For new products, I like to focus my product strategy map on the few elements that are most likely to derail the product we don't have a crisp handle on them: problem to solve, target audience, value prop, competitive advantage, growth strategy, and business model. It's a helpful test to see if I can articulate each of these elements, which then helps me figure out which of these still needs more clarity / validation.

Additionally, I strongly believe in writing this document out in full prose, since that forces me to get to clarity on my thinking.

I really like the outcome-motivation-gap framing for understanding the problem at hand. I find that it forces me to really empathize with the user (and helps the reader of the document do so as well).

I find it helpful to think about audience attributes, in order to get as specific as possible about our target audience. This specificity might feel like overkill, but it makes the downstream logistics (of things like customer interviews, possible segmentation) much clearer.

Though there's a lot of detail here, it's helpful to break up our target into these discrete segments because it'll help us thoughtfully talk to potential customers (and then make sense of what they say).

I also strongly believe in prioritizing "now" vs. "future" target segments. I've been too many new products go too broad too quickly, to their detriment.

This is a method to help us distill our value prop 

. Imagining designing the homepage for the new product and articulating why customers should buy it; we define the product tagline (the overall promise to customers) and ideally 3-5 specific, distinct sub-benefits. We then validate how these value props resonate with customers during customer interviews.

This was important to call out because we were working within an established organization.

It's a productive exercise to explicitly lay out hypotheses about both short-term 

 long-term competitive advantage, so that you can pressure test both. In particular, I like how this example makes the tie between our short-term competitive advantage and the target audiences we want to go after first.

Same here. This was important to call out because we were working within an established organization.

I feel like this section is too-often overlooked, which is why I make a point to include it. I've seen a lot of product strategy maps that talk about top line revenue, but the payment model and cost structure are really important to consider in order to help get to longer-term success.

Sachin Rekhi

When incubating a new product within LinkedIn, I used this product strategy map to pressure test early assumptions and align the core team on a vision for the opportunity space.

: Our team at LinkedIn was trying to create a new product for sales professionals (essentially product expansion). Before we dove into building, we wanted to pressure test our assumptions around our product strategy (documented below). Some of these beliefs came from things we knew from users of “regular’ LinkedIn, and some came from early user research; however, we had varying levels of conviction in them.

: We used this document internally to get the core team aligned on what the product should look like.

: After this first step of documenting our hypothesized product strategy, we used more targeted customer interviews and other validation techniques to get to even more conviction on what we should build, before we went ahead and built an MVP.

 for sales professionals is to increase the quantity, size, and speed of closed deals.

 to achieve this outcome is driven by commissions. Therefore, they would be most interested in maximizing their commission for each closed deal.

 or problems that prevent sales professionals from achieving the desired outcome.

First, it is challenging for sales professionals to identify the right prospects to reach out to.

Second, it is also difficult to determine the best path to reach them because the majority of current outreach was cold.

Third, they often lack the social context to craft compelling outreach messages.

 are user title, industry, and deal size. First, we believe that account managers and account executives could benefit from our product. Second, prioritizing tech and financial service industries ensures that we can leverage the industries where we have the greatest density of sales prospects on LinkedIn. Third, we believe that sales professionals who manage >$100K deal sizes, considered relationship sales, will resonate more with our product but sales professionals who manage $10K - $100K deal sizes would still find value in our product.

In terms of customer segments, since LSN is a B2B product, we hypothesize that there are different customer segments for decision makers and end users.

VP Sales in tech industry with deal sizes >$100K

VP Sales in tech industry with deal sizes between $10K - $100K

VP Sales in financial services industry with deal sizes > $100K

VP Sales in financial services industry with deal sizes between $10K–$100K

Account managers in tech industry with deal sizes >$100K

Account managers in tech services industry with deal sizes between $10K - $100K

Account managers in financial services industry with deal sizes >$100K

Account managers in financial services industry with deal sizes between $10K - $100K

Account executives in tech industry with deal sizes >$100K

Account executives in tech industry with deal sizes between $10K - $100K

Account executives in financial services industry with deal sizes >$100K

Account executives in financial services industry with deal sizes between $10K - $100K

Of course, some of these customer segments will resonate more strongly and should be prioritized in the “now” target audience versus others that we will plan to consider later as part of the “future” target audience.

LSN will initially focus on these customer segments

We want to prioritize these four customer segments as our “Now” target audience because they have the greatest resonance with the other dimensions of our product strategy. Namely, these customer segments likely feel the most acute pain in terms of lacking high-quality leads, strongly desire the value proposition of quality over quantity of leads, and already have a higher presence on LinkedIn, making them easier to reach in terms of future growth. Moreover, LSN would be uniquely positioned to build on LinkedIn’s existing competitive advantage because of LinkedIn’s user density in these industries.

This means the other eight customer segments fall into the “Future” target audience.

 for LSN is “Close more deals faster through social selling”. This reflects the idea that LSN enables sales professionals to increase the quantity and speed of deals by enabling social selling.

Initially, we’ve come up with ten different 

 that we will then validate through customer interviews

An account-centric view that delivers relevant insights on your top accounts

Proactively notifying you about actionable insights on your target accounts & leads

Providing a world-class search experience optimized for sales prospecting

Proactively recommending potential leads at your accounts

Prioritizing accounts that have become more attractive using information gleaned on target accounts & leads (target the right buyer)

Replacing your spreadsheet with a better workflow for pre-opportunity account and lead management

Deeply integrating your prospecting workflow with your CRM to avoid manual data entry

Guiding sales professionals through the new way of social selling

Providing pre-meeting intelligence to better prepare for every prospect conversation

Creating an account planning tool to help you better map the key account stakeholders and org structure

In terms of the long-term competitive advantage, LSN can leverage LinkedIn’s existing user base network effects to prevent competitors from being able to build and maintain an up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive prospect database.

 and how we’ll win today, we need to consider our direct competitors (Hoovers, ZoomInfo, Lead411), indirect competitors (industry conferences), and adjacent competitors (CRM solutions like Salesforce, sales acceleration solutions like Outreach and YesWare). We believe our existing competitive advantage is the up-to-date accuracy and comprehensiveness of prospect information we have thanks to the rich LinkedIn profiles members keep up-to-date. This advantage best serves the customer segments we prioritized as the “now” target audiences because VPs and account executives focused on larger deals would perceive the greatest benefit from being able to more efficiently pinpoint the right prospects and build rapport with them.

Since LSN is a new product within an established org, we focus on 

 and skip short-term traction channels because the long-term channels were already established.

 Specifically, we focus on two long-term growth loops, one to target decision makers and one to target end users:

First, to reach decision makers, we would leverage an inbound sales loop. Namely, our sales team would use LinkedIn InMail to reach out to decision makers like VPs of Sales.

Second, to reach end users like account executives, we would leverage an incentivized viral loop. Namely, the marketing team targets sales professionals already actively using LinkedIn's free product, upselling them to LSN.

Since there are two ways of purchasing LSN, depending on whether the user is a decision maker or an end user, we consider how each business model input would vary based on the user role.

First, for decision makers, the input of revenue streams include levers like new opportunities and win rate since we think we can leverage the sales team to reach them.

On the other hand, for end users, levers include free trial starts and free trial survival rate, since we plan to upsell them directly through marketing and offer a free 30-day trial.

We hypothesize that the key lever for decision makers is deal size whereas the key lever for end users is average selling price.

Finding decision makers with higher deal size is crucial to monetization when selling bulk seats whereas selling to individual end users will likely depend on the LSN price point.

We hypothesize NRR (net revenue retention) for decision makers and renewal rate for end users. This reflects the fact that LSN will likely be sold as a subscription to both decision makers and end users.

The direct sales team has to be taken into account as a sizable fixed cost when considering the business equation for decision.

On the other hand, for end users, the marketing costs are likely considerably lower and can be disregarded.

New product strategy map at LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Context

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