Building a product strategy
How to craft a product strategy without falling into analysis paralysis or "design by committee." A fresh take on blending flywheels with value propositions for e-commerce marketplace.
A few years ago, I wrote a guide on crafting a product strategy.
While it’s still a useful manual, it has one major flaw: it assumes that strategy is a product of design by committee.
In real life, teams consist of different seniorities, perspectives, and levels of interest in the process, often leading to a collection of biases.
Ultimately, someone will need to step in and make the “final cut” to navigate through those biases.
That someone is the product leader.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about “command and control”; it’s about providing guidance.
Guidance brings clarity and removes blockers for the team—something every team needs, even if it’s rarely expressed this way.
But how do you provide this guidance?
In my experience, the best way to deliver “strategic context” is by combining flywheels (here’s my past article on that topic) with your business’s value proposition.
Below, I’ve explored this approach using a practical example from an e-commerce marketplace.
Today’s article
Flywheel. What can go wrong and how to avoid it by creating clarity.
Value proposition relativity. How value proposition of an e-commerce marketplace is relative to competition.
Value proposition breakdown. How to break down the value prop elements into actionable levers.
🔗 How all of this connects
Sometimes metric trees are not enough.
They make it harder to visualize the flow and the relations between elements.
Flywheels, on the contrary, are very telling.
In a nutshell, your flywheel is a value proposition in motion.
It shows the key levers you can push (as inputs) and the outputs you can get.
The combination of those levers is unique for every business, but there’s general similarity between business model types.
🔄 Flywheel
For the e-commerce business the value proposition consists of three key elements:
Supply (input/output)
Price (input)
Delivery (input)