Product strategy is a phrase that inspires awe and fear in many Product Managers - yet having a strategy in place is key for growth.
In her talk, Amy will convince you that you can and should have a product strategy in place for any kind of problem you're working with, that the process of creating one is easier than you think, and she'll share a story about how she's used this process in her work at Spotify.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
One of Europe's top tech companies and perhaps the one that plays in the in the in the major leagues with the biggest tech companies in the world is Spotify. And I've been a customer for I can't even tell you a million years. It feels like a long, long time.
At least a decade, one of my favorite apps, one of my favorite European tech companies, and one that's I think has contributed an awful lot to the landscape across, not just across Europe. You know, if you think about their squads and tribes, for example, that's really been influential in engineering and product teams around the world.
So today, we're going to hear a little bit about how how people at Spotify think about product. And in particular, we're going to hear from someone who was on the stage in Edinburgh two years ago, talking about killing products, which was a pretty, pretty interesting talk on an emotive subject.
And today, she's back to talk to us again. So we've got principal product manager from Spotify, Amy Zima. So she's coming to you now. Hello. Hi. Thank you so much for joining. I'm here to hopefully demystify product strategy for you. Strategy is something that can feel like a completely different world.
It's graphs and total addressable markets and bunch of mumbo jumbo. I'm here to tell you that you definitely do not need a fancy three letter qualification to create a lightweight strategy for your product area. Product strategy is a phrase that can inspire fear, and I've seen a lot of PMs shy away from creating strategy because they don't know how to get started.
Every product manager can and should create product strategy whatever level or problem space you're working in. You're kind of lead, head of, VP. You're probably focusing more of your energy and time into creating strategy, but it's an exercise for every product manager or aspiring product manager.
It's actually a key skill that's pretty unique to the function of product, and there's not really any secret to it. In fact, articulating strategy is just about knowing how to apply the key tools that you already have. You don't need to create a grand strategy for the business, but you can work to bring business strategy to life through product strategy.
That's what you own. You should always have a strategy for your work, because otherwise your choices are just completely random. You're missing the why part of your job, which is so important. And there's a ton of great frameworks and strategy. I do not pretend to be able to distill them down into any perfect solution.
The next few minutes, I'm just going to show you how to use some of the stuff that you probably already know how to do to start to feel much more confident creating product strategy. And I'll show you how I've used this to articulate a product strategy for a problem that I have worked on.
My name is Amy. I'm a product manager at Spotify. I've been there almost three years. And I've been working in that time on the core consumer mobile experience. So basically the Spotify app that you use. Before that, worked at Twitter, PA, and a couple of other startups.
First up, I want to make you understand that strategy is not the same thing as your plan. Your plan or your roadmap it comes from your strategy. Strategy is also not the same thing as goals. Here a lot of people talk of confusing strategy and objectives, not the same thing.
Simply put, strategy is the answers to the set of choices that you have in front of you. It's a framework that you curate to help you make a meaningful plan. Strategy does not have to be the most perfect thing ever. It's so much better to have one in place to guide your thinking than not having one.
In fact, most of the business one on one on strategy will just tell you that most of your competitors do not have a strategy. So when you if you just have something in place, then you already have an advantage over them. Strategy is super key to ensuring that you're growing in the right ways too.
It's a living thing as well. It's something that can be always on. I made up an example to illustrate the point that we need a strategy for any level of problem. This is a completely made up example of a checkout experience. So let's imagine that we're product managing the checkout flow.
We've created a vision that's about customer experience, and we're optimizing for conversion rate. So we've got a bunch of strategic choices at this point. Let's imagine that one of those choices is around payments. What kind of payment strategy do we want to have?
Do we want to optimise for customer choice and offering as many payment methods as possible? Or are there other things that are important to us, like actually less choice is good for our users, or maintenance cost might be a factor that's important in here.
If we jumped straight to this plan, adding two new payment methods, without understanding our strategy, then we've got something to do, but we wouldn't be able to answer why. What other options do we have? It's not enough to have the goal and the vision, and then make the plan, and then fill in the why afterwards, we need to understand what kind of plan we're trying to make.
The choices that we make here, they're the important part because they completely influence the outcome. Without the strategic framework, these choices are just random. Another example in here, we might have data that tells us that our customers are having trouble getting through checkout flow.
There's something going wrong in their happiness here. And we already knew that customer happiness was important to us. When we think about how to apply that to a checkout flow, are we optimizing for customer happiness, or are we optimizing for conversion rate within this?
So what's the strategic choice there? We need to answer a few other questions and gather a few different data points to actually understand what the strategy for the checkout flow is. Is it a speed or a comprehension strategy or a happiness strategy? So in this example, we might have realized that strategically we want to try something different, so we need to test out a new checkout flow.
But what those strategic choices are will completely influence what the checkout flow will be. So just two examples of how having the strategy in place leads us to the plan. The strategy is the answer to the set of choices, then the process of creating it is identifying what the choices are and negotiating the trade offs.
Your vision is where are we trying to go? Then our strategy is what kind of journey do we take? And our plan is how we get there. Daniel Ek, he's the CEO of Spotify, he laid out this vision for the company in a blog post I think back in February twenty nineteen.
We want to become the world's leading audio platform. It's a pretty powerful vision statement and a really inspiring north star for everyone at the business of the company, but it doesn't help us understand what we need to do as teams. At the business level, this was broken down into a strategy for the business.
There's lots of different parts of that, one of which came to us with this wording. It came to us because our team is the core consumer mobile team. I sort of started and ended with this wording: Spotify is a world class podcast product.
Great, but what the hell does this mean? What does it mean for us to be a world class podcast product? Well Spotify could be considered by some to be a world class music streaming app, but it's probably not the first experience that you would think of when you think about podcasts.
You might think about apps like Apple Podcasts, Overcasts, personally use Pocketcasts. What's the one thing that they have in common? Well they're all apps that are only podcast apps, and Spotify is a music app. So that doesn't give us a lot to go on.
When we thought about how to build Spotify out to be a world class podcast experience, there were several ways that we could have approached it. These were three choices that we identified. Each of these has pros and cons, but the choice we made here was going to dramatically impact what we did, completely change the the road map for us.
So we needed to understand what kind of trade offs we need to make here. So how do we go about figuring this out? Where do we what do we do next? Before we start curating a strategy, we needed to make sure that we had the vision in place.
Like we said, the strategy is always in service of the vision, And there's a ton of great resources for doing this. It's not my focus here, but a great vision is an ambitious statement about where we're trying to get to. It should be actionable and inspiring for everyone.
And while the business probably has its high level vision statements, you should also have it in place for your area. You don't need to stress too much about it, but having a vision is really key. For the bit that I control, where do we want to be?
If it doesn't map up to the higher level business strategy, you've probably got a different kind of problem. But you can work with business partners and your team to pull this together. Just make sure it's in place. Okay, so we already have the vision in place for this.
Great. Spotify is a world class podcast product. The next step is to understand the problem and the opportunity by answering questions. If these questions seem familiar to you, it s because they probably should do. This is how you might structure a product brief.
You probably already know how to answer these kinds of questions: who are our users, what are their problems, What's the data telling us? What insights can we derive from that? What are our customers up to? I have used this set of questions to build a product brief about a thing that I wanted to build.
So what do we want to do? And how do we explain why we're doing it? It's completely the wrong way around. Instead, when you're building a strategy, use these questions to put the strategy in place to help you know what it is that you want to do.
So some example questions that we asked ourselves when we were thinking about how to make Spotify a world class podcast product, who are we building for? When we thought about it, needed to be strategic about who we wanted to focus on, to help us understand what kind of basic expectations we needed to meet, and which things to prioritise.
This question is very key to making sure that we're growing in the right way. Are we trying to lure people who listen to podcasts somewhere else to Spotify? Or do we wanna introduce people to podcasts for the first time? Do you wanna create an audience or bring one over from somewhere else?
When you think about the problem, it's really asking who's my user really. You can have multiple kinds of users. You can also have internal users. What can go wrong? Two huge risks that we saw with this were that we could dilute the experience for loyal customers who were expecting Spotify to only be a music app, and we risk losing them as customers.
We could fail to build a compelling user experience as well. So when we were thinking about the kind of strategic choices that we were needing to make trade offs against, we wanted we needed to ask ourselves what could go wrong and how do we address them.
A good way of addressing these risks is to create tests for them. So for example, with compelling user experience, we actually defined what compelling meant to us and used that as a test in our research, in our usability testing, so that we could make sure that it was passing that test.
What's our secret sauce? How do we differentiate? What can we do that other people can't do? As possible, we're very good at personalization, and people trust and love products like Discover Weekly. It's a strength that we have. So when you think about this, understand what your competition can do and what you can do that's unique to them and take the time to add some delight in there too.
You can differentiate sometimes with delight. Alan Loughley and Roger Martin in their book Playing to Win asked, Is the opposite of this also a strategy? And if so, it's probably a great strategy because your competition could viably choose to do that thing. And sometimes positioning yourself intentionally against your competition is a way to win.
They argue. Something that you might not think about in your normal product brief process, which is important to building a strategy from the vision, is to ask yourself what needs to be true for the vision to happen. Just one example to call out here.
In order to reach a certain number of listeners with this, we did believe that we needed to introduce podcasts to people for the first time. There were several other examples in here. I'm just using three for illustration. Okay. So we've we've answered our questions.
We've been through that process. We've got our insights and understood our competition. Now we need to break this down. What are the choices that we have? So we had these three choices. What are the pros and cons of each of these approaches? So with a separate app, this is going to be a great option for speed of getting to market.
We would have a completely brand new slate to build, iterate, learn as fast as we can. The other advantage of a clean slate is that we were completely free to design the best possible user experience that we could for podcasts. We could kind of lean on some of those existing patterns and frameworks for the other world class podcast apps have and build that for us at Spotify, build on it.
Downside of this approach, we would have to find product market fit all over again. This is going to be a great option if we wanted to optimise with people looking for a podcast app. Option b, it still gave us the freedom to carve out that unique podcast experience that's a little bit more closer to what existing world class podcast products look and feel like today.
A little bit harder to build a habit around there. We would have to kind of do some other stuff, employ some other tactics to kind of encourage you to go to the podcast tab, get you to use it, and would maybe interrupt parts of your music flow.
And it was going to be tough to cross promote music and podcasts both ways. Option C gave us the option to introduce new listeners to podcasts. This option was by far the worst to meet our vision statement of building a world class podcast product.
We were not going to be able to compete with existing podcast apps, because we needed to somehow reconcile music and podcasts together. They behave quite differently. This option was going to be also the extremely hard path designing into that, but also building into what is a legacy system.
Spotify is more than a decade old. So a lot to consider. Once we've identified our choices, then we should very importantly intentionally choose not to do everything. This is the part of the process where you consult others, get buy in, iterate on their feedback, talk to users too, if you can.
Which pros and cons are most important? It can get kind of messy at this point, but don't forget that you're only curating the best choice that you can given the information that you have. There's also sort of a few other validation techniques that you can try out here, but don't stumble at this point.
Remember that having a strategy, even if it's not the most perfect one ever, is much better than not having one. So just thinking about the three options that I I talked you through and what I explained about the pros and cons, which of these would you choose?
Separate app, podcast tab, or integrated? We chose the hard path option c. Why the hell would we do this to ourselves? Why would we make our lives this difficult? Ultimately, the most important part of the strategy was the the trade off around two things.
One, the growth, getting people to use podcasts. And two, leaning into what we could do best, taking advantage of everything that Spotify is good at. Our recommendation systems that power stuff like Discover Weekly, if you remember, we could build fantastic new products like your daily drive, which is a this is this should be out to everyone now.
It's a mixed recommended music, personalized music, and news podcast playlist. It's designed for you to listen to around your commute. It's really awesome, check it out if you haven't seen it. Ultimately, we needed to create a new audience and achieve growth, and that was much more important than the pain of the bill cost to us.
What world class podcast product meant to us wasn't the same thing as just copying other podcast apps. We wanted to kind of redefine what it meant to be a world class podcast product. Did it work? There's obviously a lot of different ways of measuring it.
This article is from Nasdaq dot com. And in their words, yes, it did work. What matters in the end was that audience growth, like I said, and we're doing pretty well with that. And there's a whole ton of different parts of the strategy and I only worked on one small part of it.
But hopefully this was a helpful illustration about how the process of identifying choices and making trade offs is not actually that scary, and how you can do it for any kind of problem that you're working on. If you're interested to keep reading this topic, it's fascinating.
Probably the best book on strategy in general that I have read is Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Brumelt. He has this very cool, elegant framework of diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action. And if you want to kind of geek out with loads of tools to try, then Roman Pitchler's strategize book is it has a ton of tools in there and useful frameworks and pretty practical guidance.
I had also mentioned Playing to Win by Martin and Laffley. So to recap, the vision for your area can be informed by other visions and strategies. You do not need to have answers to every business problem. But you will always have strategic choices to make, informed by the vision.
So much better to have a strategy than to not have one. You should never have anything in your roadmap that you cannot answer why to. And don't forget that the vision and strategy inform the plan. The plan's obvious when the strategy is good, and without them you're just making random choices.
Thank you very much for listening. Okay, tons to dig into there with Amy. So let's let's get into it. Amy, thanks for joining us and thanks for that cracking talk. And great to have you back at Turing Fest. Sorry. It's not in person. Some, you know, stuff going on.
So the the opener that you you mentioned, product strategy is not your product road map. It feels like everyone in product talks about roadmaps all the time. And product strategy seems like it's something that comes up a little bit less or actually, to my mind, a lot less.
Is that your experience when you talk with other with other product people? And if so, why do you think it might be? Yeah. Absolutely. It's something that, basically everywhere I've ever worked with, every product person I've worked with, it's this sort of topic that people dance around because people don't know where to get started.
So that was the motivation for writing the talk, because the more I dug into it myself, and the more that I found that I needed to have a strategy for what I was doing, the more I felt like it's actually not that hard, so why is it all, why is it presented to us like it's this mysterious language that you need MBAs to be able to kind of dig into?
There's a big difference between making a kind of big strategy for the company that can kind of change the kind of direction of it, and lower level strategies that you can control. So yeah, it's something that I myself was scared of for a really long time.
So if I can just make any person feel less scared of it, then I, that's my hope with the talk. But curious to hear from people if they think it worked or not. Yeah. I mean, it just seems like such a such a fundamental question for for for any company that's building products.
Something that you mentioned is, yeah, I I really love this identifying choices and negotiating trade offs. That is that the essence of product management? Is that maybe one of the biggest skills to master? Those two those two components, identifying the choices seems maybe the more obvious, but negotiating trade offs, that's got to be one of the key key bits and one of the hardest bits now.
Yeah. Yeah. And I said, I think I said in the section that this is where it gets the most tricky part, actually. It I do agree with you that it's a fundamental kind of part of product management. It's the kind of what is the right tension between all of the different trade offs that you can make.
We talk about it as we kind of bring it to life through the tension between like design and tech or the business and the user experience, but it's also within those functions within the choices that we have. Going one way or the other, the pros and cons aren't always obvious.
So the work in my experience is to get all the data and all the input that you can, but then crucially, to be able to make a decision. And I have myself felt that that's where I have been stuck in the past, like what do I what do I do, but actually making it making that trade off.
Like I said in the talk, it's actually so much better to make a decision, learn from it, and improve for the next time, rather than kind of just getting stuck in not knowing what to do next. There's a question in from the audience around that.
Let me just dig into it. How do you how do you ensure product strategy aligns within the larger business strategy? So when you're when you're making product decisions versus yeah. Oh, this is about resources. And the resources available for product a, if you take those resources, then maybe they're not available for product b.
How does that if you're not a business strategy owner, how do you figure out the alignment internally? How do those fights go? Yeah. I I think that that's, hopefully, it's a happy fight most of the time. I think that, obviously, where I'm advocating that you should have a strategy for your area, what I think everybody needs to be careful of is that that strategy doesn't deviate from the general business strategy.
So there's a part there about just making sure that your stakeholders are your partners on the business side, they actually understand what you're trying to do, that you have articulated a a product version of what they're trying to do, and it shouldn't really be at odds.
If it is, then you probably got some more things wrong, and you need to go back and have that conversation before you can move forward. So practically make friends with those people, talk with them, share what you're doing, ask what they're doing, ask what's important.
And sometimes you can talk different languages as well, but I think the more you kind of learn about what's important to those folks on the business side, the more you can actually power up your own thinking about how you can bring that strategy to life.
Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense. You you so you mentioned vision, strategy, and then plans and road maps. And then you you gave an example of vision from Daniel Ek wanting Spotify to become the world's leading audio platform. So which is an interesting shift from just music to be audio.
And obviously, podcasts have been a big part of that. And from a product perspective, how different did the team find building for for podcasts versus building for music? Really excellent question. Because it's very, it's both the same and it's different. So at the fundamental level, when we think about our product, it's sort of content.
Right? It's stuff you can listen to. And a lot of the time, it's it's really just like a list of tracks. And you can press play on it, and it plays. You can do some other stuff like add it to your library. So it seems very simple on the surface, but when you start digging into the differences between what that content actually is, that's when it starts to get really messy.
So the the biggest change is actually three things. With podcasts, you don't listen to a podcast probably all the way through. You don't kind of sit down and say, have exactly the perfect amount of time to listen that this podcast is. You sort of listen for as much time as you have, and you you need to pause it and maybe come back to it later.
We didn't have any concept of, like, storing your listening and your progress in Spotify. So we had to build that, like, fundamental concept into our playback systems. The second area is that you often you don't finish, so we needed to kind of support the the UX of kind of coming back or picking up where you left off.
That was a new design challenge. And another assumption that was baked into Spotify because of music was the fact that you listen over and over again to your favourite songs, favourite playlists, your favourite artists. A podcast episode it's extremely rare that you would listen to it more than once.
So all of these kind of assumptions about how music work had been baked in at deep fundamental levels into Spotify. So we needed to unpick it both from the user experience and work out how to reconcile it, But we also needed to evangelize internally and advocate internally for why these things were different.
Because like I said, it just looks like a list of tracks on the surface. But once you dig into it, the whole experience is completely fundamentally different. So and I would say that I don't think we have even reached the full potential of being able to make them feel natural and organic.
Think that there's still as much as we have done. I think that there's still a way to go. Just a sort of a personal question, I guess I used to buy I used to buy an album pretty much every week, a CD way back.
And, and now I, you know, I don't even have a CD player anywhere. Albums versus playlists, that that's like one of the fundamental shifts that probably Spotify is really kind of driven. How do you think about those differences? And does either of those help you think about?
Did either of those help you think about building for podcasts? The Yes, super interesting question for anybody who's interested in music. Think my answer is more personal, I think, than the best on anything because I have been working on the podcast user experience.
But I I think fundamentally, there's there's a way of listening for everybody. And what a playlist can do really well is if you're not sure what exactly you're looking for, if you don't know what kind of artist or you don't know what kind of album you're after, then a playlist can kind of be a great way in to a certain mood or genre or in particular to discovering a great new artist or a great new track.
But albums are there, and if you have that connection to a particular album, which can be like a story that's told over a certain number of tracks, then that choice is there too. That's like a thing that you have. So I wouldn't say that I personally or really anybody at Spotify thinks that that one is better than the other, they're just different things.
How they relate to podcasts, I think that we, we had a podcast show and podcast episode is the main way that you listen to podcasts. So we there weren't really any insights that we took from the difference between playlists and albums. We did have a build podcast playlist, which I think is actually an interesting way of thinking about it because we needed to when we were thinking about what a podcast playlist was, it was actually slightly different to what a music playlist could be.
A playlist of podcast episodes that is fifty hours long is not something that you would sit down and listen to really, but it can be quite an effective way of kind of trying something out, finding something new, kind of yeah, expanding your horizons.
So we did think about the differences and the considerations there. But that that playlist is kind of the crossover. It's it's a way of like grouping different stuff together to make a different kind of session. So it's in between both, and I think that that's more interesting opportunity.
The Discover Weekly feature you mentioned in your talk, and I love it. It's great. It's a great way to find new music. And it it it seems, you know, you hear people talk about it as exactly that, like, this one of the ways that they now find find new music.
So it seems like it's a product that's or or a subset of the product that really works. Does so that maybe buys you more trust from users, but does it also raise expectations? And I guess the question is, success make it harder or easier for the next product win?
You know, people will trust you maybe to go to new places, or they're like, you know, this is not as good as the last thing. Why not? Like I mentioned in the talk, I think that those points are actually some of the key insights that we could bring to thinking about what success is and how people see us, like what's our unique place in the market.
So I don't know if those were the questions to answer that it's just something that's interesting to how we had been, how we have been thinking about the work. And I maybe just to say that I agree with you that it's an opportunity to build on.
I love it too. Discover Weekly is my my most listened to playlist. Yeah, yeah, probably probably is for me too. Something that you mentioned in the talk was differentiating with delight. Can you explain a little bit more about what you mean by that?
Yeah, I didn't go into it too much. It's something that I think we can sometimes forget to do just adding a little bit of delightfulness or playfulness into our product for the sake of it. I've thought about this a lot with this is maybe more related to kind of how you think about what an MVP might look like.
And so I think about it a lot there. But it can be something that you think about as a strategy. So an example would be one example that we used to think of was actually an old product. It was, I think, a confirmation flow that you used to get in transactional email.
And the the delightfulness that we added in there was just to kind of add some little animation into the email, which was probably about a week's worth of extra engineering cost to make this thing work. But the impact of that thing being really delightful to customers and just gave them a little bit of a boost when they got the email.
That was an element of delight that we had added in to this. So it's not something that you should be completely optimizing for, but it's an kinda extra cherry on top of what you're doing that maybe is something that can be a word-of-mouth driver for for your stuff.
So, yeah, I guess another example of of something like that is, you know, with with Zoom, what their kind of squares layout did was just really solve a problem that was very easily copied by many people. But because they were kind of the first to do it and everybody loved it, then everyone was talking about, you you have to get on Zoom for the square layout.
So that's an example of like, it's not really defensible as UX, but it's it's something that can just make users feel good for the amount of time that you have it and and can maybe help you get a bit of a head start.
Yeah. It feels like something at Slack is maybe one of the best exponents of in the in the b to b space. Amy, loads of loads of great stuff in there in the talk and interesting, there's tons actually, we didn't get into yet.
But we'll have to save that for next time. We're running out of time. So just want to say thanks for for joining us again. And hopefully, we'll have you back another time and in person and all those things. But for today, thanks very much.
Yeah, thanks so much, Brian. Really happy to be here. So hopefully next time in person, maybe. Okay. Thanks, Amy. Bye bye. Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break. We're back in about twenty minutes, four pm UK time. We have Yara Paoli talking to us about structuring for growth.
Yara is former VP growth at Skyscanner and currently at GrowthOS. So see you in about twenty minutes.
We use cookies to measure traffic and improve the site. You can accept or reject analytics & advertising cookies. Privacy Policy