A well-defined product strategy accelerates your career. It improves your odds of success. It inspires teams. In this highly interactive, case-based workshop, you'll learn seven vital strategic frameworks, plus how to run a product strategy meeting as we simulate a modern-day Netflix Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting towards the end of the session.

THE CHALLENGES

Today, product leaders are constantly challenged to act and think "more strategically." These tools help product leaders frame their thinking strategically and accomplish work that pushes metrics tied to each product strategy.

Another challenge is building alignment across an organization. Everyone in a company has a perspective on how a product can be better, even folks with no experience building products. These tools and frameworks enable product leaders to develop a common language and plan that can be understood across the organization to build cross-functional alignment.

Last, everyone within an organization has a point of view on how and where resources should be allocated. The simulated Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting enables students to participate in a meeting that will teach them to debate product strategy in open, more effective ways within their product organization and to allocate resources intelligently.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

You learn how to:

1. Describe the positioning and "something bigger" of your product that helps to build a brand using language that appeals to your customers and is well-understood by your marketing partners.

2. Craft a long-term product vision that provides clear direction. This vision also breaks down the plan into shorter, step-by-step "bite-size chews" that maintain flexibility as you invariably encounter speedbumps and roadblocks.

3. Define a succinct product strategy—a hypothesis on how you will move your key metrics—by developing hypotheses that will delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways.

4. Articulate metrics and tactics for each product strategy to effectively "align the wood behind the arrow."

5. You'll learn to tease out how to prioritize Growth, Engagement, and Monetization, depending on the company's size and goals.

6. Communicate a quarterly plan using two roadmap formats: a "rolling four-quarter roadmap" and a "Now, Next, Later" approach.

7. Debate 2-3 modern-day Netflix cases, demonstrating how these product strategy frameworks help to form a common language that enables better communication and more thoughtful debate.

HOW THE COURSE WORKS

This course is designed to be very efficient. There's no pre-reading, and it's only three hours. We'll open up the class fifteen minutes before the start time -- so you can ask questions at the beginning -- then we'll go through each framework with lots of juicy examples from Netflix's past and present. The session will be sprinkled with many mini-cases where students will be asked, "What would you do if you were the product leader at Netflix?" We'll use Slido to build engagement and draw all students into a fast-paced conversation.

This is not a boring lecture. It's a lean-in experience where you will be at the edge of your seat and diving into the conversation-- when you're up for it.

At the end of the session, we'll simulate a Netflix Quarterly Product Strategy meeting, allowing you to see what a world-class product organization thinks about and how they discuss and debate product strategy. The three-hour session is a lot of fun!

No reading will be required in advance -- people are busy -- but there will be plenty of "leave behind" materials to read about product strategy and each of the frameworks defined in this course. I will also provide pre-populated Google Slides you can use to define your product strategy. I will hang out for 30 minutes after class to answer questions.