Building a Product Strategy for a Backend Product

When you learn and read about product management you will quickly learn how important it is to engage with your customers, be agile and make experiments, but when your product is a back-end system with no end users, but just other applications and it is considered key infrastructure that others depend on to work in a predictable way, it is not so easy to be agile do A/B tests lean start up style experiments and user testing.

This is a classical problem and one very often ignored in product management literature. Here it seems always to be about products that have users that you can sit down and talk to and learn what to do. There are however a few things you can do if you are the product manager of a back end product and need to build a product strategy.

It is necessary to sit down and look at all the consumers of your product. They are essentially your customers. That means identifying all other products that depend on or will depend on your product. Unfortunately product managers don’t always have a strategy. Then you need to look at other artefacts like road maps, visions, even marketing material. It is also a good idea to talk to them to understand where they are moving. Here you actually don’t need to concern yourself with the end users.

Once this is done find out what the strategy is for their product. Doing this may uncover some contradictory demands. One product may want you to focus on microservices another on batch deliveries another wants a message based architecture. Some may prefer REST/JSON type services, others SOAP/XML and others just FTP/CSV in a scheduled batch. Welcome to the world of Agile development where teams decide inside their own bubble what would be most agile for them.

Unfortunately it is your problem to reconcile these differences with the different consumers. In order to do this you need stakeholder management.

It is necessary for you to chart the different stakeholders and weigh their importance and actually do a typical stakeholder analysis where you find out what their interests are and how you should communicate with them. Unfortunately most product managers leave it at that and forget the art of stakeholder management. In the best case they will fill out a stakeholder analysis and store it on their harddrive never to be opened again. But stakeholder management is more like politics. Watch Game Of Thrones or House Of Cards for inspiration.

You have to understand the different fractions and their powerbase. Understand the different persons their culture. You have to lobby ideas, be the diplomat, explain the positions of other stakeholders. Look at key persons social network profiles in order to find out what type they were, where they live, what they do in their sparetime. Understand their concerns, apply pressure when needed and yield when it is necessary. Remember politics is all about compromise. But you can only do that once you have a plan.

All the input you have got from the above points now has to be integrated with your own knowledge about the product. What are the possibilities, the technical limitations, technical debt etc? Given your knowledge of the status of your product and the possibilities and available resources you have to plan for how it should change. Draft a plan on a few headlines. Focus for example on capabilities you would like to develop, data you want to capture or ways of working with consuming products. Find out only a few key goals you have, but have suggestions for more.

Now, start over again, because product strategy, like any strategy takes time and you need to form a coalition behind it if it should succeed. You are not finished until you have that coalition behind you. Not until then will you have a proper product strategy.