Product Strategy: From Insights to Action

Turning Insights into Action

Continuing with the series on product strategy, this article focuses on how to leverage insights into action.

At this point, we have narrowed our attention to a very small number of critical problems and done the hard work to identify the key insights that power our product strategy. The next step is to turn those insights into action—but there are two fundamentally different ways to do this.

This is the fork in the road that reveals whether a company is truly serious about empowered product teams, or whether it remains attached to feature teams.

Feature Teams vs. Empowered Product Teams

Even if a company chooses to stay with roadmaps and feature teams, it is still far better off having a strong product strategy than having none at all. However, the real difference comes down to one question:

Do you give your teams features to build, or problems to solve?

Most of the time, the distinction is obvious:

Feature framing: “Add videos to our online help offering.”
Problem framing: “Improve the new user onboarding success rate.”

In this case, adding videos is only one of many possible ways to improve onboarding.

Sometimes the distinction is more subtle:

“We need an app.”
“Our users need to be able to access our services from anywhere.”

Here, building an app is likely the primary solution, so either framing may lead to a similar outcome. Still, framing the work as a problem reinforces ownership and accountability.

Roadmaps vs. Ownership

If leaders believe they already know the features and projects required to execute the product strategy, they will typically place those items on a product roadmap and assign them to teams.

However, if leaders want product teams to own the problem and take responsibility for discovering and delivering solutions that achieve real results, they must give teams the freedom to explore and decide how best to solve those problems.

This distinction is often described as:

Mercenaries: Teams that execute predefined features and projects
Missionaries: Teams that are deeply committed to solving meaningful problems

The empowered product team model consistently delivers stronger outcomes, particularly in innovation and measurable business impact.

If your organization is committed to feature roadmaps and delivery teams, this is a natural stopping point. What follows assumes a commitment to the empowered product team model.

Initiating Action in the Empowered Model

In the empowered team model, leaders:

Provide clear strategic context
Assign each team a specific set of problems to solve
Give teams the autonomy to determine the best solutions

One widely used system for managing problems to solve is OKRs (Objectives and Key Results):

Objectives describe the customer or business problems to be solved
Key Results define how progress and success are measured

Company-level objectives are part of the strategic context. To initiate action, teams need their own team objectives aligned with that context.

A deeper discussion of team objectives and OKRs will follow in a separate series.

OKRs Are Optional

While OKRs are a popular and useful technique, they are not required to initiate action.

At a minimum, all that is needed is for a knowledgeable leader to:

Sit down with the product teams
Explain the strategic context and product strategy
Clearly state the problems each team must solve
Define the business outcomes that matter

If teams have the right skills and understanding, they will begin working immediately.

OKRs simply formalize these conversations. They only work when:

Teams are truly empowered
Leaders have created a clear and effective product strategy
Leaders are willing to trust teams to solve the problems they are given

Empowerment Still Requires Leadership

Empowering teams does not mean abandoning them. Significant active management is still required to ensure progress, remove obstacles, and keep teams aligned with the strategy.

Turning insights into action marks the beginning of execution—not the end of leadership responsibility. The next topic in this series will focus on the active management required to make product strategy succeed.