Take a look at any decent product strategy if it’s in a visual format and 9 times out of 10 it’s going to be a pyramid of boxes that looks something like this:
Classic pyramid format for a product strategy This structure is an incredibly powerful way of collecting your thoughts and communicating them. At its most basic, this sort of pyramid links long term objectives at the top to short term actions at the bottom through an intermediate layer of themes or pillars.
Once you’ve defined your product vision, it’s the pillars that break it down into manageable blocks of work, and describe how you’ll get there. They are the next layer of detail of your strategy, explaining why you’ve selected the items you’ll place on your roadmap out of a universe of options.
As well as helping you prioritize effectively, they also serve a crucial role motivating people - they connect people’s day-to-day work to the inspiring vision you’ve created. Think of them as the golden thread that connects today’s to-do list to the overarching company direction.
You are probably already familiar with this sort of structure to some degree, as it underpins almost every goal setting framework from OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) to OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures), even if it’s not as visual and explicit as we’ll outline here.
In this article we’ll cover:
- Why pyramid structures are so powerful
- Why pillars are the core of your pyramid
- What goes in the boxes
- Related frameworks
- How to develop your own pyramid
- Strategic pitfalls to avoid
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Why pyramid structures are so powerful
Many of us are accustomed to objectives and key results as a format, or objectives and tasks, but adding pillars into the structure hugely assists with coherence, communication and ultimately delivery:
- Links tasks to objectives - Shows teams and stakeholders how work ladders up to goals.
- Aids comprehension - When you group similar pieces of work together into clusters, it’s easier to digest than looking at all the pieces individually.
- Help problem solve - Breaking big problems down into smaller pieces makes them easier to solve, because the small problems can be solved one at a time.
- Aid prioritization - Instead of needing to assess every piece of work against every other piece, you can prioritize top-down, selecting the branches to focus on, and ignoring individual tasks that are outside of that branch.
- Help communication - You can explain plans top-down, only going into the details of the branches where more explanation is needed.
Why pillars are the core of your pyramid
There are three key elements to a strategy:
- Objective - the overarching goal you’re trying to reach
- Pillars - the guiding rationale that explains how you’ll achieve your objective
- Actions - the set of actions you’ll take to achieve your objective
In this format, the pillars are the key - they connect your teams’ everyday work to the vision you are working towards, and they help you select the right actions to focus on. When you express these visually, they form the pyramid we’ve seen before:
Pillars help provide a rationale for what you’re working on The pillars are the major themes of work that you want to undertake. You do the actions that fall under your pillars (rather than other actions) because you can’t do everything, and these actions are:
- Effective - higher impact than you’d get on average
- Coherent - they are mutually reinforcing, so more than the sum of their parts
Put another way, your pillars make it really clear what you should say “no” to.
Strategies make it clear what you are NOT going to do These three elements can also be split out into two or more layers, so you might end up with a complete pyramid that has 4-5 layers in it, rather than just the basic three.
Complex pyramids can be managed by having more than 3 levels Popular alternatives
We’ve explained the principles of pyramids and pillars with a simple objective-pillar-action format. This is not an attempt to create another framework, but rather to highlight the commonalities between many existing frameworks.
There are many frameworks which use the pyramid structure and build on it to describe a product strategy. Often they add metrics or ownership to the layers, or distinguish between problems / opportunities and solutions. Some of the more common frameworks are:
We’ll describe these variants below, but feel free to be inspired with any of these to structure your strategy as you see fit. They all do basically the same thing, and you don’t need to get hung up on a particular methodology if you understand the principles that underpin all of them. You may find that the phrasing or structure of one alternative works better in your organization than others, so it’s helpful to understand different ways of doing the same thing.
Pyramid Principle
Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle is perhaps the original and broadest articulation of structuring your thinking into a pyramid. This is essentially the same as the objective-pillar-action format we’ve already described - we’ve just used product management terms to aid understanding.
In the Pyramid Principle the different layers don’t need to be doing different roles. Rather than restricting itself to strategy and product work, it’s a method of structuring any set of thoughts:
- Low level facts and thoughts are grouped together into common themes
- Insights are gained from having seen the similarity between the original facts
- The process is repeated at multiple levels until a single governing thought or conclusion is reached
- Others can quickly understand the whole pyramid of thinking by reading the governing thought, or be guided down the pyramid to dig into the details
Classic Pyramid Principle structure, with a governing thought at the top Taught extensively by top management consultancies like McKinsey, Bain and BCG, this format is used across all mediums: presentations, emails, word docs and so on to crisply outline a logical argument.
Opportunity Solution Tree
Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree is a pyramid structure with four main levels:
- Desired outcome - the objective you’re trying to achieve
- Opportunity - user problems you can solve to achieve your objective
- Solution - potential solutions to the problems you’ve identified
- Experiment - tests for different aspects of the solution
Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree This format is discovery focused, and works well for product teams. It’s straightforward to know if you’re discussing an opportunity, a solution, an outcome or an experiment, and once placed into a tree then gaps in the logic become readily apparent.
Delivery is focused at the experiment level. By shipping experiments, a team can discover more insights and reveal new opportunities. But it also describes the real nature of solutions - these are rarely if ever “done” as there are always more refinements that can be built. It’s just a question of when other opportunities and solutions start to become more appealing.
Lean Value Tree
Lean Value Trees are similar to Opportunity Solution Trees in that they are designed with product teams in mind. There are five main levels:
- Ambitious Mission - overall purpose for company existing. Stable over very long periods.
- Strategic Goal - the objectives that measure progress towards reaching your mission. Defined as outcomes, not outputs. Defined with metrics.
- Strategic Bet - the themes of work that you will do to achieve your goals. Where you will invest time and effort. Stable over the medium term, and has its own measure of success.
- Promise of Value - the value you are offering customers to achieve a bet. Ownership of the problem, not the solution. Sized to guide how much investment is worth making.
- Promise of Delivery - Experimentation to find the best solution. Shipping the smallest part that creates value.
Lean Value Tree Example:
Ambitious mission - become the world’s best hire car company
Strategic Goal - increase UK revenue to £100m
Strategic Bet - increase cities served from 10 to 50
Promise of Value - reduce car service turn around time from 60 mins to 20 mins
Promise of Delivery - build dynamic checklist for agents to manage car servicing
Note: we have just given one example for each level here, but you get the point.
When laid out in this way, ownership for the different levels of the pyramid becomes clear - this will vary depending on the company size and structure, but accountability clearly flows down the organization.
Accountability mapped to Lean Value Tree levels OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures)
OGSM stands for Objectives, Goals, Strategies and Measures, and is a framework that helps organizations, teams and individuals describe and link long-term objectives to short-term actions. In this case:
- Objective – a clearly written, short statement of what the organization wants to achieve.
- Goals – describes what success should look like.
- Strategies – sets out how you will achieve your goals. (Not to be confused with organizational strategy).
- Measures – how you will monitor the delivery of your strategies.
Example:
Objective - Become the best social fashion marketplace in the world
Goals - Increase GMV to $2bn
Strategies - Build seller center to serve large volume sellers
Measures - Number of large sellers (>100 sales a month) increases from 3k to 10k
Note: We’ve just given one goal, strategy and measure, where there would likely be several, but you get the point.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
Even OKRs exhibit many of the same characteristics of other pyramid-based strategic frameworks. OKRs focus on outcomes, leaving the details of delivery elsewhere:
- Objectives – an inspiring goal that the team is trying to achieve
- Key Results – quantified measures of progress that allow you to see unambiguously whether you’ve hit your objective or not.
Example:
Objective: Create a radically better onboarding experience
Key Results:
* Reduce percentage of users dropping out of onboarding process from 30% to 10%
* Increase new user activation rate (i.e. users purchasing with first 7 days) from 5% to 10%
* Reduce average time for new users to complete onboarding from 600s to 300s
