The Stephanie Leue Hypothesis: Developing Product Strategy is a Critical, Ongoing Piece of the Chief Product Officer Role

Speaker A: In today's episode, I talk with Stephanie and Liu about leading product strategy development. We answer some of your biggest questions about developing a product strategy. Like, what is hardest about building a strategy? As a new Chief Product officer, how

Speaker B: can we make sure that the teams are busy on something that is meaningful enough so we don't have to throw it away without becoming a feature factory or continuing being a feature factory actually, while at the same time building a strategy?

Speaker A: How long does it take to develop a new product strategy when you're an incoming cpo?

Speaker B: So they were busy for five, six, seven months around, which is good. And that gave me quite some time to, on the one hand, onboard to the product because I was new.

Speaker A: And what questions do you need to answer to develop a great product strategy?

Speaker B: Going even one level deeper to understand how is the whole funnel looking? Like, how is the business model structured? How are users even using the product? And how do they convert from one step to another? How do we make money with them? All of these questions, um, I needed to dive deep into.

Speaker A: Hi, and welcome to the Product Science Podcast where we're helping startup founders and product leaders build high growth products, teams and companies through real conversations with people who have been there and aren't afraid to share their lessons learned from their failures along the way. I'm, um, your host, Holly Hester Riley, founder and CEO of the Product Science Group. This week's episode is the Stephanie Liu Hypothesis. Developing product strategy is a critical, ongoing piece of the Chief Product Officer role. This week's guest is Stephanie Liu. At the time of this recording, Stephanie was the CPO at Doodle. She is a seasoned product leader with a versatile background spanning startups to Fortune 500 companies, specializing in B2B SaaS. As a female leader in tech and mom of four kids, Stephanie is passionate about leadership coaching and diversity and inclusion. With that, let's go to the conversation with Stephanie. Welcome, Stephanie, to the Product Science Podcast. I'm excited to have you back.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me again, Holly. I'm really excited.

Speaker C: So.

Speaker A: So since the last time that you and I spoke, you took a position as Chief Product Officer at Doodle, the, uh, scheduling software, and then you wrote a post on LinkedIn about how you developed the strategy and how much work it took. I thought that was a really interesting post and I wanted to talk to you some more about it. So tell us a little bit about, you know, um, how did you. How did you get started on that task when you got to Doodle?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe let me start with a little story around Product strategy because I remember that I work for PayPal and I owned a domain and my boss 3 then asked me shortly after I joined, like Stephanie, you have to create a strategy for onboarding and activation. And I had no idea what he meant. And I was so scared about strategy since then that this was really like one of the biggest topics for me. And I was so fearful when it came to strategy actually. But then obviously taking on a new role as uh, Chief Product Officer left me no other chance than like getting started. Right. Because you can't build a product without a strategy. So I was obviously facing my biggest enemy at work, which is the strategy question. Back then we were also kind of in ah, a challenging situation. So there was no strategy at all. I just joined, we released a new product, we canceled a couple of features without informing customers. So we were really struggling and we were in a situation where we on the one hand had to bring back existing features which users just missed, but we deprecated them at the same time. We had no strategy, so we had to build something. So I was in this limbo state between keeping my teams busy, saving the business, bringing features back, but at the same time building the foundational uh, strategy to make sure that at some point in time we're not just delivering features, but we really build something bigger and like delight our customers.

Speaker A: Right, Yeah, I love hearing that story, particularly the part about how as you were developing the strategy you couldn't just have the team not working on anything and you knew that they needed to rebuild some of the things that were taken out from the deprecated version. I think that's an element of developing product strategy that we don't talk enough about how you have to fit this in while you're still keeping the lights on and everything else.

Speaker B: Exactly that. Right. Like keeping the teams busy but still give them the feeling that they work on something meaningful that contributes to the bigger picture. Because we all somehow aim to work on the bigger picture and we want to know why we're working on something and we don't know what. We don't want to waste our times.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And that's exactly what my team requested, uh, to that they just wanted to work on really important stuff. So we just had to make a decision on how can we somehow get everything done, how can we make sure that the teams are busy on something that is meaningful enough so we don't have to throw it away without becoming a feature factory or continuing being a feature factory actually while it the same time building a strategy. So what We've done is we prioritize the uh, like top 10 customer requests based on data based on customer feedback. So we internally collaborated on all the things that we think we should do. We decided uh, the top 10 priorities together and then actually the teams just built those things. Right. So they were busy for five, six, seven months. And that gave me quite some time to, on the one hand, onboard to the product because I was new, I didn't know the product, I didn't know the market, I didn't know the competition, I didn't know the product itself. I had no data. I was clueless, right. So I also had to onboard myself. So if you ask me how I approached it, that's exactly what I did. I bought myself some time by keeping the teams busy with things that I knew were impactful, while at the same time having a clear structure in mind on how to onboard to the product so that I do understand all aspects of the company and uh, its market actually.

Speaker A: Brilliant. So tell me more about that structure for onboarding yourself onto the product. What were the things that you did?

Speaker B: All the basics you learn in each product 101, right? The question of, like, who's your biggest competitor? How big is their market share? Right. Like this external lens to understand, like, how do they build features? How big are they? How much money do they earn? How do they build features? What is their product strategy? Just to get a glimpse of uh, who they are and how they position themselves to also get a better understanding of like, who are we? And like, what is our positioning compared to our competitors Positioning. So that was the second part, the question of how are we positioned today? Right. Do we have a clear value proposition? Do we have an idea of our target market? And actually I figured out we don't, right? We try to serve everyone, we try to be a product for everyone. We had no clear idea about the problems we're solving, so I need to figure all of that out. So for this like, more internal lens, I collaborated very closely with my design director and she has done an amazing job on a jobs to be Done research, and that foundational research helped us to get an idea of which problems are we even solving. So, so I had an idea from a customer perspective on their jobs to be done. And then the third layer actually was the uh, business layer, the data layer. Where are we from a financial standpoint? What is the data we can use in order to determine our positioning, our strengths, our market, our key targets, uh, customer, our audience? All of these questions needed an answer. So the third Area I looked into was the data area to understand, like all of these questions. So I ask questions about, um, who is the customers that use us most, what is their conversion rate, um, where are they located, what are the languages we're good at? All these very detailed questions, plus going even one level deeper to understand how is the whole funnel looking? Like, how is the business model structured? How are users even using the product? And how do they convert from one step to another? How do we make money with them?

Speaker A: Them?

Speaker B: Right. All of these questions I, um, needed to dive deep into. And that, to be honest, took quite a while.

Speaker A: What made it take so long?

Speaker B: We haven't had good data. On the one hand, we have a brilliant data team, but they also just started. So they started a couple of months before I just joined. So obviously if you don't have any data, you need to build the foundation too. So they've built the foundation. So we had suddenly access to data. But then we needed to build the right dashbo. We needed to train ourselves to ask the right questions. We needed to get answers to these questions. We needed to understand the data we got. We needed to compose a picture out of that data. So that takes a while because that's like a team effort. And like, building good data foundation isn't done overnight. And training all of your teams to read and understand data isn't easy, especially not if they are not used to ask the right question. So that's also a process task to make sure that they collaborate well, that they are trained on the things they need to learn and for the jobs to be done. Research, obviously you also don't do a research in just three weeks. Like, at least not if it's so foundational. So that just took another two months. But we've done it in parallel, obviously. Right. Like, I didn't start with market and then started with jobs to be done and then did the data. We've done things in parallel to.

Speaker A: So one of the other guests we've had on this season is Melissa Perry and Denise Tillis with their new book about product operations. And it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about with regards to instrumenting the data and setting up, you know, the jobs to be done interviews and getting the foundational understanding of the customer segments overlaps a lot with what they talk about in their book about product operations. I'm curious what your perspective on this is and who within the organization you worked with to get these things set up.

Speaker B: We were super lucky, to be honest, because our data teams Have a very, very great business acumen. So they are a very collaborative and they aren't protecting themselves in order to just achieve their roadmap. Which is cool because without a collaborative data team you have hard times getting access to data. Obviously because they were super interested to understand the product and to help us crafting a strategy. We also got a lot of support from the data team and they help us prioritizing our requests so we can get answers. That was super helpful. But they also have a uh, sense for the business itself. So they didn't just deliver dashboards, they were also helping us to tell us a narrative with data because they helped us to find the right answers to the questions we were asking. And I think that was super crucial for us because it was not just about like putting into uh, into jira, kind of a data request and then get a dashboard back and then looking at this dashboard once and then trying to get some answers but also collaborating on this higher level of like okay, but what do you see there and what does this data tell us? So they were super um, open and like really helpful for us, um, which made collaboration easy and that also increased the data quality and um, speed up the time to get answers to our questions.

Speaker A: So tell me a little bit more about what the process did look like to collaborate with the data team to answer questions like how do you sit down and communicate to them what questions you're trying to answer and how much context you have to give them about why this matters.

Speaker B: So on the one hand the data team has their own strategy. As I told you, they had to build the foundation as well. And when you build a foundation as a data team, you can't just set uh, something up that your team then has uh, to use only. You need to build something that is also self service for the product and growth teams at some point in time. So the data team has a strategy that says like first we've built the foundation, second we help you to get answers to your questions. Third we extend so that the whole system is kind of a self serve system and we are right now at the second step of this whole thing. So they right now help us getting the answers. But we're not in this uh, self serve mode, right? So the process for us was um, to get them on board in two different dimensions. Dimension number one is the product strategy dimension, the bigger picture. So we shared with them how we think the business model is working, how we think the users behave on our website, how we think conversion funnels look like based on this They've done research for us, uh, using data in order to prove uh, the hypothesis we had. So that was a collaboration where we together tried to figure out whether the assumptions we have can be proven by data or not. There was more, the strategic level, but then there's also this day to day level where we obviously also build products and we need answers, um, on activation, retention, satisfaction, on certain features, how to make decisions, whether one feature is more important than the other one. And for this kind of day to day work we just put in data requests into jira. We have one shared portfolio management board for all teams at Doodle. So actually um, we have shared priorities. We have clear idea of highest priorities. So based on highest company priorities also the data team is able to prioritize their work accordingly.

Speaker A: I feel like you said something magical there, which was we have a clear idea of the company's priorities. Um, how did you get to that magic? No, honestly,

Speaker B: It's truly magic still for me because I can't believe that we got to this point. Um, I think it all starts with people. Um, we have super collaborative people at Oodle. I've never experienced before that all people from different departments truly want to collaborate with each other. Them that makes it easy because if you listen to other departments, obviously you're also open to their ideas and obviously you also want to achieve something together. Right? And if you want to achieve something together, you can achieve big things. I think people in our case is, is the true magic. And this is why so many things were just as easy as pie still in retrospective, as easy as PI. But what we've done is we introduced a super simple process. Um, we used the classical double diamond process, Discover, define, build. So we have more than a double diamond, actually we extended it a little and we also have a measure face in there. So what we did on the one hand is we introduced a process to explain everyone how we get products live from very first idea until it's successful. There was already a good foundation, so everyone had a shared understanding of how we build products at Doodle. But then the next level was that we also introduced a portfolio management system for the whole company. So other than uh, many, many other companies, we didn't build kind of a product portfolio, but we've built a company portfolio. And that means that this discover, define, build and measure process is something that is adopted by all teams at Doodle, even our people. Ops team is using this structure in order to identify their high priorities and to work on their initiatives. The finance team does the data team does the growth, marketing, and product teams do as well? We're aligned on the process. And then on top of that, we do have the company portfolio with a clear idea of how we prioritize. We're using COD here, how we put in certain initiatives. We're using JIRA for that, by the way, and how we also, um, align on company level, which things are more important than others. And this overall alignment on company level helps us to not have discussions on whether the product initiative is now more important than the growth initiative or the marketing initiative. So it's not the data team that has to make that decision, but it's us as the company having a shared understanding of how we prioritize things. And then the top priority is also the top priority for data teams, obviously.

Speaker A: So one of the things you said in there that I want to just get a little explanation of is you said we're using COD for prioritization. What do you mean by that abbreviation?

Speaker B: Uh, COD is the Cost of Delay Framework. So, um, by cod, I mean that we do have a set of criteria that we use for every single initiative at Doodle. It is things like, um, efficiency or risk, um, or business enablement. I can't recall all of them I can share afterwards. But, uh, actually it's a set of five criteria, and we're using these five criteria to assess every single initiative.

Speaker A: Actually, this is really interesting. So, uh, I feel like we've talked a lot about some of the more detailed elements of strategy and how you've created it, but what is a strategy? What is a product strategy to you?

Speaker B: Honestly, I think I still can't answer that in just one sentence. It's so hard, right? Even now, having something that feels like a strategy, I still struggle to tell you, like, uh, yeah, that's a strategy. And I would even say that if I am working in a different company, the artifacts or strategy I create might look completely different. Different. So my understanding of the strategy at Doodle right now is the idea of where I want to be with my product teams in 18 months from now. We're a small company. I can't project the next three to five years. Right? Like, we're not an enterprise, but it's the path forward so that we do have a shared understanding of the 18 months ahead of us. That's like the biggest, bigger picture, the breakdown of the vision. And then the next step is to break the strategy down into concrete action items, which is then just the execution plan. So the strategy is kind of the middle layer for me between vision and tactics.

Speaker A: What are the artifacts that you created at Doodle to communicate the strategy?

Speaker B: Tons of. I do have a future press release for example. I love these format. We used it at Contentful already. It is a super interesting exercise to summarize all of your fluffy thoughts into a written version of the product idea. So that is one of the elements I absolutely love. So we do have this future press release. But I figured out that not all people can handle this future press release, uh, thing. It feels like too tangible for many of them and they have too many question marks like is it even feasible and how does it look like?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Like it doesn't answer all questions. So we also created a little video on where we think we can be with the product in 18 months. It's kind of uh, screenshots, prototypes, um, explanations of the problems we're solving, for whom we're solving these problems, how we want to solve them. That's like one and a half minute video. Super nice. But we also have more, um, more extensive strategic documents where we describe all of the single elements of the strategy in more depth, including how we measure whether we are successful. So this, we, we call this like the go forward plan. It's like a 10 pages long document where we outline what the four pillars are that we're going to focus on in the next 18 months, how we measure m. These, uh, each of these pillars, which initiatives fit potentially into these pillars, um, obviously waiting for confirmation of uh, our underlying assumptions. Right. These three artifacts help us to communicate the strategy in different levels across the company.

Speaker A: One of the things I loved about that is the video. It's something that I've gotten more and more interested in over the past couple of years. Whenever I've worked at a company where the product team put together a video that helped communicate the vision and the problems they were solving. It's always been really powerful. But I'm a little curious, like how do you even create that video? Who did you work with to get it done and what does that process look like?

Speaker B: Super simple. I mean we've never done it before. We don't want to share externally. We don't have people for video editing and we didn't spend massive amount of time. I just grabbed, uh, one of our amazing designers, shared with him all the fluffy things I have in mind for the future of Doodle. And then we started just brainstorming and discussing and he was scribbling some of the ideas on paper. Actually he, he uh, made them look pretty. So that was the first step that we he kind of helped me to get this picture out of my head into something more tangible. We then shared it with our principal engineers. So they challenged it to help us understand, like, is the things we think we can do, even something we can do from a technical perspective. Initially I was afraid that they said, like, you're crazy. This is never doable. But the opposite happens. They got so inspired that they even challenged us to go above and beyond. Um, so they even had crazy ideas and like, better ideas than we ever had. So we took their ideas, refined the prototypes and the wireframes, and then we just, just created this like 21 minute, 20 second little video on Vimeo, nothing else.

Speaker A: That's awesome. I love that. And I love that it was kind of a scrappy, uh, initiative. You know, it didn't take a lot of extra resources to get done. But, you know, you're doing some of this work anyways, right? Like, you're creating some of these prototypes and these, you know, artifacts that communicate, you know, whose problems you're solving and you know, which problems of theirs you're solving and why. And so you put it together. It sounds like it impacted the engineers greatly, which is fantastic. What was the response from the rest of your product team?

Speaker B: They are excited. I mean, they are something in between excited and anxious, right? Because the things we shared are, uh, like really big, right? It is something we've never done before. It's kind of the future of doodle, obviously. Um, and then, you know, product people and you know, designers and you know, engineers, right? Like, if you show them 1 minute 20 about the future of a product product, they immediately have 20,000 things that will never work out. And they have 20,000 questions and like, tons of ideas why, uh, things will take way longer than expected. But to be honest, that's exactly the discussions you want to have, right? Like, that's why you share the bigger picture, because you want to, you want to get to two things. Number one is you want people to leave their comfort zone. We just don't want to build one feature after another. We want to have kind of a bigger picture in mind and we want to achieve that bigger version of what we are today, right? So people have to leave their comfort zone. And I think these, like, tiny little exercises help people to do so. Even if they just criticize the book or if they are skeptical. That's brilliant. We need this, right? And then the second thing is that you want your teams to think outside the box, right? And that's what our CPO duty is. We need to enable people to not just, um, do their day to day work, but to also understand how their day to day work might impact the bigger picture. So such exercises also help to think outside the box and to understand, like, if I'm building this feature today, can I rethink it so that it even contributes to the bigger picture tomorrow? And I think that's what we achieved with the video and it sparks super interesting discussions, um, all over the place. And that's amazing.

Speaker A: That's incredible. And, you know, that's, that's the way you want to see these things work. You want to see that motivation, that excitement and that pushing back and that anxiety too, because you, you need it to be something big enough that people are a little nervous about whether they can make it happen.

Speaker B: I'm nervous too, right? Like, I mean, it's a bet. Each strategy is a bat. And all you can do is you can try to de risk this bad to a certain extent by doing proper product work, by doing great discovery, by using data to validate your assumptions, you can try to de risk to a certain extent. Nevertheless, a strategy is always just a set of bats. And this set of bats is something that makes me anxious as well, but it also makes me super excited because we can build something big.

Speaker A: Yeah. Wonderful. I'm wondering, uh, where people can find you if they want to follow along or learn more about you.

Speaker B: I'm sometimes active on LinkedIn, so just follow me there.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today, Stephanie. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. Pleasure too.

Speaker A: What great insights from Stephanie Liu. Next up, our, uh, new lab notes segment where I and my team talk about our key takeaways from the conversations with our guests. In our first lab note, Dina Levitan and I talk about the value of an experienced product leader.

Speaker C: Something that I've heard a lot growing up is when you see, when you experience someone who's an expert doing their craft, they make it look easy, they make it look simple. And I think that that was true with the way she was describing her process. One of the examples she gave was the super simple process of the double diamond technique, which I've never heard anyone describe double diamond as super simple. I can imagine that, you know, she's so experienced at it that for her it's super straightforward. But, you know, the intricacies of getting, you know, every phase of that right from the discover to the maintain all along the journey, that's not simple.

Speaker A: And I think that speaks to how valuable it is for product leaders to actually have experience in product management, which sounds like a duh statement, but I can't tell you how many times I've even had a sales call with a company that was thinking about working with me and learned that they brought someone in as a product leader who hadn't been a product manager before, but, you know, maybe had experience as manager. And you really need the hard skills as well as the soft skills to lead a product team and a product organization. So lab Note 604.1 is experienced product leaders make the craft of product management look easy. In our next lab note, Mark Inakia and I talk about the great things that can happen amid discomfort. One of the things that I really love that she said is that strategy is a series of bets. And there are ways that we can de risk those bets with data, with discovery. I think of discovery as both quantitative and qualitative. We can de risk those bets, but at the end of the day, they're still bets and they make even the chief Product officer anxious, but also excited. And that really resonated with me.

Speaker B: Yeah, I loved this, uh, sound bite of uncomfortably excited. I was teaching a class last night and was telling this story about this interview that I saw recently with Cher where she was asked, when have you been the most uncomfortable in your career? And she was like, I was never comfortable in my career. I'm uncomfortable right now. And I think that speaks to, like, great things happen in that space of discomfort.

Speaker A: So that brings us to LabNote 604.2. Strategy is a series of bets that can make even the CPO uncomfortable. Following that, Dina Levitan talks about Stephanie's communication strategy.

Speaker C: Something great that she communicated about how she thinks about product strategy is with the artifacts that have different granularity depending on who in the company she's trying to speak to. So that was the three, the trifecta, uh, the future press release, the video prototype demo, the short 90 second video, and then the longer, more detailed go forward plan document. And I thought that was a really great example of empowering teams based on, you know, their context to have the vision at the granularity that makes sense for them. And I thought it also, you know, really harkens back to one of the product science principles of having the evidence at, uh, every level.

Speaker A: So that brings us to Lab Note 604.3. Use different communication approaches for different audiences of your product strategy. Then I talk about how much I love Stephanie's approach of finding foundational work that the team connects you on while you're discovering your product. Strategy. One of the things that I teach is exactly the same as what she was saying, which is that you can find foundational, important work that you can put the team on while you're doing some more discovery and learning and understanding about what's going on. The way that I always tell people is like you want to calm your executives with the knowledge that you are moving forward on something, that you're building something worthwhile, and you have to start with the yes, I will go and do the thing M and then you can start sneaking in that maybe you're uncovering some things that m put to question, some of what they've told you to do. But you already are building trust because you're building things that are valuable that you know are necessary while doing that discovery. So it's great to hear her talk about that. So that brings us to Lab Note 604.4. Find foundational alignment and begin executing while you are developing your bigger product strategy. Well, that concludes our Lab Notes section. Each of these lab notes will be in the show notes as well. It was such a pleasure to talk with Stephanie Liu about Product strategy. You can find her on LinkedIn. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The Product Science Podcast is brought to you by the Product Science Group. We teach startup founders and product leaders how to use the Product Science method to discover the highest product opportunities and lay the foundations for high growth products, teams and companies. We do this through community coaching, training and consulting. Learn more@ahproductsciencegroup.com Enjoying the episode? Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode or Visit us@productssciencepodcast.com to find show notes or sign up for more information from me and our guests. If you like the show, please leave us a rating or review. It goes a long way towards helping others find us. Now go out there and experiment. Sam m.