How to Crack Your Product Strategy

Bavaro contrasts Microsoft’s structured strategy culture with her early work on Google’s Data APIs team, where the team had a broad mission but mostly focused on shipping requested work. A successor reframed the API infrastructure as something that could serve developers across the internet. Bavaro says that bigger-picture thinking could have surfaced opportunities such as making cloud infrastructure a business.

Bavaro defines strategy as a vision of the future, a strategic framework for choosing a market and deciding how to win it, and a roadmap that works backward from the vision. The roadmap is a way to check whether the ambition fits the available time and resources, not a fixed commitment. If the pieces do not fit, the team may need to hire, narrow its scope, or change pace.

Before developing strategy, Bavaro recommends learning the users, product, and company, including speaking with at least 10 users or potential users and looking for patterns. A useful vision paints a concrete, believable future tied to real customer problems; narrative examples can help people picture it. The strategic framework then identifies the target audience, product investment areas, and principles for resolving trade-offs. At Asana, the team prioritized large companies because it was easier to simplify a product built for complex needs than to add those capabilities later.

Bavaro describes roadmaps as a portfolio: set a high-level share of effort for each strategic goal, then decide whether to pursue work in parallel or sequence it. Smaller teams may benefit from focusing together on one goal at a time, while larger companies can pursue several. For a new entrant, she advises serving a narrow or underserved use case well instead of trying to match a competitor’s feature checklist. Asana aimed to combine power with ease of use.

Bavaro recommends drafting a point of view privately, then involving the team in shaping the strategy so they can contribute and support it. Bringing senior leaders into early discussions can surface concerns before a formal presentation. Managers can use strategy principles to guide everyday feedback and decisions, repeating them often enough that teams can apply them independently. When assumptions change, revisit the strategy with the people involved and explain what was learned before bringing the wider team along.