy framework so everyone on your team knows what you’re building and why

You’re the founder or the product team leader in a early-stage startup. You’ve got a product strategy, right?

Of course you do!

You’ve been working with the team, and now you have it all mapped out. The vision for your product has been defined, strategic objectives have been mapped out for the next quarter, you’ve got a product roadmap, and each team member has a list of tasks they are working on this week.

The problem is that all of the elements of your product strategy are likely floating around somewhere in separate documents, Trello boards, sticky notes attached to monitors, JIRA stories, or more realistically, living in the heads of you and your team.

A lot of companies build out their product strategy piecemeal, and this becomes a problem as they start to scale.

Product strategies that exist in pieces are hard to communicate and harder to act on, so they will always require you to spend time managing them.

Save time, lead better

As your company scales, so too will the scope of your product strategy and the amount of work that is required to deliver it. More teams, more projects, a bigger product, more customers, more feedback and even greater ambition will mean that its going to require more time invested in planning and managing all of these moving parts on your end.

As the leader of product development, your goal is the opposite…

You’re trying to equip your team to own and manage larger parts of your process, without the need for you to be actively involved.

The more you can enable others to own and execute on your product strategy, the more time you have to dedicate to other parts of your growing business.

A good framework will mean you can spend less time working on the hands-on execution of your product strategy, without risking your product development going off the rails.

What does a good framework look like?

The fundamental way to manage it all as you grow is to give your product strategy structure and organization.

A framework is a structured communication tool.

Frameworks allow you to take a 1000ft conceptual view of an idea and zoom all the way down into the tangible parts that it’s made of. You’ve used many other frameworks to build your business, so a product framework should be no different.

While these frameworks don’t apply directly to your product strategy, you’ve likely come across them in the process of building your company:

Business Model Canvas/Lean Canvas — these are widely used by startups because it takes the imposing task of assembling a business plan, and makes it approachable by applying a simple structure to it. And when the time comes to share your model with others, it is simple to communicate by visualizing the relationship between your business, your customers and your financials.

Bootstrap — I’m guessing you used this front-end dev framework to build out the first version of your product’s website. Why? Because Bootstrap makes it accessible for anyone with a beginner’s understanding of code to create their own (mostly) beautiful website. They took a cohesive end-to-end product UI design, created structure for it by breaking it down into collection of CSS styles, Javascript functions and code components.

Similarly, a product framework is tool to communicate how your product strategy breaks down from the high-level vision to the day-to-day tasks/stories your team works on.

This gives you a structured way to break down your company’s goals into increasingly tangible steps for your team to tackle. But, before you put in the work building yours, let’s talk about how this is going to benefit your team…

Give your team the gifts of structure, alignment and autonomy

Your product framework will provide your team with:

Structure — by visualizing the relationship between your Vision, Strategic Objectives, Roadmap and Tasks, you will create a simple view of your product strategy that can be easily communicated across your team. With it more easily understand by everyone, you increase the likelihood that they will be thinking about your strategy with every decision they make.

Alignment — your framework acts an agreed upon charter of your team’s goals that everyone should be aligned around, so it can be used as a day-to-day litmus test for all product decisions that are made on your team.

Also, with projects happening across different teams all contributing to the same strategic objectives, this will make it clear where projects overlap so they can work together and limit redundancy.

Individual autonomy — by creating a clear relationship between the vision and the tasks/stories being executed daily, you’re empowering them to make decisions about how to best solve each problem. Provide your team with the desired outcome, and they will give you the best solution to get there.

By equipping your team with this tool to understand and make decisions about your product, product work won’t require you hands-on management of execution and delivery. This will allow you to focus on higher-leverage aspects of your business that deserve your attention.

Applying the Atomic Framework to Product

There aren’t really any universally applied frameworks used for managing your product strategy. A few startups have given us a peak under the hood through their writing.

As opposed to building something new, let’s borrow the Atomic Design framework from the design world. Brad Frost created this concept as a means of creating structure and organization for design systems.

The framework is used to break designs down from high-level page templates, into smaller and smaller molecules like forms and logins, all the way to the granular atoms such as form fields and labels.

A template is a collection of organisms, each which is a collection of molecules, each which is a collection of atoms.

Interfaces are made up of smaller components. This means we can break entire interfaces down into fundamental building blocks and work up from there. That’s the basic gist of atomic design. — Atomic Design

Atomic Design framework in action for Streamloan

In the same ways, a product strategy is made up of smaller objectives and activities, so let’s apply this thinking for managing your product strategy.

The Atomic Product Strategy

How can the framework connect the task of “creating a dropdown menu for commonly used taxes” to your product vision of “removing the pain of invoicing for every small business owner”?

Let’s work through it from of breaking down a product strategy from the top-down —

Vision — Remove the pain of invoicing for every small business owner

Vision — every product strategy should start with a single vision. Your product vision sets the direction for what your team is building and describes what the outcome you are working to create.

Great product vision will clearly define what your product is, who your customers are and most importantly, what value you are creating in their lives.

Strategic Objective — Automate 50% of financial reporting for businesses

Strategic Objectives —a vision should breakdown into a few strategic objectives that define how you will tangibly deliver on your product vision.

Your strategic objectives define your team’s plan of action for how to make your vision a reality. Regardless if you use OKR’s, quarterly goals or something different, these should provide a tangible definition of what you’re building and what impact you intend it to have.

As these are objectives, they should include clear, specific and measurable goals that will help to measure your team’s ability to execute and the success of your chosen strategies.

Realistically, most early-stage startups can only focus on 2–3 objectives at any given time, because if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

Roadmap Project — Automated HST report generation

Roadmap — For each strategic objective you have, there will be a laundry list of projects and features you’ll want to work on to achieve them.

Your roadmap is a collection of interwoven projects/features prioritized to best deliver your strategic goals. It should encompass your product marketing, customer success strategies, business intelligence and all other work required to get a project into your customers hands.

With many possible projects to take on and a limited number of resources, prioritizing all potential product work is important. While there are many ways to run through the activity of prioritization, the goal of them is the same — determine which work will have the greatest impact upon your team achieving your strategic objectives.

Task — Add dropdown of commonly used taxes to iOS invoice flow

Tasks/Stories — For each priority project, they can be broken down into the design, development, marketing, business intelligence, etc. tasks/stories that are required to deliver that project to your customers.

These are the “atoms” of your product strategy — the individual units of work being delivered by team. Most of the time, your team spends their days focused on this layer of your product strategy, and so it can be very easy to get lost in the weeds without understanding how this work ladders up to the higher levels.

Putting your product framework into action

As we mentioned off the top, you have all the elements of your product strategy defined already, so you’re off to a hell of a start.

Now put it to work.

Visualize it — because this is meant to be a communication tool, the best thing you can do is get your framework on paper, and hang it up in the office so your team can reference it regularly. This doesn’t need to be pretty, there are no style points here.

Get a piece of chart paper or use a white board, use some tape to create the pyramid on it, and use sticky notes to fill everything in. Practically speaking, you don’t need to include the Tasks as those change on a day-to-day basis, but you should include your Vision, Strategy and Roadmap.

Use the tagging function in your project management tool (Asana, JIRA, Trello, etc.) to tag each task with it’s parent roadmap project and strategic objective. This ensures that ‘what needs to be done’ always maintains the context of ‘why we are doing this’.

As your product scales, so will the complexity of your product strategy, and the sophistication of the tools required to manage your framework. Look into Aha, Roadmunk or JIRA Portfolio when you get to that point.

Maintain it — your framework is only useful if it is relevant. And, in early-stage startups your plans and strategies can change by the week. So make sure you regularly update your framework so your team has the most current articulation of your product strategy available.

Make this part of your routine — update it prior to your Monday Morning Standup, or your Friday Product Meeting, or after your weekly Roadmap Reviews. Anchor the updating of your framework to a regular event to make it a routine behaviour. It’s like flossing — a little bit of effort now pays off with a lot of benefit in the long run.

Use it — set the example for your team, and actively use the framework as part of your day-to-day decision making.

If somebody on the team suggests a new feature, ask them which strategic objective it is helps to achieve. If an engineer finishes their tasks and is wondering what to work on next, ask them what the next highest priority on the roadmap is. If you demonstrate that you get value from using it, others will soon follow.

With enough use and reinforcement, a good product framework will begin to replace ‘just asking somebody who knows’ as the primary source of product strategy information and guidance.

Save time, keep your team aligned

Because you will likely have all the fundamental product strategy work done, building a framework shouldn’t require much incremental effort to implement and maintain.

As the founder or product team leader in your company, you should always be searching for new ways to empower your team to drive the product forward without requiring your active management. A product framework is hell of a tool to achieve just that.

Have questions about how to get started putting your product strategy framework together? Say hello @therobhayes

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👍 to Tom Creighton and Kyle Lubieniecki for the feedback.

Atomic Product Management was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Atomic Product Management

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