Yesterday you heard about the first three of the seven deadly sins of product strategy. Today you hear about the next four. These are the "gotchas" that can all too easily torpedo your marketing plans, if you don't pay attention to the details. And as you well know, success is all in the details.

Sin #4: Avoidance By Delegation: Give the strategy to the 'strategy group', they do all that strategy stuff anyway.

One of the best ways to kill the effort to develop a product strategy is to give it to the 'Strategy Group'. Invariably, this results in several dynamics occurring:

   1. The strategy group feels that they 'own' the strategy --effectively 'disempowering' the marketing and development organizations.

   2. The disempowered marketing and sales organizations provide (at best) cursory input into the process ('Hey, I don't own it, why should I spend a lot of time on it?').

   3. The final strategy has no buy-in from anyone outside of the Strategy Group, and as a result, the final plan is placed on a shelf --and never really implemented.

The reality is that a good product strategy integrates views and insight from across the organization. It also has close involvement by the executive management team (who own the strategy in the first place). It's also critical that the product strategy reflects the overall business strategy. I have seen many times, situations where there is little or no alignment between the business strategy and the product strategy.

So, this is all fine and good if you are a multi-billion dollar manufacturer. But what about the 'little guy'. Someone who is providing print services on a local or regional basis? They probably don't even have a strategy group. But even with small organizations, there is a tendency to delegate the strategy down to a single individual.

Tips: The key is to make sure the product strategy process is inclusive, not exclusive. There are several ways to do this including:

   1. Include everyone who is impacted by the product / service strategy. Form a cross --functional team to develop the strategy.

   2. Ensure that at least one member of the executive management team is involved in developing the strategy. All of the members of the executive management team should be involved in the review and sign-off on the strategy.

   3. Make someone responsible for managing the 'process'. But make it clear that they own the process --not the result. The entire team owns the result.

Sin #5: Perfectionism: We need a little more data, or competitive insight, or time before the strategy is 'perfect'.

Of all the product strategy mistakes, this is probably the most common. Some companies will make the product strategy process endless. They see this as something that will be perfect and which will stand the test of time without change Not a chance!

You will never have enough information for the perfect product strategy. Things will change. Competitors will do something that is unexpected. The regulatory environment changes. It's impossible to predict what is going to happen.

You will have to revisit and modify your product strategy as the year(s) progress. In fact, a good discipline is to plan on reviewing this quarterly or bi-annually, depending on how quickly your competitive environment changes and the market changes. The key thing is to get a plan down that is based upon the best (not perfect or complete) information you have available.

Tips: These are the tips for avoiding perfectionism.

   1. Set a date for completing the product strategy. And complete it by the date regardless of what happens or what information you have (or don't have).

   2. Set a review date for some period out in the future to revisit the strategy. This will take some of the worry out of 'what if it's not perfect and we just keep executing to it?' Build opportunities for change into the process.

   3. Begin the process with the statement, "it's not going to be perfect!" Obtain buy-in and agreement at the start that you will be working with some unknowns, educated guesses, and uncertainty.

Sin #6: Trophy Case Mentality: Okay, we will build this really great strategy, and then come back and look at it in a year or two (meanwhile, it is filed away and no one really pays much attention to it).

If you find that your firm spends huge amount of time building a product strategy, but then that strategy is 'put on the shelf' and not used again as day-to-day tactical demands rule the business; I can tell that you are headed for a crisis. And until you hit that crisis, you probably shouldn't even worry about having a strategy! This might sound a little radical, but let's face it. If your firm is so tactically driven that you don't even look at the product strategy, then you are already in a purely reactive mode. As such, a product strategy isn't going to do much good, and, you are doomed to be driven by your competitor's moves anyway. So why waste time on the strategy?

Okay, so I'm being a little facetious (but not much). Firms that win are firms that have a clearly defined strategy and who are able to force the competitor to react. As Sun Tzu noted in The Art of War, "Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple where the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose."

Tips: These are the tips for avoiding a trophy case mentality.

   1. Tie your new product development process and your financial process into your new product strategy process.

   2. Build a best of breed competitive intelligence organization. This is your 'eyes and ears' to the market and most importantly to competitor's strategies. This can actually be accomplished very cost effectively by leveraging existing sales, marketing, and purchasing organizations. With just a little training and the right incentive structure, these teams can become very effective at gathering competitive intelligence.

Sin #7: Distraction: We are too busy reacting to the [Fill in the blank here. It can be market, competitors, or you name it.] to worry about strategy.

Okay, so this one is closely tied to Sin #6. But it's an important enough point that it needs to be made twice, in different ways. You are never too busy to develop a product strategy. Remember, without a clear product strategy, you are merely reacting to your competitors.

Clearly, developing a product strategy is not easy. However, whether you are a local print service provider or a top manufacturer of printing equipment, a clearly articulated, insightful product strategy can be the difference between winning and losing in the market place. Don't let these 'sins' get in the way of developing an effective product strategy!

In our next issue we will address the foundation of a good product strategy -- Market Intelligence. As always, feel free to email your thoughts and comments to me.

And as always, feel free to email your thoughts and comments to me at [email protected].