Companies create products for two primary reasons: to benefit target users and to increase revenue. Both goals rely on research that sets the product up for success.
But to accomplish them, engineering, product, and design (EPD) teams must understand what their customer base wants and which innovations will support business goals. After all, even a unique, well-designed solution can flop if you don’t make sure that it resonates with your audience.
To help with this, you can create a product strategy—a clear, aligned view of why you’re building something. This allows you to ask better questions, spot patterns sooner, and make smarter tradeoffs. That way, instead of reacting to the loudest request or the latest trend, you can focus on creating meaningful, durable value.
What’s a product strategy?
A product strategy is a document that outlines a new offering’s motivations and goals. It doesn’t define every step of creating the product, though—that comes later in your project roadmap. Instead, it clarifies who your product is for, what problem it solves, and how it will win in the market via a framework that guides execution.
The most effective strategies act like living systems that bank on ongoing customer insights and day-to-day engineering and design decisions. However, a strategy only works if people can find, understand, and use it, which is why visibility and connection matter so much. When your strategy is searchable, linked to research, and tied directly to projects and backlogs, it becomes part of how you do work, not just a slide deck that you only revisit once per quarter.
How a product strategy connects to roadmaps and backlogs
Think of product strategies as the “why,” roadmaps as the “what,” and backlogs as the “how.” Strategies set direction, roadmaps translate that direction into planned initiatives, and backlogs break those initiatives into actionable work.
When these key elements live in disconnected tools, you’ll lose context. But when they’re connected—like linking a strategic goal directly to roadmap items and individual tasks—teams can see how their daily work contributes to the bigger picture. This connection is what turns strategy from theory into practice.
Why is it important to have a product strategy?
According to a study that Heliyon published, a lack of focus on customer needs is a primary reason why products fail. Teams usually address these needs in the early stages of product development—in other words, during the research and strategy phase. But failing to do this or rushing the process can doom a product to underperform against established brands.
For EPD teams, a customer-centric strategy is about alignment, clarity, and momentum, especially in fast-moving environments where priorities shift quickly. Without a shared strategy, teams often face these consequences:
Tool fragmentation: Research often lives in one place and roadmaps in another, and decisions are often scattered throughout emails and Slack threads as well. In fact, according to the BetterCloud 2025 State of SaaS Report, organizations use an average of 106 SaaS tools, which further adds to this fragmentation.
Unclear product vision: The product’s purpose changes depending on who you ask.
Scattered context: Onboarding and handoffs become more difficult than they need to be.
Frequent leadership updates: Teams spend extra time on reporting because there’s no single source of truth.
A clear product strategy framework also helps you accomplish these goals in tangible ways:
Team alignment: When everyone sees the same goals and initiatives, EPD teams will move in the same direction, even when they’re working asynchronously.
Clarity and focus: Instead of debating every request from scratch, teams can refer to the product strategy to decide what fits and what doesn’t.
Prioritization: With a strong strategy in place, features that don’t support strategic goals or match user needs will naturally fall lower on the priority list.
Improved decision-making: Having clear principles and goals helps teams make faster, more confident decisions without waiting for top-down approval.
What are the key components of a product strategy?
A solid product strategy generally contains a few core components. The following building blocks will give your team a shared understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and how you’ll get there:
Vision: This is your big-picture description of the product and the problem it solves. You might craft a vision statement that sums up this information in a few sentences or a bulleted list of what the product is and offers. You can also try creating a product vision board using a vision board template to brainstorm ideas before deciding on one to guide your strategy.
Goals: Including goals that are related to adoption targets, retention improvements, or performance benchmarks translates your vision into measurable outcomes. And by setting clear, high-level goals—such as achieving 1,000 app downloads in three months—you’ll help your team understand what success looks like.
Initiatives: While goals are strategic and concise, initiatives are broader objectives that you hope the new product will achieve. For example, you may seek to improve app users’ lives or tap into a new demographic.
To keep these components current, modern product teams often rely on connected strategy documents, centralized research repositories, and AI-powered tools. Linking these insights directly to goals and initiatives—as well as using AI to summarize feedback or spot market trends—helps product managers ensure that their strategy evolves alongside their understanding of their customers.
Types of product strategies
While all product strategies aim to benefit a target market and support business objectives, each team approaches tasks differently. Here are a few strategy types you might create:
Cost strategies focus on delivering a high-quality, affordable product by optimizing efficiency and reducing expenses.
Example: A SaaS tool that prioritizes essential features and automation to undercut competitors’ pricing
Focus strategies narrow in on a particular target audience or ideal customer (like a buyer persona) and build tailored functionality around their needs.
Example: A project management app that teams design specifically for creative agencies
Quality strategies prioritize reliability, performance, and craftsmanship without worrying about end cost (as with luxury products).
Example: A developer platform that customers know for its rock-solid uptime and exceptional documentation
Differentiation strategies highlight a unique value proposition that competitors can’t (or don’t) offer.
Example: A note-taking app that stands out due to its deep integrations and flexible workflows
Service strategies lead with excellent customer service by investing in onboarding, support, or complementary services.
Example: An enterprise product that provides dedicated success managers and custom training
How to create a product strategy in 6 steps
To create a product strategy quickly, check out these resources, which are available in Notion:
While what you include in your strategy doc will vary according to the product you create, here’s a more detailed, step-by-step framework to help you get started:
1. Know the market: Centralize your insights and research
Successful products alleviate customer pain points, which means they’ll stand out from the competition. To accomplish this, you should consider performing these tasks in the strategy phase:
Researching companies that provide similar products
Identifying what makes your offering stronger and weaker than the competition (performing a SWOT analysis helps here)
Describing your target audience
Defining several ideal buyer personas within that audience
If you already know what you want to produce, this process can inform your product direction and marketing plans. If not, you can use the research phase to find a market gap to fill.
For instance, say you’re on an app development team creating software for a design-minded audience. You might analyze other digital design apps and look for missing features that users would love, like better ways to share content across social channels.
How Notion helps: As you gather your research, you can use Notion to create a centralized research hub. You can also tag and link interview notes, survey results, and usability recordings in one database, then use Notion AI to summarize themes or answer questions like, “What are the most common onboarding pain points?” By centralizing your research in this way, you’ll reduce duplication and make insights accessible to everyone—not just the product leader who ran the study.
2. Define your vision: Draft with AI, then refine with the team
Once you’ve chosen a product to develop, it's time to solidify your vision by asking “why?” This step involves considering your target audience’s pain points, how your offering supports business goals, and why now’s the right moment to bring it to market.
To start, write a vision statement or create a vision board to help you refine your ideas. After brainstorming with your app development team, your vision statement might read, “Help users make aesthetically pleasing marketing posts for all social media outlets in seconds.”
How Notion helps: Notion provides templates to help you create both vision boards and statements. You can also use Notion AI to generate a first draft based on existing research and notes to get started.
From there, the real work happens collaboratively. Designers, engineers, and stakeholders can comment directly in the doc and suggest edits, which results in a shared vision that feels co-owned, not dictated.
3. Set SMART goals: Connect goals to projects and metrics
With a clear vision in place, you can now outline high-level, SMART product objectives. When doing this, remember to consider external and internal factors that could impact execution. Additionally, you’ll want to determine how quickly your team can create the product with your existing personnel and resources before deciding on timelines. Then, identify key metrics to measure each objective’s success, focusing on the most essential product features and deliverables first.
For example, you might set app creation as a general goal, then add smaller milestones like designing key pages or developing core functionalities like drag-and-drop canvases for social media.
How Notion helps: In Notion, product goals live in a database that links to both metrics dashboards and project plans. For instance, you can connect a goal like “increase activation by 15%” to the experiments, design updates, and engineering tasks that support it. This traceability makes progress visible and accountability clear.
Template
To get started quickly, try out this SMART goals tracker template.
4. Choose the team: Clarify owners and cross-functional roles
The next step is to identify all product-creation stakeholders, from employees to vendors, and bring them into the conversation early. For instance, on an app development project, you might include project managers, web developers, and UX/UI designers so they can share input on the strategy, assign ownership, and set up an internal and external review cadence. That way, everyone understands expectations and where they fit.
Including everyone from the beginning like this also allows them to offer unique expertise and gain a clear understanding of the project right away.
How Notion helps: To reduce confusion and speed up execution, teams can document who owns each initiative, which functions are involved, and how they make decisions. In Notion, this might take the form of an initiative page with linked owners, stakeholders, and communication channels.
5. Determine product initiatives: Turn insights into roadmap items
Once your team’s on board, you can generate high-level ideas and themes—like improving clients’ daily lives or expanding the company’s reach—to guide the product creation process. During this process, though, you’ll want to lean on buyer persona research, competitor data, and internal opportunities to form these general initiatives.
For example, imagine that a mock tech company is struggling to resonate with entrepreneurs. Developing design tools for small business owners might be a worthy initiative for this company to pursue.
How Notion helps: Notion roadmaps allow teams to visualize initiatives over time and link them back to strategy. Including context like the customer problem, supporting research, success metrics, and related tasks in these roadmaps will keep the “why” front and center as work progresses.
6. Share the document: Create one source of truth
Once you’ve finished defining your product strategy, share your document with everyone involved. Then, post-launch, review it to understand where your projections were accurate and where your team could improve.
How Notion helps: House your document somewhere central, like your team's Notion workspace, so it can serve as the source of truth for leadership updates, onboarding, and planning discussions. Because it’s living and connected, it will stay relevant throughout the product lifecycle and guide decisions on new features to add down the line.
Helpful Resource
Learn how to set up a Notion workspace for your team with our helpful guide.
Strategize effectively with Notion AI
A successful product strategy helps teams align around customers, focus on what matters, and turn ideas into impact. But strategy only delivers value when it’s connected to the work itself.
That’s where Notion helps—it brings research, goals, roadmaps, and execution into one place so nothing goes missing along the way. And with Notion AI, you can synthesize insights faster, draft strategy documents with confidence, and keep everything up to date as you learn.
If you’re ready to turn scattered knowledge into aligned action, start building your product strategy roadmap in Notion for free today to give your team a clearer path forward.
