Strategy Excellence for Product Managers

In order to be an excellent product manager, you must have an excellent product strategy. You need to have an understanding of what is best for your product right now, and how to ensure it’s success in the future.

Developing a product strategy is not an easy or quick process. It means having a grasp of the context and trajectory of your customer, the technology, and your competitors. You need to constantly observe and adjust. You must move beyond managing the product and start leading it.

Book Description

This book uncovers how you can create a winning product strategy, even if you are coming from behind.

It covers the three main areas you need to understand for long-term success:

• The five elements of a product strategy
• How to drive product growth today and into the future
• How to analyze markets to create a sustainable competitive advantage

Author

Greg Cohen, Senior Consultant, 280 Group

Table of Contents

Foreword by Brian Lawley

Introduction

Part I: Being Strategic

Chapter 1. Product Strategy
Chapter 2. Vision
Chapter 3. Strategic Roadmap
Chapter 4. Prioritizing the Product Backlog

Part II: Driving Business Success

Chapter 5. Managing the Product Lifecycle
Chapter 6. Establishing Product-Market Fit
Chapter 7. Purposeful Learning

Part III: Finding Competitive Advantage

Chapter 8. Basic Strategies and SWOT Analysis
Chapter 9. Anticipating the Future with Industry Analysis
Chapter 10. Mapping Your Markets
Chapter 11. Pricing for Competitive Advantage

Conclusion
Appendices

Reviews

Anant Chintamaneni, VP Products, BlueData, Inc.

If you want to know what it really means to be CEO of your product, this book is a must read. Greg offers practical frameworks for the key pillars of product management that you can put to work immediately. This book is destined to become the definitive guide on strategy for PMs.

Mike Belsito, Co-Founder of Product Collective and Co-Organizer of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference

Good Product Managers know how to lead teams to ship product. But the great ones do more than that — they execute a true product strategy. This book is a much-needed primer on how to do exactly that.

Dan Olsen, Product Management Consultant and Author of The Lean Product Playbook

Read Greg’s book before your competitors do: it’s chock full of great frameworks and advice for how to take your strategic thinking to the next level.

Alex Cowan, faculty, University of Virginia Darden School of Business

When one of my favorite voices in agile told me there was a deficit on strategic thinking and an opportunity to fix it, I listened. I’m glad I read this book.

Sanjay Raghu, Head of Product Marketing & Technical Services, CloudGenera

Today a great deal of emphasis is placed on being responsive to the market. Greg Cohen’s latest book illustrates how product managers can perform even better by being both responsive and strategic.