What is product strategy? Best practices & template

Product strategy bridges your product vision and tangible business outcomes, and having a strong and well-documented product strategy is mission-critical today. It sounds dramatic, but the stakes are truly high. Across industries, and especially for companies offering digital products and services, you risk disruption if you are not an ‘AI company’ or working to become one. “In 2025 and beyond, companies will live and die by the strength of their digital products,” shared Airtable CEO Howie Liu.

It’s both a benefit and a challenge to see all timelines accelerated. Companies can deliver more value to customers much faster, but the timeframes for doing the background work that inform an effective product strategy are shorter—and why 76% of product leaders expect their investment in AI to grow within the next year. In this article, we’ll look at how you can strategically build a winning product strategy that drives results.

What is a product strategy?

Product strategy is a high-level plan that defines what your product hopes to accomplish, who it benefits, how it will deliver value to customers, and why it’s different from alternatives. To inform this plan, a product strategist needs to have a deep understanding of what users want, what their organization is capable of, and what the market is ready for. 

One way to think about it is like this: “In [insert timeframe here] our product will be [insert outcome here]”, where the timeframe is long and the outcome is broad but clearly conveys the user benefit (or the infamous jobs to be done).

The most successful companies—from Netflix to Amazon to Apple—didn't achieve market dominance by accident. They crafted deliberate product strategies that guided every major decision, from feature prioritization to market positioning. (These companies also all, notably, leaned into emerging technology.)

Why is product strategy important?

Product strategy provides the foundation for sustainable growth and competitive advantage. A well-documented and socialized product strategy serves as a North Star. Without it, teams can find themselves pulled in different directions, building features that don't align with customer needs and core business goals.

If you’ve conducted market research, created personas, gathered customer feedback, and used this knowledge to prioritize your roadmap, then you stand to reap the following benefits:

Attracts investor confidence: Product strategy helps stakeholders understand why you're developing your product and how you'll prioritize decisions in favor of customer value

What are the key components of a product strategy?

An effective product strategy consists of three core elements, influenced by your business goals and market dynamics:

Once you have a well-defined product strategy, you need help executing against it. Product operations teams support your product strategy by streamlining the development process, managing data and product management tools, and standardizing processes and communication. 

5 effective product strategies

Your product strategy can move in several different directions depending on what’s working already, that can be improved upon, and what you’re capable of offering.

Market penetration strategy

This strategy focuses on increasing market share within current markets and with existing products by improving the customer experience and encouraging repeat purchases. This may mean placing more emphasis on loyalty programs, personalization, expanding channel reach, or offering exclusive products or experiences.

Product development strategy

This strategy involves developing new products or features for existing customers. Companies might leverage their ecosystems to create seamless and integrated experiences for customers (either between product lines or with partners).

Market development strategy

This approach expands existing products into new markets or customer segments. This requires market research and attention to cultural nuances. New markets involve research into pricing strategies within that market, supply chain management, and regulatory compliance and legal considerations.

Differentiation strategy

This strategy emphasizes leaning into your unique value propositions that set your product apart from competitors. If you’re truly offering a disruptive and transformative solution (e.g., you’re one of the first electric vehicles on the market), this is likely the way to go. If you can give customers something new, there’s less need for spin and more importance on education and benefits.

Focused strategy

This strategy, also referred to as a Niche strategy, involves tailoring your product to meet the needs of a specific segment of the market. In this case, you’re not trying to dominate the whole market, but to claim a very specific space within it because you can address particular customer or industry needs.

How to build a successful product strategy framework

Building an effective product strategy means taking a systematic approach that considers your business model, company goals, product vision, market insights, and internal resources. 

1. Analyze the market

It’s important to do an in-depth analysis of the competitive landscape and your target market. Research your target audience's needs, pain points, and the solutions currently available to them, including competitors’ strengths and gaps. Insights may come from:

AI-powered product management software makes this process faster and more reliable. With Airtable ProductCentral, AI agents can automatically generate a competitive analysis, benchmarking your performance against leading rivals and surfacing real-time insights from the web. This empowers your team to continuously monitor the competitive landscape and quickly act on market shifts or emerging opportunities.

2. Define and document your strategy

Choose a strategic approach based on your research and business goals. Don’t worry about the details—the tactics will come later. Focus on making clear choices about where you'll compete and how you'll win. You’ll need to make decisions around:

3. Establish key metrics and benchmarks

Identify the metrics that are meaningful to your business strategy. Every company is different and there’s no one-size-fits-all way to measure success. Metrics and KPIs should directly relate to your strategic goals and help set that overarching North Star. Think about:

4. Create your roadmap(s)

Every product or service offering needs a product roadmap. This is where you break down your big-picture aspirations into prioritized features and actionable initiatives. A roadmap connects strategic objectives with the tactical work required to deliver functionality and product launches successfully (pro tip: consider using a product launch checklist too). Consider:

5. Continuously validate and iterate

In many industries, but particularly in the SaaS (Software as a Service) product lifecycle, it’s common to begin with an initial strategy and iteratively validate and make changes and optimize results. The most effective product strategies evolve based on product-market fit, user needs, and product differentiation so it’s important to establish regular strategy review cycles. Pay attention to:

What are the challenges of product strategy?

Every team faces challenges. While not an exhaustive list, here are a few common challenges in adhering to your product strategy.

Strategy drift and scope creep

Teams sometimes gradually deviate from their original strategy as new opportunities and pressures arise. 

Solution: Establish regular strategy review sessions and define clear criteria for evaluating new initiatives against strategic objectives and resources. To avoid strategy drift, use product portfolio management tools like ProductCentral. They help you move beyond politics and gut feel by giving you a data-driven view of your entire product portfolio, making it easier to decide which products to scale, pivot, or sunset based on impact, resources, and market opportunity.

Lack of stakeholder alignment 

Different departments may interpret strategy differently or have conflicting priorities. 

Solution: Create shared documentation and product roadmaps that stakeholders can access and establish clear communication channels between teams, focusing on data and impact.

Rapidly changing market conditions 

External factors can quickly make strategies obsolete, whether those are economic, political, competitive, or from emerging technologies.

Solution: Build flexibility into your strategy, monitor market indicators closely, and establish processes for rapid strategic pivots when necessary.

Caught up in time-consuming tasks

Research, data analysis, and cross-functional communication all take time. Teams can risk under-validating their strategy or missing details simply because they are stretched thin.

Solution: AI-powered product management tools like ProductCentral can help. For example, ProductCentral comes with Omni, an AI sidekick that can help teams build custom apps, analyze data, and answer questions instantly.

What are examples of successful product strategies?

Taking flight with a flexible product strategy: JetBlue

JetBlue is a great example of a major airline whose product strategy needs to adjust alongside company goals and changing market conditions, especially post-Covid. Travelers may be interested in where they can fly next, but behind the scenes there is a lot of operational complexity and IT work happening to deliver smooth customer experiences.

“We have to constantly reinvent ourselves and dig deep to rethink: Who is JetBlue? Who do we want to be? What sort of product offerings do we want to put out there for customers?” says Tracy Bink, Director of IT and Strategic Programs. 

To achieve this agility, the JetBlue IT organization—more than 400 people—uses Airtable to prioritize and re-prioritize initiatives that power customer experiences and streamline frontline operations. Their use of Airtable now allows the org to prioritize a roadmap containing 400 initiatives in minutes—compared to days. The team now has a shared, prioritized roadmap that gives cross-functional partners immediate access to which initiatives are prioritized and their timeline for completion. This also moved the needle on reporting: from a multi-week process to a 30-minute interface build. 

Thinking outside the box for a better customer experience: Vimeo

Product strategy can apply broadly to teams building experiences for internal customers and making calls about whether they can deliver a good product, or a great one.

As Director of Customer Experience Operations at Vimeo, Kristen Kampetis, and her team of program managers and automation engineers work to build workflows and tools that facilitate their customers’ enterprise journey. The team foresaw a need to modernize technology, consolidate best practices, and standardize workflows to accommodate for growth, but they struggled internally to mine information across fragmented tools.

With Airtable, Vimeo built an app that effectively created a central hub of information for teams that work directly with Vimeo’s enterprise-level customers. It’s where customer success and implementation managers track the health of accounts, manage day-to-day interactions with customers, and understand product usage to identify where people may need help. This app connects seven teams and provides a consistent experience for end customers. “Airtable is big impact, low investment. This is the dream for an agile operations team,” says Kristen.

Product strategy template 

A product strategy template can help keep teams stay aligned on customer needs, launch timing, and long-term strategy.

This template from Airtable allows you to set goals, map initiatives, and tie every roadmap back to KPIs—and you can track progress to metrics and goals in real time. Automations help with updates, notifications, and reporting while custom views allow each stakeholder to work in the view that works best for them.

Your one-stop shop for product strategy

Airtable ProductCentral is a flexible, AI-powered solution that brings every stage of product development—strategy, planning, and shipping—into one place. It turns customer feedback into roadmap-ready insights, aligns distributed teams into a coordinated portfolio engine, and delivers the clarity you need to ensure every sprint drives your top priorities forward. ProductCentral also comes with Omni, your AI collaborator, ready to help teams build custom apps, analyze data, and answer questions instantly, so product teams can focus on strategy, not manual work.

See for yourself by booking a demo.