Product strategies are known as a crucial part of developing and roadmapping a product. It ensures that your product launch is smooth and targets the right audience. But what exactly is product strategy and how do you create one?

In this guide, we’ll explore:

What is a product strategy?
The importance of a product strategy
Key components of product strategy
8 types of product strategy
How to create a product strategy?

What is Product Strategy?

A product strategy helps you define a vision for your product and provides a clear blueprint on how you will achieve that vision. It defines how you will achieve your vision and execute the product roadmap.

When you design a product strategy, you consider aspects such as:

Your target audience and customers
Your unique value propositions
Your vision for the product
Problems your product solves
Distribution methods you will use

With these aspects in mind, your aim is to find a differentiated way to solve user problems and stand out in the market. A good product strategy can shape your product roadmap.

The Importance of Product Strategy

Product strategy is often overlooked as most developers jump into product roadmapping instead. However, it’s more practical to start with a product strategy first.

Let’s understand why:

Product strategy provides clarity.

A strong product strategy can help you define your vision and the roadmap to get there. When you’re designing the product development plan and roadmap, such clarity is immensely important.

Product strategy helps you get perspective on broader goals.

Creating a vision is easy, but tying it to your offer is another stage. If you have endless features on your app and you need to define the one to achieve your vision, a good product strategy can help you align the product with your vision.

Product strategy defines your place in the market.

Market research and competitive analysis are two of the biggest components of product strategy. They aim to help you differentiate your product from your competitors with a ‘differentiation edge’.

If you know where your product stands in the market, you can easily determine which path to take. In addition, it can help you create a more reliable product development strategy.

Key Elements of a Strong Product Strategy

You can think of the product strategy framework as three core levels: vision, goals, and initiatives.

At the highest level, we have the product vision. It typically involves the goals that you want to achieve and the problems you aim to solve with your product. In addition, you need to clarify how your product will achieve this vision.

Next, we consider the goals for your product. These goals are the way to your vision. However, they also lay the foundation for your product roadmap and the core level, which is, initiatives.

The core aspect of the framework is your product initiatives. It defines the themes, areas, and functions that you need to focus on to ensure your product’s success.

If you look closely, a product strategy bridges the gap between your vision and how exactly you’re going to achieve it. An ideal strategy involves:

Your vision for the product or app
The target market for your product
Your direct and indirect competitors
The specific problems that your product solves
Your unique value proposition

These components are crucial to designing a successful product strategy.

8 Types of Product Strategies

You must’ve heard about only one type of product strategy so far: a differentiation strategy. It simply means to find a differentiating point that helps your product stand out from the competition.

That said, there are 8 other product strategies commonly used to develop and shape mobile apps. Let’s learn about them all and how they’re used.

Cost Strategy: It positions your product as the most cost-effective solution in the market as compared to other solutions.
Niche Strategy: It positions your product as the best solution for a niche market with specific and potentially smaller target customers.
Quality Strategy: It positions your product as one with the best design, functionality, and features in the market.
Service Strategy: It relies on your customer services and positions it as better than of your competitors, or as a unique extension to the product.
Challenger Strategy: This strategy positions your product as more enticing or effective than other solutions based on design, features, or something different.
Focus Strategy: It is similar to a niche strategy as it also narrows your product strategy to a specific market.
Speed Strategy: The strategy positions your product as the fastest to develop new features as an advanced tech.
Upselling Strategy: It focuses on upselling new products or services that are adjacent to your original product in a way that encourages customers to make continual purchases.

All of these product strategies are based on differentiation, but in a specific way. Is your product differentiated based on the pricing structure, audience, features, or something else?

These differentiations help shape your product strategy and ultimately, your product roadmap

How to Create a Product Strategy for Your App?

A product strategy is the bridge between your vision and product roadmap. Although it isn’t as lengthy of a process, it is crucial for product success.

Here are the best practices to design a product strategy for your mobile app:

1. Start with a vision

You need to define your end-goal before curating your product strategy and roadmap. This vision must resonate with not just you but also your customers.

For instance, you can ask your customers: “Does this product solve your biggest problem? Does it make [the problem] easy?” The vision can be made true only if your customers also understand it.

Validate your product idea based on user feedback. Stay prepared to adjust your long-term vision to create a strong product-market fit and ultimately, a successful product.

2. Build your product strategy

With a clear vision in place, you can think about your product strategy and roadmap. Start by defining the themes you need to work on in order to achieve your goal.

Use your chosen themes to map out the specific measures you need to take. As you prioritize the themes you need to work on, you can also draw out the themes you don’t need to focus on.

Think of your product strategy in layers, moving from a long-term vision to short-term milestones. For instance, themes shape your product roadmap which further specifies the projects you need to work on.

3. Focus on what works

Every product has a different strategy that works for it. It’s very likely that a certain strategy that worked for another product doesn’t work for yours.

You should focus on the strategy that works for your product. Use this strategy to develop your product further based on the vision, features, audience, and differentiating point.

Conclusion

A product strategy is a crucial step to launching a native mobile app. After weeks of planning and research, you want to ensure that the app has strong product-market fit. Hence, it’s essential to build an MVP, perform market research, and then design your strategy.

Here’s the good part: You can design a functional mobile app within several hours with an AI app builder like Natively. Just prompt the AI about your app idea and it’ll be ready within minutes. Make changes as per your brand guidelines — and that’s all.

To get your app’s preview, use Expo Go for the best experience. You can also use the platform for user research and feedback. In simple words, you can build your app’s first version, the strategy, and launch it — all with Natively.