Productside Webinar

Cultivating a Strategic Product Team: Part 1

The Power of a One Pager

Date:

09/03/2021

Time EST:

1:00 pm
Watch Now

In this two-part webinar series, we’ll show PM leaders how to increase the alignment and autonomy of the product teams they work with, freeing up more time to do strategic product work. In Part 1, we’ll introduce the power of the Product One-Pager, which succinctly establishes a product’s goals and the boundaries the product team can operate within to achieve these goals. In Part 2, we’ll explain how to more effectively make decisions about product goals and increase organizational and executive alignment using a Product Review Board process.

Here in Part 1, you’ll learn how the bare minimum amount of process and documentation (it’s one page, after all) can help thoughtful Product Managers communicate more clearly, align their product to company goals, and utilize a secret tool to help them “manage up.” This customizable template will focus the development, marketing, and sales efforts around a few key messages and help your PMs be more strategic. Sharing and leveraging this resource with your PM team will increase alignment across departments and answer many questions, giving the PMs more time to focus on more strategic product work. It’s also a great tool to share quarterly “news-making” events across your organization.

Top Takeaways:

  1. Your product releases must map to company strategy.
    Don’t just ship features; ship outcomes tied to executive priorities like revenue, churn, expansion, or NPS.

  2. The Product One-Pager is a strategic contract.
    Left side = Problem, hypothesis, persona stories, risks.
    Right side = Boundaries (features, OKRs/KPIs, dates) + direct tie to company goals.

  3. Bundle sprints into “newsworthy” releases.
    Agile teams ship constantly, but if you never bundle that work into meaningful announcements, you lose strategic visibility and sales/marketing leverage.

  4. Personas & stories make strategy concrete.
    Framing releases around real people (e.g., Fred in Finance, Claire the CEO) clarifies what value you’re delivering and how it changes behavior.

  5. Risk visibility = credibility.
    Great PMs write down risks, share them, and work to reduce them. That’s how you become known as a truth teller.

  6. Use one-pagers from conceive → launch.
    They’re not just a comms artifact; they guide what goes in the release, how it’s measured, and how you talk about it internally and externally.

  7. This is a career strategy, not just a document.
    Ken’s formula: Align to strategy → Make news → Achieve the plan → Get promoted.

Welcome, Housekeeping & About Productside

Rina Alexin | 00:00:00–00:04:30

Hello everyone, welcome and good morning. My name is Rina Alexin and I am the CEO of Productside.

Thank you so much for joining us this morning. Today we’ll be discussing Cultivating a Strategic Product Team – Part One: The Power of a One-Pager, and I’m so honored and excited to be introducing to you today Ken Feehan, one of our principal consultants and trainers at Productside.

Ken, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Ken Feehan | 00:04:30–00:06:30

Hi, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I believe we have some attendees from all over the world.

My name is Ken Feehan. I am a principal consultant and trainer at Productside. I’ve been working in and doing product management for about 25 years, mostly in Silicon Valley, and about five years ago I shifted over to doing consulting and training, and I made a really great decision.

Rina Alexin | 00:06:30–00:09:00

Thank you, Ken, and I’m so, so excited for this topic today. It’s actually our first time doing a webinar together, but it’s not the first time we’ll be talking about the power of one-pagers. So, great topic today.

Before we get started, I just want to go over a few housekeeping items for the webinar.

As always, after the webinar, please continue to stay engaged with the product management community. There are many online communities out there, and our LinkedIn group is a great way to stay connected to your peers. We’ll be posting a link to join our LinkedIn group in the chat box. Use it as a forum to chat about best practices and tips with your peers.

At Productside we also love interacting with you, so during this webinar…

Ken, can you go to the next slide?

During this webinar, we encourage you to ask questions and give feedback. There’s a question box located to the right of your screen. We’ll be taking questions live throughout the broadcast if we can, and of course we’ll be leaving time at the end of the webinar for additional Q&A.

So please, get your questions in throughout the broadcast.

And at this time, I’ll be answering our most popular question, which is: “Can I watch the webinar later?” And the answer, of course, is yes. All attendees will be receiving a link to the recording after the recording has ended.

Before we begin, I also want to take a moment to introduce what Productside is all about.

At Productside, our mission is to empower product professionals with the knowledge and tools to build products that matter—that’s products that delight your customers and achieve breakthrough business results. Unlike other companies, we’re focused on just the needs of product professionals.

Whether you’re an individual looking to grow your knowledge and skills or you’re working on improving your team’s effectiveness, we have the experience and the services you need.

Check us out at Productside.com.

So now, Ken, let’s get to the meat of the webinar.

Why Strategy + One-Pagers Matter

Ken Feehan | 00:09:00–00:13:00

Thank you, thank you very much, Rina.

Hey, thank you very much for joining us this morning and talking about strategic alignment and the power of a simple document that I discovered through my career, called the Product Management One-Pager.

This topic is actually the first of a two-part series.

  • The first topic, today, we’re going to be talking about what is a one-pager and how product managers use it to create better products and to align to strategy.
  • That will be followed up by a similar webinar and blog post in August, where we talk about how product managers, product line managers, product management directors can use product one-pagers in order to better manage and structure the success of the people who report to them.

So we’re talking about a document that is great for individuals, but we’re also talking in August about how managers potentially can use these one-pagers in order to be strategic with their team.

So join us today, and then please come back again in August as we do this again.

Poll: Are Your Releases Aligned to Strategy?

Ken Feehan | 00:13:00–00:15:30

But first, we would love to get some background on you—the attendees. We’re going to be talking about product one-pagers and we’re going to be talking about doing product releases, and what we would like to do is find out how you, the attendees, associate product releases to corporate strategy.

Your organization has strategic goals to grow revenue or to reduce churn.

My question is: as a product manager, how do you feel you align your product releases along those product strategies?

  • Do you think that every release that your company does is aligned to company strategy?
  • Do you think that about three-quarters of the releases you do are aligned to company strategy and the rest are tech debt or specific feature releases for specific customers?
  • Are half of your releases strategic?
  • A quarter of your releases strategic?
  • Or is this not something that happens at your company?

We would love to get some feedback from you on how often your product releases are aligned with company strategy.

Rina Alexin | 00:15:30–00:18:30

Great, and the poll has been launched and we’re getting quite a number of responses right now.

I’m actually quite surprised at how the responses are changing the more people are voting—I think people are thinking about this question. So I’ll give you just another second…

That’s perfect. You know, it looks like a simple question, but it’s more complex than that, right?

It is. That’s great.

So I’m actually going to close the poll, and it’s very interesting because throughout this poll, it’s almost been kind of even around a third, but at some point “every release” was winning by quite a lot.

But it’s good news that at least it looks like almost all of our participants have voted that at least half or greater of every release is directly tied to corporate priorities.

It’s about twenty percent on “every,” twenty percent around “three-quarters,” and twenty-nine percent around “half.”

That’s fantastic, and that’s what we see in the world. What we would like to do is work with our clients in order to try to get that ratio up. Some of you are doing it really, really well, and probably there are a few things that we can learn here. But for others, let’s work on actually doing that product release strategy and aligning it to corporate strategy.

Ken’s Career & the Success Formula

Ken Feehan | 00:18:30–00:24:00

What I kind of want to do is tell a little story about how I got here.

I’ve been doing product management for 25 years. I started quite a long time ago, and during the first couple of years that I was working as a product manager, I was attending every meeting, I was working hard, I was returning emails all the time—but I never seemed to get anywhere.

And then I learned a secret formula, and the formula is here on this page.

The formula for success was:

  1. Align my products to strategy.
    Figure out what the CEO wants to do, and make my products work that way.
  2. Make news with the product release strategy.
    I wanted to bundle up a couple of sprints’ worth of work and get something accomplished, and then send out a press release and give the sales team something to talk about.
  3. Achieve the plan.
    I wanted to achieve the reduction in churn, or I wanted to reach the number of new customers that we were targeting.

And when I did that structure—when I aligned to strategy, when I worked on making news, when I achieved the plan—that’s when I found my career really taking off.

That’s when I got promoted to line manager.
That’s when I got promoted to Director of Product Management.

It was this formula that worked through towards making that real.

So I developed a tool during the years when I was being successful there, and the tool is called a Product One-Pager. Let’s go ahead and talk about that.

As I mentioned, I started my career at Apple, actually on the Macintosh operating system team, and I worked really hard. There were product managers who were sitting close by me doing similar jobs, and they seemed to get promoted and I didn’t.

I did a good job, I loved my job, but they got promoted, and the question was: Why did they get promoted?

Generally speaking, I figured out that they told stories about what their products could do for consumers. They aligned their products to customer needs and they talked about it.

It wasn’t just a new release of an application with three features. They talked about how that was good for customers and how that was good for the business.

So they aligned themselves to strategic product management, and when we did that, I started to make some difference.

The formula here was:

  • I told a story.
    What does this release do for users?
    How does it make their job more effective?
    How does this make our product more valuable to them?

That was an important part of organizing and structuring a release.

And then lastly: What does this release do for the company?
Does it improve margins?
Does it reduce service costs?

Whenever an executive or someone at the company would say, “Hey, what’s up with the next release?” I had a story to tell, because I was acting in line with what we were trying to do strategically with the company.

Personas: Fred in Finance & Claire the CEO

Ken Feehan | 00:24:00–00:29:00

So that was about users and about the company—why we wanted to do this.

The next structure that I put inside this one-pager is that I made it persona-based.

We work as product managers in order to be empathetic to users—whether they’re buyers or user profiles or advisors. Personas and customer problems are at the key of what we’re doing here.

So I always try to structure my releases around specific problems that people are working on.

We’re going to use these two personas as an example:

  • First up is Fred in Finance.
    Fred is a person who uses our cloud-based executive dashboard tool on a regular basis, and as a matter of fact he’s our executive sponsor for this particular product. We know what his goals are, we know what his backgrounds are, and we’re going to make him a part of our one-pager.
  • We’re also going to do the same with Claire, the CEO.
    She’s not the sponsor of our dashboard product, but she is the consumer of that information, and we want to work through this understanding and identifying, as a product manager, who the personas are for the types of customers we’re dealing with.

We mentioned that Claire is the consumer of this information on the dashboard product, but she also gives the strategic value of what’s happening inside the company.

And a little technique that I used as a product manager in order to align my product strategy is: I wanted to find out what the company was doing.

Most CEOs, as I’ve gone through my career, usually take the holiday break around the first of the year in order to write down what their strategic goals are—what they’re trying to accomplish for the year.

Frequently, as a product management leader at companies, I would get handwritten notes from these executives early in January, and it would tell us what the CEO wanted us to work on for the year.

I equated this to company strategy, and I worked to make my product roadmap and the product releases that we did for the year address these specific problems.

CEO Strategic Goals as Product Inputs

Ken Feehan | 00:29:00–00:34:30

Working as a product manager towards the goals of the CEO, the CEO wants us to:

  • Raise revenues significantly for the company
  • Reduce churn
  • Expand into the European marketplace
  • Increase average revenue
  • Raise the Net Promoter Score
  • Reduce support costs, make the product easier to use

These are my inputs as a product leader, as a product manager.

My goal is to structure product releases and newsworthy product events to drive the product strategy to achieve these kinds of goals.

These are pretty common. Your CEO probably has these kinds of letters somewhere on their desk. It’s usually a note sent out to leaders about what’s happening here.

These are my keys as a product manager: my product roadmap needs to be aligned to these particular types of things.

Rina Alexin | 00:34:30–00:36:30

Ken, hold on. I did want to make a comment that we often find with our clients that linking product strategy to the company strategy is a pretty big pain point for a lot of teams.

And the point here is: if that’s true in your company, then this one-pager helps you get those questions answered.

You don’t have to do it on your own. Make sure, if you’re not sure what part of the strategy your team is working on, that you work with your executives, get clear on those, and use this one-pager as a way to start that discussion.

Roadmaps, Sprints & Making News

Ken Feehan | 00:36:30–00:43:00

Yeah, that’s exactly right, Rina.

We now have some direction from the executives; we now have some understanding of what the strategy is here.

We also have development teams that are working in a traditional Agile and sprint process. Let’s assume that your organization is working that way and that every two or three weeks we have a finished sprint coming out of a particular team.

What I would like to encourage people to do is to structure newsworthy product release announcements on a relatively regular basis—usually quarterly—where you potentially collect up the features and enhancements that have been worked on in the previous sprints and announce them as a product enhancement or “product innovation” in your particular space.

For instance, we’ve got a fictitious product called Dashboard. The release that’s currently present is less than 1.2, but the version release 1.2, which ships toward the end of Q1 2022, would be an accumulation announcement that is the output of the sprint work done in sprints 14, 15, 16, and 17.

We’re not making specific one-pagers for each sprint—that’s too frequent.

What we would like to do is arrange the feature work that’s done in sprint 14, 15, 16, and 17 to work towards a strategic goal, which we’ll talk about in the next slide.

So we’re trying to figure out how often we need to do one-pagers. If we’re doing an iterative product, a nice pace is to structure those releases on a quarterly basis and pick up the features.

We can ship some of these features earlier—totally fine in Agile—but I don’t want to lose the ability to make news from the innovation that you’ve shipped to your customers.

So if I have a sprint process and I’ve got a product line called “Dashboard,” then generally speaking I’m going to try to announce quarterly enhancements to this particular product, and I would do a one-pager for Dashboard 1.2, Dashboard 1.3, and Dashboard 1.4.

The purple products on the roadmap are iterative products, but also frequently at companies you’re going to have new products that enter into the marketplace—either as MVPs or as 1.0 versions. We also recommend doing one-pagers associated with those kinds of products.

That’s going to key in your sales team and your marketing team, your operations team, into what it is you’re trying to accomplish, and it’s going to make you a bit more strategic.

Again, what we’re looking to do is bundle the work done in multiple sprints in order to make some news.

And what that news usually looks like is the news and announcements portion of your website, next to the fact that you hired a new vice president and that you’ve signed on a new customer. We would like to see columns of new product announcements and introductions from your company show up in the news feed.

When I look at a new company that I’m working with, I go to the news site and I say, “What are they announcing?” And I want to see a steady stream of new product enhancements that address specific customer problems.

When I see that happening, I know that the product team is pushing hard to announce things and develop solutions to problems.

We think that’s a great thing.

Rina Alexin | 00:43:00–00:45:00

We have a poll, Ken, right?

Ken Feehan | 00:45:00–00:47:30

Excellent. Rina, it’s time for another poll.

A question here to follow up on the first one is: Do you or your company have a product release coming up in the next six months?

There are a couple of different product release categories that I use:

  • One is an iterative release of an existing product. That would be something like a version 1.3 to a version 1.4.
  • Maybe you’re lucky enough to be working on an MVP of a new product.
  • A third typical kind is a major enhancement of an existing product, like going from 1.1 to 2.0.
  • Or maybe you don’t have a significant product release coming up.

Rina Alexin | 00:47:30–00:50:00

Yeah, the poll is open, please get your votes in.

I’m happy to report: currently, very few say “we don’t use roadmaps” and very few say “no release.” That’s a really good sign.

All right everyone, I’m just going to leave the poll open for a few more seconds…

It looks like the responses are fairly stable at this point, so I’ll close the poll.

The results are that about 45% have an MVP or 1.0 coming up, about 36% have a major new release, and about 19% have a minor iteration. Only 3% said “none of the above.”

So that’s pretty good.

Inside the One-Pager: Problem, Hypothesis & Stories

Ken Feehan | 00:50:30–00:58:30

That’s fantastic. That’s a lot of innovation that’s happening there.

We’ve promised to talk about something called a One-Pager, and we’re 20 minutes in, so let’s go ahead and actually talk about and share this template.

This is a Product One-Pager template. This template will be shared with you as a link in just a few minutes, but it’s rather simple.

It’s just a document that is structured into two primary parts:

  • On the left is the Problem Summary
  • On the right is a set of Project Boundaries

When filled out, the Product One-Pager generally reads like this (example for a fictitious product called Dashboard 1.2):

On the left side we describe the Problem.

For example:

Problem Summary
Client executives we are selling to are not using the dashboard enough. Our analytics show that execs are using this 18 minutes a week versus the forecast 54 minutes a week we had forecasted. Customers without executive-level use will renew at lower rates. We need more reasons why client executives will turn to the dashboard multiple times per week and increase the number of minutes they’re logged into it. We would like to see weekly goals added to our monthly goals so that there’s a weekly reason to log in.

That’s the problem statement.

Next up, we create a Hypothesis.

The hypothesis is an action statement that lets us lean forward on this:

Hypothesis
If we can get executives to log into the system more frequently, we can reduce churn from 6% to 4.5% in 2022. The goal is to increase executive login times from 4 minutes per week to 10 minutes per week and to get them to generate a report once a month. If we get clients to do these actions, we’re going to reduce churn and accomplish the strategic goal.

The use of a hypothesis is key.

Here’s a simple formula for stating your hypothesis:

If we do X for persona Y, then outcome Z will happen, which we will measure by metric M.

Next we add Stories for our personas—how this release will change behavior.

For example:

  • Story 1 – Fred in Finance
    Fred logs into the dashboard and sees weekly goals and results. He sees that the company is ahead of schedule on weekly results, and he shares this with Claire via Slack. We have a feature in the product that allows him to share. When this happens, both people log into the system and are using it more often, which increases sessions.
  • Story 2 – Claire the CEO
    Claire receives the update from Fred and sees that this is important information. She pastes this information into a Board of Directors deck she’s preparing, and she actually uses our product during the board meeting as the strategic view of the situation.

Both of these stories are about executives using our product more frequently. We’ve reduced friction to it and increased the value for them to use it, hence they’ll log on more often, hence we reduce churn.

We also add:

  • A “Next Check-In” date – when the PM will come back and report on progress.
  • A section for Significant Risks – what could go wrong that affects success.

Risks might include things like:

  • Pandemic impacts
  • Dependencies on teams in other countries
  • Marketing budget not yet secured

Writing risks down is critical. Every time a product manager acknowledges the risks they’re under and writes them down and shares them, those risks become smaller.

You’re more likely to ship on time, and you’re perceived as a realist—a truth-teller.

Boundaries: Features, OKRs/KPIs & Dates

Ken Feehan | 00:58:30–01:04:30

Now let’s talk about the Project Boundaries side of the one-pager—the right-hand side.

Three of these sections are incredibly important:

  1. Strategic Goals (from the CEO)
  2. Key Features / Outcomes
  3. OKRs & KPIs for this release
  4. Target Introduction Date

The CEO said she wanted to reduce churn. As a product manager, we need to take that strategic initiative and translate it into features we can implement.

We might set a goal like:

  • Reduce churn by 2 percentage points by the end of the year.

To get there, we break it into:

  • Increase usage by key executives
  • Make it easier to forward dashboards to others
  • Emphasize insights that are board-ready

That leads to specific features:

  • Show actuals vs. forecasts in an easy view
  • Support weekly goal views as well as monthly
  • Add a “presentation mode” suitable for board meetings
  • Add “Forward via Slack/email” directly from the dashboard

On the boundaries section, in the upper left we restate Claire the CEO’s goals:

Raise revenue, reduce churn, expand to Europe, increase average revenue, raise NPS, reduce support costs, etc.

Then, right next to it, we respond with key features:

Weekly views, share via Slack/email, presentation mode, etc.

There might be 10 features going into the release, but the top 3 that matter most toward success are highlighted. As a PM, you will work extremely hard to deliver those three.

Next are the OKRs and KPIs for the release.

Since we’re trying to increase usage and reduce churn, we might define:

Objective: Reduce churn from 6% to 4.5% by end of year

  • KR1: Increase average executive weekly login time from 4 min to 10 min within 60 days of release
  • KR2: 40% of executive users view weekly goals at least once per week
  • KR3: Churn reduction of 1% within 6 months of release

These are metrics that 60 days after introduction, you’ll report back on.

Lastly, we associate an introduction date with the release.

We’re working in sprints in January, February, March, and we’re collecting all that goodness and then shipping out a newsworthy release—say, March 29th.

We’re not tying it directly to the end date of a sprint; we give ourselves a little runway so we can make news.

That’s how we make sure we don’t end up with incremental agilism—constant small changes that no one notices.

The opposite of incremental agilism is making news for your products.

One-Pager vs Lean Canvas

Ken Feehan | 01:04:30–01:09:00

Throughout my career, I’ve used a very popular document with tremendous value: the Lean Canvas or Business Model Canvas.

I’ve seen lots of organizations use it, and I think there’s tremendous value there. I’ve used it many times and I love it.

I have potentially moved a little bit forward with these product one-pagers as an iteration off of that for some businesses that I work with.

Side by side:

  • Both capture user problems
  • Both can have key metrics
  • Both talk about revenue

I’ve always loved the “Unfair Advantage” field of the Lean Canvas—they’ve got that over us in spades.

But the key difference is the use of the self-managing boundaries on the right-hand side of the product one-pager.

The ability to manage:

  • The key features in the release
  • The introduction date
  • The OKRs

Having product managers self-managing these projects towards completion within those boundaries is a difference maker.

You’ll see more of that in August when we talk about how managers can use this to manage their teams.

My content is: both documents are fantastic.

If you’re not using either one today and you start using either one tomorrow, you will be a better product manager.

I’m not trying to compete with the Lean Canvas; use the tool of your choice. But one of them should be something you use on a regular basis.

Rina Alexin | 01:09:00–01:11:00

We had a question from KJ who asks if others are using customer journey maps to meet some requirements.

Customer journey maps can absolutely—and should—be a part of structuring your release, but I don’t see it as kind of an executive communications document the way I see the one-pager.

We teach journey mapping, we teach that process, and you hit on a couple of things there: they’re full of personas, problems, understanding and changing customer behaviors.

I use journey maps to structure the story that I then tell using the product management one-pager.

Q&A: Pictures, Conflicts & Adoption

Rina Alexin & Ken Feehan | 01:11:00–01:19:30

Q (Rajesh): Your thoughts on adding pictures to the one-pager? Visual cues or anything else you’d recommend?

Ken:
I’ve been using one-pagers for about four years, and I have built a couple with screenshots. I’ve also seen a couple from clients that take a picture of the persona using the product.

So I’ve seen some pictures sneak into one-pagers, which works.

I tend to avoid doing it because I want to be succinct with words and strategic. I want to talk less about “here’s what the interface looks like” and more about what outcome we’re looking for—reducing churn, increasing usage, hitting OKRs.

Pictures can push you toward a feature/status document instead of a strategic commitment.

So: can be done, but be careful.

Rina:
I’d only add: keep it simple. This document has a specific purpose—for having those conversations with your executives and other stakeholders. If there’s supporting documentation, sure, send those along, but don’t overload the one-pager.

Q (Shelley): How do you use this tool to reconcile conflict between voice of the customer and strategic objectives, particularly when they don’t seem aligned?

Ken:
Great question.

The way that I’ve dealt with impossible tasks as a product manager—like conflicting inputs—is to be the honest arbiter in the middle.

I take my product one-pager with some simple words written down about:

  • What the customer problem is
  • What the executive strategic direction is

…and I try to build the one-pager with the most challenging stakeholders in small, non-confrontational meetings.

If I know that the CEO represents one extreme and the Head of UX another, I work with them one-on-one and negotiate back and forth.

I don’t take sides; I simply try to be the truth teller in the middle:

“We’re trying to organize releases for the spring, fall, winter that move the ball forward. Let’s write it down.”

We advance the ball a couple of yards at a time by writing things down, not by yelling at each other in a big meeting.

Rina:
You say it all the time and I love this quote: “I’m a product manager, I’m a truth teller.”

That means you’re responsible for many difficult discussions. This is just one of them.

And Ken’s point about the meeting before the meeting is huge. That’s often your best chance to convince people with data that their idea might not be validated by reality.

Q (Harsha): Does the one-pager look different at the inception of a project versus later on when you’re selling the need for it?

Ken:
Excellent.

I work very hard with clients on trying to get the product boundaries set at the conceive level and not change them throughout the lifecycle.

If they do change, we have a formal “project out of bounds” review.

So the right-hand side (boundaries) is something we want to establish early and keep consistent:

  • If your product is trying to generate revenue, that will show up in the KPIs
  • If it’s about usage/churn, that shows up there

I also like to think that the left side (problem, hypothesis, stories) is established at conceive and plan and does not change either.

You can imagine interfacing with marketing and sales and saying, “Let’s build a marketing campaign around these stories.”

So best practice: establish the one-pager early, and carry it through from beginning to end.

Q (Stephen): How do you use the one-pager to communicate a roadmap? Does that mean several one-pagers?

Ken:
If you look at our roadmap example—three iterative releases and two new products—I see a product one-pager associated with each significant announcement on the roadmap.

So there’s a one-pager for:

  • Dashboard 1.2
  • Dashboard 1.3
  • Dashboard 1.4
  • Executive Report Builder 1.0, etc.

The roadmap shows when things happen.

The one-pager explains why and how they matter.

Your executive will look at the roadmap and say, “I see Dashboard 1.2 and 1.3. What’s the difference?”

The product one-pager is the next thing you share with that executive.

Q (Ina): Any ideas on how to work with the CEO on having company goals defined in the first place?

Ken:
We love this question. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think.

Very frequently a product manager is asked to build a roadmap that’s not based on company strategy because they can’t find what the company strategy is.

In that situation, as someone in the product organization, I would work with the CEO or someone who influences the CEO and say:

“Last year, the roadmap was mostly reactive—we pulled from the backlog based on what fit. We’re trying to change that this year. We’d like our product strategy to drive towards strategic goals. I’m planning that now. Can we work with you to establish what some of the company goals are for this year?”

They’re not meant to be complex. They can be as simple as:

  • Reduce churn
  • Expand into Europe
  • Increase NPS

If you can help the CEO understand that you want to be less reactive and more proactive, and that product strategy is meant to answer what they think is important, I think you’ll get a half hour of the CEO’s time.

You can literally take the slide that said “Claire the CEO” in this presentation, scratch out her name, and write your CEO’s goals in.

It’s hard; CEOs are not always sophisticated about articulating strategy—they’re under a lot of day-to-day stress.

But if you go to them and say, “I need your help because I want to be less reactive and more proactive,” that’s a foot in the door.

And being the person who helps the CEO with a blind spot? That’s one of the things that got me promoted.

Rina:
I love ending on this question.

Final Advice & Next Webinar

Ken Feehan | 01:19:30–01:22:00

Very quickly, I want to come back and talk about the main idea I want to leave you with:

We want releases and news coming out of your company that are aligned towards company strategy.

The work that product managers do day in and day out should make the CEO go:

“Hey, they get it. They read what I wrote on January 1st. They’re trying to help us accomplish these goals.”

We want to see you:

  1. Align to strategy
  2. Make news
  3. Achieve the plan

If you can state a plan, make some news, and accomplish the plan, I promise you: you’re going to get promoted.

Rina Alexin | 01:22:00–01:24:00

We have a handout for you. We’ll be happy to give you the template for this very simple document, which can be used in PowerPoint or Google Slides.

If you’d like a copy, please download it from the follow-up email. We’ll include the link there so you can start structuring your releases.

Remember, this is part of a two-part series. We’ll be back again in August and we’ll take what we built here with the one-pager and structure that webinar around how managers can use one-pagers to more effectively manage their teams and get promoted to the executive level.

We’ve got an exciting thing coming up in August, and we’re not done getting you promoted yet.

Rina Alexin | 01:24:00–01:25:30

Thank you all for your great questions today; it’s what really makes these webinars work. We really enjoy all of the engagement we’ve had today, and this was really fun.

Ken:
Yeah, I love doing this. I sent an email and said, “Can I turn this into a play on Monday?” and I got a lot of yeses back in a big hurry. This was a lot of fun. I hope it was entertaining and informative.

Rina:
Great. Well, thank you again for joining us this morning. If you’re interested in transforming your team, you can get expert help for your team on these strategic one-pagers and gate reviews. At Productside we provide custom solutions, custom training curriculum, and workshops just like what you saw today.

Make your team more effective and contact us.

Thank you so much, Ken, for this wonderful workshop on one-pagers, and thank you all for joining. You’ll receive a link to the recording after this has ended.

Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Ken:
Thank you. Be safe, be well, be strategic.

Webinar Panelists

Rina Alexin

Rina Alexin, the CEO of Productside holds a BA with honors from Amherst College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is also a member of the AIPMM.

Ken Feehan

Ken, a Productside former consultant, brings 20+ years of experience in product development and go-to-market strategy for hardware, software, and services.

Webinar Q&A

A Product One-Pager is a concise, one-page strategic document that clarifies a product’s goals, personas, key problems, success metrics, risks, and boundaries. It helps Product Managers directly tie releases to company strategy, executive priorities, revenue goals, churn reduction targets, and customer outcomes — enabling clearer communication and faster decision-making across teams.
A Product One-Pager gives teams a shared “single source of strategic truth” by outlining the problem, hypothesis, personas, OKRs, risks, and release boundaries up front. When every PM and cross-functional partner aligns around the same strategic intent, teams gain autonomy to make informed decisions while staying tightly connected to business goals — reducing rework, misalignment, and time-consuming status meetings.
By mapping each release to executive priorities (e.g., revenue growth, churn reduction, NPS improvement), the One-Pager shows how specific features and outcomes support company-level goals. This helps PMs avoid shipping isolated features and instead deliver clearly defined outcomes that matter to leadership, such as increasing usage, improving conversion, or lowering support costs.
A strong Product One-Pager includes: Problem Summary (customer pain, unmet needs, core issue) Hypothesis (what success looks like and how it changes behavior) Persona Stories (e.g., Fred in Finance, Claire the CEO) Key Risks (visibility = credibility) Strategic Boundaries (features, OKRs/KPIs, dates, goals) Direct linkage to company strategy These elements help PMs tell a compelling, executive-ready story that elevates strategic thinking.
Executives want clarity—not long documents. A Product One-Pager distills the entire release into a simple narrative that addresses strategic goals, customer value, and measurable outcomes. Because it’s easy to read, it accelerates decision-making, reduces miscommunication, enables faster approvals, and helps PMs “manage up” by showing clear, thoughtful strategic reasoning.