Building a Product Strategy That Actually Guides Your Roadmap

1. When the product is born before the strategy

Recently, a company reached out with a familiar challenge: they had launched a new digital product but were lost on how to evolve it.
It was a young product with a handful of users and plenty of potential — but no clear compass. Decisions were reactive: a suggestion from the tech team here, a commercial idea there, and the roadmap was being filled without criteria.
This scenario is more common than it seems. Many companies believe that having a roadmap is having a strategy, when in reality the roadmap is just its reflection. Without a clear strategy, the product evolves in a fragmented way, consuming energy without generating direction.
The work started with a simple question:

“Before deciding what to build, do we know where we want to go?”

2. Strategy is the bridge between vision and execution

A product strategy is the document that connects the company’s purpose to the day‑to‑day product decisions. It answers three fundamental questions:

1. Why the product exists (vision and market context);
2. How it generates value for the user and the business (fit and model);
3. What needs to be done now to get there (tracks and metrics).
   Without this, the product becomes a patchwork quilt. With it, the roadmap stops being a list of deliveries and becomes a coherent evolution plan.

3. Start with context — the terrain your product stands on

The first step is to understand the context: the trends, pains and transformations that create the opportunity for the product to exist.
In this case, the market was full of signals: new technologies were evolving rapidly but in a disorganised way; companies had data but didn’t know how to turn it into practical intelligence; and the pressure for efficiency was enormous — doing more with less, without losing quality.
It was from the intersection of these points that the strategic insight emerged:

The product needed to solve a real and emergent problem — turning complexity into clarity, and data into action.

Lesson: context is the foundation of strategy. Before defining what to build, understand why the market needs this now.

4. Use frameworks to give structure to strategy

One of the most effective frameworks for organising thinking is the 4 Fits Framework, created by Brian Balfour (Reforge). It ensures coherence between the four gears of a product:

• Market Fit: is there an audience with a relevant pain?
• Product Fit: does the product deliver measurable value?
• Channel Fit: are there viable channels to reach this audience?
• Model Fit: is the business model sustainable and scalable?
  Without balance between these dimensions, the product loses traction.

Lesson: before deciding what comes on the roadmap, check that all the fits are aligned. The role of strategy is to strengthen these fits, not to generate new random fronts.

5. Define the product vision and category

The product vision is the starting point of the strategy. It should inspire but also guide practical decisions. Use the classic structure:

For [target audience] who [suffer with a certain problem],
the [product] is a [type of solution] that [delivers such benefits],
different from [alternatives], which [have such limitations].
This sentence is simple but powerful. It forces the team to align purpose, audience and value proposition in a single coherent narrative.

Lesson: if the team can’t explain the product in a clear sentence, it still doesn’t understand what it’s building.

6. Product Release and FAQ — the Amazon format

As soon as the vision is clear, the next step is to make the strategy tangible. One of the best ways to do this is with the Product Release + FAQ format, inspired by Amazon.
The logic is inverted:

Instead of building and then communicating, write the launch as if the product already existed.

Product Release

The release is a launch announcement written like a press article. It describes the product in an inspiring, customer‑centred way:

• What the product is and why it matters now;
• Which problem it solves and how it changes the user’s routine;
• Which metrics prove success (time to value, impact, usage, retention);
• A fictional customer quote that shows perceived value.
  This exercise forces the team to visualise the impact before execution, making the strategy concrete.

FAQ

The FAQ complements the release with objective questions:

• Who is the product for?
• What problem does it solve?
• How is it different from other solutions?
• What results and success metrics are expected?
• What limitations or known risks exist?
  These answers help align technical, product, marketing and commercial teams under the same narrative.

Lesson: writing the Product Release + FAQ is a way of “simulating the future.” If the release doesn’t excite and the FAQ doesn’t stand up, the strategy isn’t mature enough.

7. Translate vision into success and failure criteria

After making the vision tangible, it’s time to define how success will be measured. These criteria transform strategy into a continuous learning system.

• Success criteria: what needs to be true for the product to create value?
  Example: the user must be able to perform a critical action within 24 hours of activation.
• Failure criteria: what shows that we’re going in the wrong direction?
  Example: if the product requires complex configurations or doesn’t generate perceived results.

Lesson: a good roadmap is built from hypotheses that can be measured — not from ideas that “sound nice.”

8. Connect everything with a metrics tree

A metrics tree connects what the business needs with what the user does. It translates the vision into traceable indicators:

• Activation: how many users reach the “aha moment” (first perception of value).
• Retention: how many continue to use the product on a recurring basis.
• Engagement: frequency of use and depth of interaction.
• Growth: expansion of revenue, upsell or referrals.

Lesson: if a metric doesn’t connect to user behaviour, it isn’t useful for guiding the product.

9. Turn strategy into roadmap drivers

With the strategy consolidated, the next step is to translate the insights into strategic fronts for evolution. These fronts are the big lines that connect vision, metrics and priorities. For example:

1. Sustainability and Operations: ensure technical stability and data governance.
2. Expansion and Integrations: broaden reach and enable new flows of value.
3. Analysis and Experience: deepen the product’s capabilities and enhance perceived value.
   Each front must then be broken down into initiatives — concrete actions that can be planned, tested and measured.

Deciding what goes to Shape Up and what needs Discovery

Not every initiative is at the same level of maturity. Some already have evidence and can go straight to Shape Up (the phase where you shape and deliver). Others are still uncertain and need to go through a Discovery cycle first.
The criterion is simple: evaluate the level of evidence and risk.

• High evidence / low risk: we already have data, feedback and clarity of value → can go to Shape Up.
• Low evidence / high risk: there are still doubts about problem, audience or solution → needs Discovery.
• Medium evidence: can be tested with MVPs or experiments before moving forward.
  This analysis helps distribute the team’s effort between execution and learning, ensuring that the product evolves in a balanced way — delivering what is certain and investigating what is still unclear.

Lesson: a strategic roadmap is built from evidence, not wishes. Maturity lies in knowing when to execute and when to learn first.

10. Conclusion — strategy is a coherent story

A good product strategy is, above all, a coherent story: it starts in the context, passes through the vision, takes shape in the Product Release, becomes measurable through metrics and ends up in the roadmap.
The difference between a product that evolves and one that gets lost lies in the clarity of why it exists and how it creates value. Strategy isn’t a static document. It’s a living tool that guides decisions — and must be revisited whenever the market changes.

Strategy is what keeps your product coherent when everything around it is in motion.