Why Short-Term Thinking Hurts Your Product: 5 Reasons to Plan for the Long Haul

What if your product's biggest missed opportunity wasn’t a feature, but the lack of a bold, long-term strategy? B2C products especially tend to plan quarter by quarter. Let me show you how to break out of this bad habit and build a long-term product strategy. 

The usual beef happens between the business side — Product Managers, Product Marketers and other business stakeholders —  and the root-level Product team members:  Designers and Developers. 

‘All that time talking at a high level could be spent on designer-engineer planning and speedy delivery’, they say. ‘Tempting, but..’, responds the Product Manager. 

Some folks would even prefer to be left out from the decision making process and just simply let the Product Manager or other business stakeholder tell them what to do. Flattering, but we PMs are not that smart on our own. 

Every software product needs a long-term strategy. Preferably crafted together by the PM, Product Marketing Manager, Design and Development, not given top-down but bottom-up to ensure those closest to the problems are involved. 

Why every software product needs a long-term strategy

1. Raising ambition

One might say that by allowing yourself to see only the next 5 metres of the road, will indeed allow yourself to see only those 5 next metres and nothing more. But imagine the feeling of unblocking the view and admiring the 5 kilometres ahead in the horizon! You’d be able to see the possibility of moving forward in kilometres, not metres. 

Similarly, planning the product milestones and roadmap only for a quarter will enable you to move forward in the fraction of a quarter of a year. It’s easy to plan just the next thing, but wouldn’t that also lock your goals into a small-sized form because you’re not seeing further? 

A classic example here is, if you’d ask me to run a marathon in two weeks, I couldn’t. I’m not ready and haven’t prepared. But if you would have asked if I can do it next year, the probability is higher since I’ll get to plan, train and work on my goal. Just like that, looking further ahead with a long-term strategy enabled me to raise my ambition. 

2. Wider perspective in decision making

If you’re not committed to a long-term plan, then your perspective is too narrow and you’re likely to be making choices based only on what is right in front of you. This is the opposite of making strategic choices and drops you from the long game everyone else is playing.  

3. Aligning business goals and user needs makes a company viable

Ultimately, the Product team holds responsibility for their decisions to the company. The company exists to make business —to deliver outcomes for its stakeholders— which by principle requires continuity and cannot be just reactive. 

A software product should be built with business goals and customer happiness in mind, neither of which benefit from short-sightedness. 

4. Differentiation = more success

Differentiation from competition happens only when  we’re able to tell a story about who we are, from whom and why we exist as a company. Without consistently executing on the message in the long-term it gets messy and eventually lost. And again, we lose in the long game of the market to those whose story is as clear as a summer morning. 

5. Guideline for everyday micro-decisions

At its best, a long-term strategy is an easy guideline for everyday decision-making for all the cross-functional experts in the Product team. The long-term strategy acts as a base for the team’s mutually agreed direction, freeing mental space for what the team members do best within their own areas of expertise. 

It doesn’t only boost the focus time and unleash creativity, but also provides end-goal goggles through which to look at the small decisions each of the team members make everyday.

What does a long-term product strategy actually look like?

A long-term strategy is for setting a clear direction with all eyes on the future goals of the team. By now we know that it’s much more than just a roadmap. It’s a plan which is not only done in collaboration with the whole team but also includes the following:

A North Star goal

 What’s the business goal your product aims to have in the next few quarters? Is it to increase revenue, save money or save time? Whichever it is, name it as your beacon to guide you in the dark. Depending on the size of an organization, the chances are that the team will receive their goal from the leadership team.

Objective

Then move on to the users’ needs. Conduct user research, market research, competitor analysis, and talk to your target audience. What do they say they’re missing? What is hard these days? Where does it hurt? You want to ensure the team is solving a real pain point so collect these insights and agree on having it as the problem you want to focus on solving,  ideally on a one-problem-per-quarter basis. The most important trick here is to choose only one focus area. Multiples would stretch the team too thin and it’s unlikely you would see success in all the directions! 

Features or a feature-set

Finally comes the biggest slice of cake: decide on the features you as a team think are the best solutions to the objective’s problem. Hosting a well-prepped one or two day ideation workshop with the emphasis on first generating ideas in all possible ways and then shortlisting those is one of the best practices in this phase. This is the time when you want to look at your current product’s promise to its users and see what needs to be done to jump ahead of all the competition. 

A North Star success metric

In the end, figure out how to measure all of the above. Changes in this singular metric should showcase how successful your long-term product strategy is and will be over time. 

The key in long-term product strategy creation is that the Product Manager doesn’t give it as an order from their ivory tower but leads the team through every step of the strategy’s creation process. The best ones let their teams come up with the objective and features while the PM’s role is simply to organise space for such decision making, remind the team of the big picture and keep the creeping risks at bay. 

Final note: build in iteration and flexibility 

With all of what was said above, the long-term strategy is still only a very charming and exciting plan. A plan with a lot of power to unite the Product team and spread crystal clear messaging to the world. 

This plan might fall short if it doesn’t assume and welcome change, though. We live in a constantly changing world so naturally we cannot prepare for everything. This is why a long term strategy should be treated as a guideline, a North Star, enabling us to deliver products in iterations to get feedback quickly and allow us to pivot if the situation seems so. 

Like this, change and iteration switches from messy to manageable, whilst we’re still playing for the end goal.