Product Strategies For Growth

Sreemati Lalgudi Nivstrand at UXDX Community: Nordics. Video: https://youtu.be/n3kqJW6AVz0

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and the BlueCall journey

[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm at the UXDX conference today to talk to you about product strategy for growth. I am Sree. You can call me Sreemati Lalgudi Nivstrand, or just simply Sree. I'm CPO at BlueCall, which is a startup that works with mental well-being for employees. I have worked previously at Fishbrain, Worldline and the NHS in the UK.

[00:00:22] This is just to give you a flavor of the different kinds of company settings I've worked in and led product in over the last 14 years. Now I'm working for a startup, and I've worked for a growth scale-up, but also an enterprise and a very public environment. I bring all this experience into product leadership at BlueCall to help us develop our growth strategy, and that's the experience and the learnings I want to share with you today.

[00:00:49] What's BlueCall? We help millions of people across the world to improve their mental well-being. How did we come about that, and what's our journey? BlueCall was founded in Q4 of 2016 by three amazing founders, Caroline, Camara [?] and Lisa. They were very young, starting new jobs, changing countries, moving states, and they realized that there was not a place where they could talk about all the challenges they were going through at the same time. There were a lot of things they could talk to friends and family about, but not everything.

[00:01:24] They realized that this was affecting their mental health and their well-being, and they couldn't access health care in a preventative setting. So they started a mental health network of volunteers, where people who needed help to preventatively and proactively act on their mental health could actually reach out and get help. In 2018 they pivoted into a B2B setting, because they found there was growing potential in the B2B market to prevent costly mental health issues among employees in the workplace.

[00:02:03] By doing that, they were able to accelerate growth in the shape of a SaaS company with a niche in preventative care, complementing the traditional reactive health care solutions we already had. By the end of 2020 they were asking, "What do we do next? What is beyond digital therapies?" That is where I came in. I joined BlueCall in March 2020 to help them build their next product strategy.

What a product strategy is for

[00:02:36] What is a product strategy, and what's its purpose? It is to set direction for the team to achieve the company's vision. I have two images here, if you're a big Lord of the Rings fan. In the first image, the dwarves are lost in the Mirkwood forest. That's exactly what happens when you don't have a good product strategy. All the teams are going directionless in different directions, because that is what they think the company wants. By not having a strategy, everyone is going in a different direction, but no one is able to reach the blue mountains.

[00:03:16] By having a really strong product strategy, you put them in the position of the second image, where Bilbo Baggins goes up the tree, looks at the blue mountain and says, "Okay, that's the direction we need to go." That's exactly what a strong product strategy does for a team.

[00:03:33] So how do you come to a product strategy? There are three very important elements to it. One is the building blocks, which are the basic foundation of the strategy. Then you develop your strategy. Sometimes it's one strategy, or multiple strategies that you need to do an option analysis for, which is what we did when we were starting with our product strategy.

[00:04:02] And finally, the most important part for me, for any company but especially for startups and growth companies, is the validation part. I'm going to walk you through each of these steps and also highlight what challenges we experienced, how we overcame them and what the lessons learned were for us from this experience.

The building blocks: complication, goals and performance

[00:04:29] First, what are building blocks? They're all the different components you need to be able to put your product strategy together. Some of these components probably already exist, or if you're a very new startup you might have to build up many of them. In a lot of existing companies, some of these components exist but are outdated and have never been looked into: what is the continuation now, does it make sense from when it started? So these are good elements to have, and to re-question as well, if you already have them and are working on your product strategy.

[00:05:05] That's exactly what we started to do. I shared the very strong complication we have had at BlueCall from its inception in 2016 to now, and we still think it's a very valid problem. Not everyone is happy at work. The number one reason for sickness in Sweden is stress, and it's also one of the top three reasons in Europe. Happiness is still related to mental health, and if mental health is one of the biggest reasons, we still think we have huge potential to make a lot of people happy by providing them focus on their mental health.

[00:05:50] Secondly, the business goals. This is where the company is trying to decide: should we be on a growth path, should our goal be to grow, should we be profitable? If we want to do a bit of both, which area of your business do you want to be profitable and which area do you want to grow? That has to be very, very clear, because I have worked in organizations where the sales team is going towards growth, and for the same product area the product team is told to be operationally profitable, and they are always in conflict in terms of what business goal they're trying to achieve.

[00:06:30] So I really think that a strong, cohesive product goal for a product area is very important, so that sales, marketing, operations and product can all head towards that same KPI. Also, when you're doing a product strategy, don't just look at the smaller adjustments. Sometimes you might have to look into drastic changes. For example, one of the questions we had was: should part of our product strategy be increasing the number of sessions we have, and what would we gain from that? Would we be able to solve some of the problems for the users or the customers by doing that? Or should we completely get rid of digital therapies?

[00:07:22] So I think you should be very bold when you're doing product strategy work, and able to question the status quo as well. But the most important thing is to have a very cohesive direction in which you're going.

[00:07:37] Then, if you have any product performance data, that's really good to have, especially about how successful your existing product has been and whether it's meeting the business goals or not. This gives you an idea of whether there are patterns or problems: why the users are not using it, why the customers are not happy, and whether you're not achieving the business goals. All this data really helps.

[00:08:03] There are many cases in which the product performance is really not known. Then I would say run some spikes or tests to understand where your product is at this given time. This is a really important part of the building blocks, to be able to have a good data-driven strategy. It could be as simple as sending a survey to your top customers: are you happy with the product, what's missing, what's not missing? Sometimes it's a simple start, but it's a great start. It's better to have data than no data.

Competition, market drivers and trends

[00:08:40] Another important part is the competition: having a good understanding of where your competitors are and where they were before. Has your competitive landscape changed? Are you still adequately differentiated? For BlueCall, it was very relevant to ask this question. We wanted to give preventative health care and focus on digital, because that is what the traditional providers were not doing at that time, in 2018.

[00:09:13] Is that still relevant? Is it still relevant to be digital? Is it still relevant to be preventative? Is it still relevant to be anonymous? Because those were our value-differentiating USPs at that time. If they are still relevant, is the competition still doing it? Is that still differentiatingly relevant for us? We questioned all of those status quos as well, seeing where our competitors were and whether we were still uniquely different from the rest of the providers in the market.

[00:09:53] What I encourage all product people to do, especially when you want to look at things very differently, is something I got from working with Spotify during our collaboration when I was at Worldline. I asked them one question, just at some social event: "Who's your biggest competition?" And they said, "YouTube." I said, "But they don't do any subscription." They said, "Yes, but they are the ones closest to taking all the users from us."

[00:10:35] So even though it's a free video streaming company, for a music streaming company it was relevant to consider them one of the top competitors. That has always made me think about looking a little bit outside the box. Who is our competition now? Are they still relevant? Are we differentiated? What are people doing in our closer markets, or the markets we're likely to expand into, even if we have not expanded yet but would want to? What are people doing in the world, but also in a similar field, like mental health tech? What is the B2C trend, what are the drivers there, how are things changing?

[00:11:19] I think all of this information is very relevant. So don't just look at your direct competitors; also look at indirect competitors, and what that means for your product strategy.

[00:11:33] We also looked into the market, which I already touched on when talking about the competitors. What are the drivers? Looking beyond the competitors, is some disruption happening there that could be relevant for yours? We looked into other apps that are more mindfulness. We are not doing mindfulness per se, but it's part of well-being, and we see a lot of disruption in Calm, Headspace and other B2C psychological service providers like Talkspace, and the local providers like Minecraft [?]. We were really looking at what's happening there, what's not happening there, and why it is or isn't relevant to us.

[00:12:15] So we looked at those market drivers, and one of the questions was to step back and ask: are their users similar to our users? Then what is the positioning we should have? Should a person be paying for that service? Could it be positioned in a way that by providing the service to the employees, you are really increasing your employer branding, because you say that you care: "You don't need to pay for these services; we offer them to you because we think your happiness is important." Is that a differentiating factor for us in our positioning? We looked into those things as well.

[00:12:53] We looked into the trends: what are the technology and regulatory trends? Instead of looking at them as challenges, you could look at them through a different lens and see whether these are opportunities relevant to us. Will this enhance or future-proof your product? For example, there is now a labor law update on how to do prevention and rehabilitation in workplaces and what the employer's responsibility is. We see that a lot of this conversation is now moving towards preventiveness.

[00:13:30] This is regulatory, and you might think it's boring, but for us it's a really important trend, showing our customer group that preventative is not just a nice-to-have thing. It's become a must-have thing, because it's going to become a regulation from the first of June. So look into those things as well.

The ecosystem and time-boxing the building blocks

[00:13:51] Finally, look into your ecosystem, because that will show you whether, with your existing product line, there is a possibility to grow through partnerships and value-adding products. For example, sleep measurements are one of the key parts of mental well-being. Should we be doing statistics or capturing this information ourselves, or can we piggyback on other sleep apps that could give us relevant information for identifying risk where people are having mental health problems, and giving them the relevant training or everyday actions to help them? Those kinds of ecosystem opportunities help you understand where you can partner with people in your own space or in a related space to grow.

[00:14:52] It sounds like a lot of things, right? But this is what we did. We knew that if we wanted to set up the perfect building blocks, we could just do it forever. So instead of doing it forever, we decided we'd time-box. Our time box for building blocks was going to be a week. We were going to focus on stakeholder interviews and market research, and we were going to use all the internal data we had, even the data we had not used in the past or that had been underutilized.

[00:15:28] For example, one of the key things we looked into was this. We said we have a problem converting customers, because we have a long sales conversion cycle, but we have a very high retention rate. How could a customer who didn't know this was a product they needed end up super happy? We have an 80 to 90 percent retention rate. Why is that? How could we use that conversation, those statistics, in our pre-sales activities?

[00:16:06] That is an example of how you can look at data differently. It's not just for customer success; it's also to motivate your new potential customers on why these things are very relevant, why these customers continue to be with us, because it's not just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have, and why they think that way.

[00:16:31] What was very helpful was to use a Lean Canvas. We still use the Lean Canvas, because it's very simple to explain to stakeholders who have never worked with product strategies before, and it's very easy to evolve with. For example, if you're at a stage where you're still trying to understand your customer segments and their problems, you can just focus on that area. Then you can iteratively build up the rest of the areas: if you're solving this problem, what is unique enough, what could the solution be, and the next parts of the conversation, like channels or unfair advantage.

[00:17:15] So I would really recommend you look into Ash Maurya's Lean Canvas if you have not used it before. You can use any other method. I'm not saying this is the best method; it just works for us because it scales with our needs, and we found it very helpful.

[00:17:34] That is basically what we started doing. We put in one week, put all this information together and started to ask: do we know who our customer segment is? Do we understand their problems? Is our existing solution solving those problems? I would definitely recommend going in that order, because a lot of people start with, "This is our solution. Who are our customers, and what problems are we solving?" But then you're focusing on the wrong place, because you're too invested in the solution you have.

[00:18:04] Always look at who your customer is now, who your customers have been, and why they have changed. Are the problems the same? Is our solution solving that problem? That's a good way to go. So we time-boxed ourselves to a week. It was a lot of heads put together, a lot of people having a lot of discussions, a lot of people invested in finding this data. But I think that creates a kind of focus as well, which is very good when you're doing product strategy work.

[00:18:33] After doing all this wonderful building-block data collection and understanding, where did we land? We identified one of our biggest problems: our user segments had changed. The mindset with which we introduced the product to the customer and the user in 2018 was drastically different in 2020, so our problem-solution statement really needed to be reassessed. We were not sure these were still the problems, or that this was still the right solution. This was one of the biggest challenges we identified when we did our building-block exercise.

Developing the strategy: personas and markets

[00:19:18] So what happens next? We took this challenge into the next part of our process, which is development. First I will talk about what the development process of the product strategy is and what it meant for BlueCall, and then how we incorporated the challenge we identified into our development process.

[00:19:45] The first thing we did when we started developing our strategy was to try to understand the personas. Personas are a very good way to cover not just the users but also the buyers, and you need to focus on both of them. Who are your buyers now? Who are your users now? What are the problems of the users? What are the challenges, or the benefits, your buyers are trying to gain?

[00:20:15] If you're ever in conflict between buyers and users, I will always say put the focus on the user personas and try to understand their problems first, rather than focusing on the buyer. Because if you have a really good value proposition for the users, you're solving their problem and making them happy, and the buyers, if they're different, will automatically buy it. You just need to shift the conversation towards the buying side of the discussion. So when you're doing your persona work for product strategy development, focus on the users first.

[00:20:44] What we did was a lot of open-ended interviews with existing customers. We also did a lot of open-ended interviews with different potential users, and also the existing users, because, as I said, our user segment had shifted, so we really didn't know exactly who our target user was. So we did a flavor sample of different groups as well. What this persona work really helps you do is put the focus back on the user, so you're really focusing on their problems rather than on your own solution.

[00:21:30] Once we'd done our persona work and started to see the patterns of problems we really wanted to solve for the user to achieve our vision, which would also translate into the buyer's benefit, we started to map them onto which market we wanted to look into that has most of these personas, so we could have the highest impact in that market, but also in terms of known well-being problems. For example, tech companies usually have 70 percent unhappiness or burnout rates compared to other industries.

[00:22:09] We started to look into macro data to see whether there were mental well-being problems, and if we didn't have statistics at a Swedish level, we tried to look at the Nordic level, European level or global level. It's always the user problem per se. The way you address them might be different, but the problems might be relatable in some ways. That is what we did if we didn't have it locally. Luckily, the Swedish government does tremendous work on mental health statistics in workplaces, so we were very fortunate. But I do know that in other industries there's always this challenge, so I would say look beyond your own current market.

[00:22:52] What we started to do was map out the problems most of our personas were facing in that market segment against the impact we could create, what we call the affinity towards the BlueCall value proposition. Our personas were likely to be someone working in an agile company, or someone whose company was going through a digital transformation. So we really started to map that to understand exactly which industry we wanted to target.

Competitive analysis and two weeks with customers

[00:23:24] The next step: I've talked a lot about competitive analysis already, so I'm not going to go into the details. But we looked at it from the aspect of how their business is set up and what potential reach they're going to look into. For example, if a company is in the UK, are they likely to grow in Europe or move to the US? That gave us an idea of what kind of growth potential they were looking at.

[00:23:53] We also looked at the product offering: what they were offering in the past, what they're offering now and what they're expecting to offer in future. Some of this information you can get if they've done an investment round, or from the company's site. You don't get all the information, but mostly you can connect the dots. Why this was really important for us: remember I said we challenged ourselves on whether our digital sessions were still a relevant way to solve this problem?

[00:24:23] We really wanted to look into companies who have offered digital therapies. Do they continue to offer it? Do they offer something different? And if they have stopped doing it, why have they stopped? So we could get that information into our product strategy development. Then, of course, it's very interesting how they're positioning themselves, preventative or proactive, what marketing strategies they were using and what digital channels they're using.

[00:24:50] The market is still struggling with having the conversation around mental health in workplaces. There is a lot more awareness than before, but there's still a lot of stigma involved, and we wanted to understand what kind of digital channels or marketing strategies were working for others or not, and in what way we could take some relatable experience into our product strategy.

[00:25:17] So how did we do that? Again, we knew that focusing on our customers and their problems was really key for us. So we put in two weeks of dedicated time to do customer interviews and user interviews, really looking into our data quantitatively and qualitatively, with a lot of collaboration with different stakeholders. Because however many interviews you do, what is the experience your salespeople have had so far on the ground? What is the experience your customer success team has had? What experiences has your tech team had?

[00:25:51] I think those are a very important part of this discussion, but also they feel involved and part of the strategy work. So we did a lot of continuous collaboration and continuous feedback throughout these two weeks, really putting people in the shoes of the user: what the user is thinking, what the main problem themes are, why the problem is different from before, and what that means to the customer. We also used a leaner version of the Lean Canvas, which really helps you focus on the customer segments and their problems.

[00:26:28] As a result of this work, we came to a very clear understanding of who the users we want to target are, what real problems we want to solve for them, and how that relates to the customers we want to sell to: what their goals are, what their pain points are, what benefit they're looking for from investing in this for their users. And, based on the competition and the market trends, how we could uniquely solve this problem for the user and create benefit for the users. Those are the most important aspects that came out of this work in the two weeks.

Solution analysis and prioritization

[00:27:11] Wow, that seems like a lot of work, but it was the most fun part of the work. I love talking to the users, I love talking to the customers, and I think my whole team really enjoyed it. Seeing the user's problem makes it very relatable, not only in the value they create but also in how they want to solve it.

[00:27:32] What did we do next? We spent one week just doing a solution analysis. We like to use a version of the design thinking double diamond to say: these are our problems, we've really narrowed down the problems we want to solve for these users, now what are the different options we have to solve them? Here I would say do very high-level alternatives. Don't go into a lot of detail.

[00:27:59] If you think you want to go the tech route, use data, create the network effect and build an AI to solve this problem, then that's good enough information to do an evaluation based on usability, viability or feasibility. Don't go into a lot of detail. That's what we did: we kept the information very high level, again going back to the Lean Canvas we used. You can read the definition there. That was very helpful, because we kept it to a level where everyone could understand how we would solve this problem, but we weren't going into the details of exactly how. It was a very high-level approach.

[00:28:42] Once we had that, we evaluated each approach for the three factors I talked about: usability, viability and feasibility. I'm not going to go into the depth of those discussions, because if you read Marty Cagan's books or Roman Pichler's Strategize, you can get a lot more information than I have to share. We used some examples or theories from there, which we applied ourselves.

[00:29:12] But what we really focused on was three factors. Emphasis on the solution creating unique value for the user. What is the best customer experience we could provide to our customers with that specific solution? And our confidence as the team, right now, in delivering and scaling the solution approach. Those were the three important factors we looked into.

[00:29:38] We used a very simple methodology called high impact, low effort, and we started to prioritize these things to see which of them were bigger bets we wanted to take, and which were leaning towards bigger bets and easy wins rather than money pits. Now is a good time, when you have a good understanding and maybe one or two solutions are leading, to start dissecting them into bigger chunks, especially identifying your biggest assumptions and the biggest and fastest learning opportunity in any of the solution approaches.

[00:30:14] If something will take you six months to implement before you learn something, versus learning six different things about your biggest assumptions in six weeks, we would rather choose the second one. And then, as I said earlier, our degree of confidence in selecting one of these options. For example, we were much more confident about giving the best customer experience than building the best tech product. That doesn't mean we are not a tech-driven company. We are a tech-driven company, but we are not aspiring to become Google. So it's a differentiation: what was our confidence level in delivering this solution and scaling it?

The mission and solution approach

[00:30:59] Great. So, three weeks of intense work, and we succeeded together as a team in coming up with a mission. Our mission was to become the employer's preferred, trusted and loved well-being partner in preventing mental well-being issues among their employees and managers. You can see that we started to have real persona discussions, and that really identified two major personas.

[00:31:27] This is a very simplified view, but we also went to the level of saying what kind of managers we really want to impact: first-time managers or managers of managers. We went to that level of detail to really understand exactly which managers we want to target, and exactly which kind of employees we want to target as well. This is a great mission. I really believe in it, our team believes in it, and we live by it every day.

[00:31:56] Then we also went to our solution approach, which is how we are going to deliver our mission. BlueCall wants to improve mental well-being in the workplace by solving employees' and managers' everyday challenges, at work and in private life. How we would do that is by providing them a toolkit of products and services that are achievable, actionable and measurable. Nothing like sitting in a workshop for two days and not being able to practice it.

[00:32:29] Like you brush your teeth every day to take care of your teeth, how can I work on mental well-being every day, ten minutes, five minutes, half an hour, to really feel healthy in my mind and be happy? That was really important for our users, and very important for our solution approach. We designed it to lower the barriers to acting proactively, and to be data-driven and science-based.

[00:32:59] Then, what were the challenges we faced? It sounds like we did a lot of work, but it also raised a lot of challenges, because we were very unclear whether the market drivers in B2C, which we had translated into a solution approach, would really create value for the B2B users. This was a completely new product stack and tech stack, which meant our collective confidence in the effort estimation was very low. We couldn't say with a high degree of confidence whether it would take two weeks, two months or two years.

[00:33:39] Of course, two years is an exaggeration, but two weeks versus two months is a big difference in the life of a startup. We also knew that we needed to experiment, we needed to learn, and we also needed to show results very quickly. That is exactly how we felt: wow, we've done all this work, but now it feels like Rolf [?] tumbling down the wheel. It seemed like a bigger challenge now. But never fear, that's exactly what we did.

Validation through hypothesis-driven development

[00:34:10] As I said, for a growth startup the third phase is the best and most fun, but also the most important phase: validation. We converted all our challenges into opportunities through rapid validation. This is a diagram from Strategyzer. It says: select your biggest risk, decide what to address, collect the data, then pivot, persevere or stop. A lot of this concept is taken from Lean Startup as well, but this is exactly what we did.

[00:34:45] We decided that for our company to create the best results, to learn fast and fail fast, we needed hypothesis-driven development. This would help us create a really good understanding of the impact, help us create better effort estimation cycles, and also collectively increase our confidence in the strategy, to say whether we should work with this strategy or whether we need to completely change it.

[00:35:14] We did some smart, low-cost validations like surveys, smoke tests, user interviews and MVPs. But at the same time we also sliced the onion into smaller chunks. We time-boxed a lot of analysis, we did a lot of spikes, and we got data from the past to understand our effort. We leaned into other departments, so we didn't think we needed to create all this impact understanding or effort understanding by doing everything in tech. We also said, "What is the minimum we can do? Can we just use Typeform to do an assessment and see what impact we have, and then is it worth it for us to do the estimation?"

[00:35:54] This also created a kind of prototype that gave us a better understanding of which part of this problem we wanted to scale or automate first into a solution for our product offering. Finally, all of this work in the last six months since we built the strategy was aimed at increasing our confidence level to 70 percent.

[00:36:15] That's collective confidence. It's not just product having confidence in the strategy, or tech being confident in the effort estimation. It's also operations being really confident about it, customer success being able to measure the impact on the customer's success from these experiments or activities, and sales being able to see the results in conversion.

Results

[00:36:36] All of that translates into the outcome, which is always what's most interesting for everyone. In the last six months since we implemented this, we saw a 4x increase in our monthly active usage. In Q4 2021 [?] we had a 20 percent increase in MRR just from existing customers. This was a very big proof point for us that, by adding to the product offering using this strategy, our customers were even willing to pay much more. That was a really good proof point that this was working from a customer success and sales point of view.

[00:37:12] We also saw that by pitching this to customers, we were able to increase our sales conversion rate. That increased about 3x in the sales cycle. These are great results, so we knew this strategy is a keeper.

Learnings and future challenges

[00:37:35] What does that mean for our future? Learning from the validation work, what we have learned is that we as a team and as an organization always need to have a clear understanding of who our customers are and who our users are. That is really the key to our product strategy success. Because we spent the most time in our product strategy work around the customers and their problems, I think we built on the best foundation, the best building blocks we could. I would very confidently say that really aided our validation work as well.

[00:38:10] And having this hypothesis mindset. I see a lot of product teams saying the team should do it, but the leadership team is so stuck with their vision, so stuck with their own strategy of how to do things. I think it's very important that you yourself have that mindset, so you create that culture of experimentation, you create the fast learning experience to increase your learning curve, and you contribute to that good-enough mindset so that you can move forward with each of these experiments and learnings.

[00:38:48] For a growth team, we didn't stop with that six months of work. We iterated on our strategy, and we always say we continuously validate it. Anyone who starts in the product team, I always tell them: this is our strategy and direction now, but it might be very different in six months' time, and it might be very different in a year's time. That doesn't mean we're not heading in the right direction. It just means we are very adaptable to our users' needs and to our circumstances.

[00:39:18] Our ultimate goal is our company mission, which is to increase happiness for millions of people by improving their mental health. As long as we're getting there, how we get there is always adaptable.

[00:39:29] So what are the challenges we see? Scaling our product strategy work with a rapidly growing team. How do we continuously have these conversations with customers and get user feedback, and build it into every part of our product development process? I think that's going to be a challenge that both product and tech leaders at BlueCall are continuously talking about. We want to communicate these changes so that we create continuous alignment across our departments, and we see that would also be a challenge.

[00:40:01] We need to address creating that collective focus because, as I said, sometimes that work-in-progress mindset can mean people ask, "What is my work going to contribute to if it's going to change in a year or six months? Would I need to do something drastically different?" You need to remove that and really help them focus on the collective goal. The goal is not how you are doing it. The goal is to achieve the vision, to create value for the users, to make our customers happy, and hitting those KPIs, however we hit them, is the most important thing.

[00:40:43] So I think that collective focus is always going to be an important part of being a product leader in a work-in-progress mindset. And creating that shared understanding of impact and effort across your end-to-end chain, not only at your strategy level but also in your backlog and sprint development: what does impact mean, what does this effort mean, how do the strategy's impact and effort translate into my sprint backlog? I think it needs to be really, really shared so that you can move forward together, and how we're going to do that with a growing team is something BlueCall will focus on.

Key takeaways

[00:41:23] Key takeaways. Product strategies for growth are always a work in progress, and you have to continuously validate them. Start with a strong foundation. It doesn't need to take a long time; we have proven at BlueCall that we can do that in one week of collective work together as a team. A hypothesis-driven approach needs to be end to end. It's not just at the implementation level; it needs to start with the leadership at the strategy level and go all the way to implementation.

[00:41:53] Time-boxing strategy work really helps, because it's so important not to get stuck in meeting rooms, and to actually go out and talk to your users and your customers. By time-boxing these things, you really focus on the most important data and the most important details. I really encourage that. I don't think this is just for startups or growth companies; I think it should be for everyone. Stop sitting in meeting rooms for three months just to come up with a strategy.

[00:42:25] Stay continuously aligned with continuous feedback, not only from your external sources, customers and users, but also internally. Good readings for you all are the two books I mentioned during this presentation. Thank you very much, and feel free to stay in touch with me, or invite me for a fika [?], a very Swedish thing to do. You can send me an invite on LinkedIn or add me on Clubhouse. Thank you very much and have a great evening.