As more executives shift from projects to product management, how do your product managers (i.e., product owners) shift from collecting and managing requirements for delivery to a mechanism for introducing, growing, maturing and then eventually retiring a product? Roman Pichler’s work on the strategy stack depicts an important relationship beyond requirements for users to one of a symbiotic relationship between the product strategy and technology strategy.
Above: Pichler's (2024) strategy stack
The product strategy
Unlike a projects that focus on managing and delivering requirements, product strategy focuses first on the customer satisfaction gap with Scrum providing key strategic and tactical feedback loops regarding the success of the solutions developed to close that gap. Technology’s role, importantly, is to provide a set of constraints for the product strategy. It highlights the technical limitations in which the product’s initiatives can be realised and solutions can be derived. These constraints include:
On premises: lead time to set up and configure hardware and software.
Cloud: forecast impact of demand signals on CPU and storage, and associated costs, against existing availability.
The technology stack itself, whether Oracle, Microsoft, open source, or other.
Product support: software licensing and qualified people to track incidents and requests and ITSM contractual obligations.
Product design: enterprise architecture input to align initiatives to, for example, organisational domain models and data governance frameworks.
Aligning to technology
From the product's objectives and technical constraints, shared initiatives can be derived as an hypothesis to close the customer satisfaction gap. It's here then that both product and technology roadmaps can be drawn, and requirements (product backlog items) can be derived.
Above: Feedback loops between product and technology strategy
This moves product managers away from simply delivering requirements as a contractual arrangement with a technology provider (whether that's the IT department or a vendor), to one that must collaboratively assess the viability of the solution in the shortest possible lead time to confirm it's viability and ultimately limit wasted effort on both sides.
This strategic relationship between product strategy and technology strategy has significant benefits, therefore, over the traditional design-build-run paradigm of projects.
It decreases the time to respond to opportunities to create new value.
It tests solution viability early in its ability to successfully impact the customer satisfaction gap before more is added to the product
Assesses actual demand signals on hardware and cloud against forecast early to empower product management and technology to pivot accordingly.
It reduces waste of collecting requirements and developing solutions that are never built or features that are never used.
It encourages innovation: solving new problems with new ideas that the organisation (or competitors) haven't tried, providing a competitive advantage beyond just operational efficiency.
Conclusions
The pursuit of product management brings technology strategy and product strategy closer than has been previously possible with project management with significant benefits for both. By aligning product strategy with technology strategy, organisations can fundamentally transform their approach to innovation and value delivery. This symbiotic relationship empowers product managers to become strategic architects, not merely requirement collectors. By shifting focus from project-based delivery to product lifecycle management, businesses accelerate time-to-market, optimise resource allocation, and enhance customer satisfaction. Ultimately, the convergence of product and technology strategy creates a dynamic ecosystem where innovation thrives, risks are mitigated, and long-term business objectives are achieved.