The Key to Aligning Product Strategy With Company Vision

by Janey Zitomer
January 11, 2021
Edify
Edify

At the end of every work day, product managers at GoodRx ask themselves the same question. 

“Is what we’re doing the best thing possible for our customers?”

If the answer is anything but a resounding ‘yes,’ they reevaluate how they can best align strategy with vision. 

For product professionals at the healthcare company, as well as the following local tech organizations, getting buy-in from internal stakeholders to make necessary tradeoffs that align with the company vision and ultimately benefit the customer is a natural part of the product development process.

Edify Product Manager Charlie Hagelskamp said his team relies on consistent communication between departments to identify priorities among otherwise competing projects. This is also the case at Honey, Tai Zhang, product management director, said. Without frequent cross-departmental communication, Zhang said disparate teams might have trouble seeing how their work contributes to the ultimate company vision. 

“Having a clear vision that guides our work enables the entire product organization to see how the pieces each team is working on ladder up to a cohesive strategy,” Zhang said.

 

Tai Zhang
Product Management Director • Honey

The product development team at Honey is constantly performing a balancing act. Product Management Director Tai Zhang said that act involves investing in the consumer web company’s long-term vision while accomplishing shorter-term, tactical goals. 

The happy medium? 

Saying ‘yes’ to projects that allow team members to build foundational features. 
 

First, briefly tell us about your overarching product vision. What is it, and how do you communicate this vision across the business?

At Honey, our vision is to create a better way to buy online. From something as simple as looking for a working coupon code to figuring out the right product to buy and when to buy it, the world of retail is full of inefficiencies whose costs ultimately get passed onto the consumer. We are working to create the most efficient way for merchants to reach consumers, and in turn, the least expensive way for consumers to do business with merchants. 

We believe that understanding the “why” is crucial to how everyone at Honey makes decisions, so we often refer back to the vision aligning everyone to this shared purpose. It is a part of our new employee onboarding and is regularly referenced in our weekly company syncs and quarterly all-hands. Perhaps most crucially, our product management team, which holds center on much of the cross-functional collaboration that occurs, communicates this why to everyone they work with. 

 

How does your product vision help inform your product strategy or other decisions around product development? 

Having a clear vision that guides our work enables the entire product organization to see how the pieces each team works on ladder up to a cohesive strategy. Just as importantly, it also helps us avoid distractions. For example, a couple of years ago we were exploring additional ways to save our members money by building a product for the travel market. On paper, this seemed like an obvious opportunity from a user benefit and revenue perspective. However, looking at the portfolio of potential product ideas in front of us, it was clear that this path had the least future optionality when it came to helping us achieve our ultimate goal. 

The ability to focus on our vision kept us aligned on what mattered most, which is especially important for startups. 

We tend to say ‘no’ to one-off work that only allows us to satisfy a single customer use case.’’ 

 

How do you stay true to your product vision while also taking into account the wants and needs of various stakeholders?

A common tension that comes up in product development is how we invest in the ultimate vision while balancing shorter-term, tactical goals that are often essential for enabling us to get there. For example, revenue and profitability considerations are important to building any sustainable business. It is common for companies to prioritize changes to support short-term sales goals, and we’ve certainly been asked to accommodate these types of asks from important customers. But keeping the vision in mind tends to help us make the right decisions about those tradeoffs. We tend to say ‘no’ to one-off work that only allows us to satisfy a single customer use case. But if that work provides a foundation upon which we can build interesting features that benefit a much larger portion of our ecosystem, it makes the cut more often than not. 

Ultimately, maintaining this discipline requires a strong alignment throughout all parts of the business on the vision, which is why it is so important that everyone understands and agrees on that vision.

 

Yi Qiang
Senior Product Director • GoodRx

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” 

Senior Product Director Yi Qiang thinks about this Lewis Carroll quotation when working to align product vision and strategy at healthcare company GoodRx. He said that the path to the final product is often not a straight road. Rather, a sound product strategy directs the team to the most efficient route. 
 

What’s your overarching product vision and how do you communicate it across the business?

At GoodRx, we believe that everyone deserves affordable and convenient healthcare. To realize that vision, we strive to build accessible, simple-to-use products and provide customers with choice and cost transparency.

As a product organization, our job is to translate the company’s vision into our product. This usually takes the form of a product vision document, which shows an idealized future state of our product often one to three years out. Creating the product vision document is a collaborative endeavor. We seek input from different parts of the organization. As a byproduct, we see increased buy-in and team alignment. 

 

How does your product vision help inform your product strategy or other decisions around product development? 

The product vision and strategy go hand in hand. In some ways, you can think of the vision as a destination on a map. The product strategy charts the path to get you there. Often, that path is not a straight line and it’s up to the product team to find the most efficient route. 

For example, it’s through the lens of convenience and affordability that we decided to launch gold mail delivery, which allows GoodRx gold customers to get their prescriptions delivered for free, and in most cases, at a better price than they would otherwise pay at a traditional pharmacy. Our telehealth offering provides cost-effective and convenient access to licensed medical professionals for more than 30 different conditions. We prioritized both of these initiatives because they help us get closer to our vision of affordable and convenient healthcare. 

As a product organization, our job is to translate the company’s vision into our product.’’

 

How do you stay true to your product vision while also taking into account the wants and needs of various stakeholders?

Realizing your product vision, especially when it’s a multi-year endeavor, requires commitment and buy-in throughout the organization and the flexibility to make tradeoffs. As a business, we need to reach certain short and medium-term milestones in order to remain competitive. Each organization also has its own goals. The key to good product management is taking those goals into account and creating alignment between them. Sometimes that means trying to reframe the problem. Other times it’s about explaining the prioritization process clearly. Each situation is highly contextual. 

That being said, one of the most powerful tools for us to create alignment is realizing that the ultimate stakeholders are our customers, and our success depends on creating value for them. So at the end of the day, we tend to ask ourselves whether what we’re doing is best for our customers. This question has been surprisingly effective at cutting through the noise and getting us to focus on what matters for us.

 

Charlie Hagelskamp
Product Manager • Edify

At Edify, Product Manager Charlie Hagelskamp said employees are committed to the company mission to improve customer service because they are target users, too. Team members across the organization use the software platform daily to simplify workflows, contact users and track analytics. When team members vocalize questions or submit feedback based on issues they run into working with clients or colleagues, they’re taken seriously. 
 

What’s your overarching product vision and how do you communicate it across the business?

We keep our product vision in line with our company vision, which is to make employees love work and customers love companies. We want to build a product that people enjoy using and that makes their jobs easier. As customers of our own product, we apply this vision internally. Everyone in our company uses our product on a daily basis, which is vital to keeping our teams moving forward. Everyone can submit suggestions, feedback and issues to our development team as they go. 

 

How does your product vision help inform your product strategy or other decisions around product development? 

Our client operations team is in close communication with our customers. They meet with our development team on a daily basis so that we are always informed about how the product is being used and where we can make the most impactful enhancements. 

This communication helps drive better product development decisions because we have a good pulse on our customers’ use of the product. We always want to prioritize items that will help our clients’ engagements with their customers be more productive and efficient.

Because our product vision aligns so closely with the overall Edify vision, we have very similar goals.’’

 

How do you stay true to your product vision while also taking into account the wants and needs of various stakeholders?

Because our product vision aligns so closely with the overall Edify vision, we have very similar goals. If competing projects or needs come up from stakeholders, we can have an easy conversation about the end result of that project versus other items in the pipeline so we can agree on the higher priority.

 

Emmy Yardley
Chief Product Officer • ChowNow

At ordering platform ChowNow, Chief Product Officer Emmy Yardley said leadership gives all employees the chance to be involved in product development, regardless of their department. With opportunities for consistent communication available at town halls and quarterly reviews, product professionals like Yardley can be sure stakeholder and executive alignment remains intact.


What’s your overarching product vision and how do you communicate it across the business?

The overarching vision for our product is to help local restaurants thrive by helping them grow their businesses. For example, we provide our restaurant partners with automatic access to their diner contact information and easy ways to communicate with them. We share analytics with restaurants about how their business is performing and what actions they can take to improve. And we help partners fulfill orders through a variety of channels, including restaurant websites and white label mobile apps.

We hold company-wide town halls, which give us the opportunity to keep employees across all departments updated on new product developments, always within the context of how they align with ChowNow’s overarching vision. At ChowNow, we give all of our employees, regardless of their department, the chance to be involved in product development. We find great value in adding multiple perspectives to the mix and encourage everyone to pitch us if they have an idea.

Aside from formal presentations, whenever we’re evaluating new product ideas or explaining them to our teams, we first consider how they relate to our core vision.

 

How does your product vision help inform your product strategy or other decisions around product development? 

Every decision we make, whether it’s which features to prioritize, how to price a new product or evaluating a new company strategy or partnership, starts with asking ourselves whether it’s going to be good for restaurants. Is it going to help them make money or simplify their operations? If the answer to that question is ‘no,’ then it’s a hard ‘no’ for us, too. We will not invest in something if it’s not going to have a positive impact on restaurants.

For example, our monthly email marketing campaign goes out to individual restaurants’ specific customer databases. We use a pricing model that is based on the value each restaurant can expect to receive from it. So if a restaurant has a smaller customer base, they pay less. We always want to ensure that our compensation aligns with the value we deliver.

Every decision we make starts with asking ourselves whether it’s going to be good for restaurants.’’ 

 

How do you stay true to your product vision while also taking into account the wants and needs of various stakeholders?

Regular communication with various stakeholders is essential. I like to do a high-level roadmap review once a quarter with the executive team to make sure we’re still aligned on company strategy, what’s most important, product direction and vision. When your executive team is on the same page, a lot of the common “stakeholder versus product” conversations disappear. And, as mentioned, we also hold regular companywide touch-bases to give all team members a forum to contribute to and ask questions about the company’s product and vision. Communication is key.

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