What Senior Leaders Should Consider When Creating a Product Development Strategy for 2024

With 2024 around the corner, senior leaders are now facing a very different business landscape than what’s come before. With a wealth of new potential challenges to overcome in the near future, senior leaders should take the time to reflect upon what kind of issues they might have to face in the coming months, and prepare accordingly. This is why creating a product development strategy is so vital to your enterprise’s success.

To help you navigate the challenges ahead, we’ve put together this brief article covering how to build your product development strategy. Complete with insights from Future Platform’s own MD, Remy Brooks, you’ll learn how to create a practical, flexible and dependable product development strategy. Read on to learn more.

What does a good product strategy framework look like?

First of all, we need to consider what makes a product strategy framework effective. Product strategy frameworks cannot be generalised. Instead, you must take care when crafting one to ensure that it is wholly unique to your business and the challenges it faces. That being said, here’s a rough product strategy template that outlines the key stages you should follow:

1. Articulating your vision

Collecting a list of features and functions for your product is simple enough. Rather, what sets good product development strategies apart from bad ones is how well you can communicate the short, medium and long-term vision of your company. Ultimately, this is what guides any and all future work, so focus on answering the following questions; what's your business’s mission? Why does it exist? How do customers perceive it? 

2. Research and troubleshoot your strategy 

Then, you need to incorporate wider research on what pain points customers face, and how your company can deliver against this vision while also making a profit. Here, you need to consider what resources, talents and skills you have access to, and how to play to your strengths using market research. Crucially, Heads of Product in particular must understand how leading brands like Google, Amazon, Apple and others raise the customer experience benchmark, and how they can deliver similar standards to their own target audience.

3. Roadmap, build and launch your product

Armed with these insights and a vision for the future, you then need to build a roadmap that defines which features and functions you’ll deliver and when. Try to make this plan as specific as possible, while being realistic with yourself and others about what you can feasibly achieve. 

When planning this, it can be helpful to align workloads by commonly shared themes or urgency. For example, you might want to organise the workload by the core competencies of your workforce, or base it around the quick wins for fast ROI.

4. Collect user feedback and adjust

Finally, when your minimum viable product (MVP) is live, you should gather as much stakeholder feedback as you can. You can then use this data to refine your roadmap and achieve profitability, while adjusting product specifications to continually improve it. Here, you can use your company vision to ensure that, even though the journey is changing, you’re still working towards the same outcome.

Common pain points in product strategy frameworks

Although creating a robust product strategy is very important, that doesn’t mean that doing so is an easy task. Here are some of the most common challenges that business leaders commonly encounter and how you can work to overcome these hurdles:

Defining the vision

In our experience, senior business leaders struggle most with communicating their vision for their product development strategy/company. Given how much it underpins the rest of the process, getting this step right the first time around is vital. Know your company’s vision inside-out, so you can articulate it clearly and easily to others. 

Collaborating with CMOs

Similarly, another critical issue we often see is CMOs and other marketing leaders being brought into product launches too late. By collaborating with marketing teams earlier on, companies can create better and more successful products. This is because marketing teams can help define core aspects of the target audience as well as identify their pain points and create resources that evidence the product’s USP.

Tips on your 2024 product development strategy

2023 was an important year for Generative AI, and many business leaders are now asking, “What’s your AI strategy?” Rather than succumbing to the hype or abandoning core competencies, it’s important to incorporate AI throughout your product development strategy; harnessing the best of AI and human talents in one. AI should always work in tandem with human agents to enhance their work experience, not to detract from it. 

Similarly, budgetary constraints are going to be another critical factor in the months ahead. That’s why prioritising an MVP build and gathering user feedback as soon as possible is essential, as it gets you closer to profitability.

How Future Platforms can support your Product Strategy Framework

Future Platforms is an award-winning digital product design agency. We can support your entire product strategy framework, whether you need to unify your vision, identify strategic opportunities or outsource development talent to achieve your goals. 

To learn more about our services and solutions, get in touch today.