How to Define a Winning Product Strategy

I recently had the privilege of listening to a highly insightful talk by Dan Olsen, best-selling author, consultant, and product expert, at Google, where he unveiled a straightforward yet powerful framework for defining a winning product strategy. This wasn’t just theoretical; it offered practical tools to help product managers (PMs) break free from tactical inertia and articulate a clear plan for success.

The discussion kicked off with a hard truth: good product strategy is rare. Many teams are stuck in tactical execution, viewing long-term thinking as a luxury, or they lack a structured framework to apply even when they carve out the time. As Olsen noted, strategy is fundamentally about having a plan for how you are going to win against the competition. Crucially, it involves taking a clear stand on what you are saying no to. In fact, paraphrasing Steve Jobs, Olsen emphasized that strategy means saying no to a hundred other good ideas, recognizing that you have more good ideas than time to execute them.

The PM’s Mantra: Start with the Problem Space

One of the most critical reminders for PMs is the need to anchor strategy in customer problems or needs, rather than feature checklists. We were warned against falling into the trap of starting in the solution space, thinking, “We should build Feature X”.

Olsen drew a clear distinction between:

• Problem Space: This encompasses the customer problem, need, or benefit that the product should address. It focuses on the value created for the user.
• Solution Space: This is the specific implementation or design chosen to meet that need.

The reason this distinction is vital is that many products fail, statistics suggest over 80%, because teams jump straight into the solution space without clearly defining the problem. This tendency to focus on technology first (especially in environments like Google) results in what Olsen calls “solution pollution”. If someone proposes a solution (Feature X), the PM’s job is to gently ask: “How is that going to create value for the customer?” to push them back toward the problem space.

The Kano Model: Categorising Customer Needs

To formalise this competitive differentiation, Olsen introduced a two-part framework, beginning with the Kano Model. This model categorises customer needs based on how fully the product meets the need (x-axis) versus the resulting customer satisfaction (y-axis).

The three essential categories are:

1. Must-Have Benefits: These are baseline expectations (e.g., seatbelts in a car, secure financial transactions). If the product fails to meet them, it causes severe dissatisfaction, but meeting them fully doesn’t create happiness, it’s expected. You do not compete on must-haves. Launching an MVP with only must-haves will fail to create customer value.
2. Performance Benefits: These are quantifiable attributes where “more is better and less is worse” (e.g., higher miles per gallon, faster search speed). This is where most of the competition happens.
3. Delighters (Wow Features): These are unexpected features that create high positive satisfaction, even though customers weren’t expecting them. An example is the early inclusion of built-in GPS navigation in cars. Delighters are dynamic; they migrate over time, often becoming today’s performance attributes and tomorrow’s must-haves.

The Product Strategy Grid: Finding Your Unique Differentiators

The second tool, the Product Strategy Grid, pulls the Kano categories into a competitive table. You list the must-haves, performance benefits, and delighters relevant to your category, and then create columns for your key competitors and your own product. Using a simple scoring system (e.g., Low, Medium, High, or Yes/No), you assess how well each competitor meets these benefits.

The ultimate goal of this exercise is to identify Unique Differentiators: the one or two performance dimensions where you can be the best, coupled with any unique delighters. Once identified, this unique value proposition serves as a hypothesis that must be validated through prototyping and testing before dedicating resources to coding the final product.

Industry Application: Lessons from Instagram and Uber

Olsen shared two “chef’s kiss A+” examples demonstrating this framework in action:

1. Instagram (2010): When they launched into a crowded photo-sharing market, they didn’t just get lucky. Their strategy was captured in their famous tagline: “Fast, beautiful photo sharing”.
   • Performance: Fast photo uploading. They used a clever UX trick, starting the photo upload in the background the moment the user took the picture, making the upload seem 2-3 seconds faster than competitors.
   • Delighter: Beautiful photos. This was delivered primarily through filters, which made amateur photos look professional or creative.
   • This combination provided enough extra customer value to rapidly gain market share.
2. Uber (V1 UberCab): Uber was taking on monopolistic taxi and limo services. Their strategy was synthesised as: “Faster and cheaper than a limo, but nicer and safer than a taxi cab”. They achieved high performance across three key dimensions (faster, nicer, safer) which is highly rare. Their initial delighters included the ability to book a ride without calling and knowing precisely when the car would arrive.

Key Takeaways for Product Marketing Managers (PMM)

The frameworks Olsen presented are indispensable for Product Marketing Managers:

1. Defining the Value Proposition: The Product Strategy Grid provides the definitive foundation for all PMM messaging. A PMM can look at the grid and immediately understand: what performance benefits we market, what we choose to deemphasise (the “saying no” aspects), and what “wow” features we lead with.
2. Competitive Positioning: The grid forces clear competitive scoring, allowing PMMs to articulate exactly why their product is superior, it eliminates generic claims and focuses on the quantifiable dimension(s) where the product is High, while competitors are Medium or Low.
3. Messaging Focus: PMMs must ensure that marketing collateral focuses on the Problem Space (the benefit, such as “make my photos look better” or “save time”) and connects those benefits to the specific Solution Space features (filters, upload hack). The Instagram tagline, “Fast, beautiful photo sharing,” is the ultimate PMM artifact, derived directly from the strategic differentiators.