Okay, let's talk about success and definition of success. Product Strategy is again a very tricky concept. And you can find many definitions of it. Honestly, before I prepared for this class, I tried to find the canonical definition and they just couldn't find any of these too many of them. So to me, let's go back on the high level, let's try to simplify the concept. How can you simplify product strategy?

To me product strategy is all about driving product success on a high level. So strategy is basically a high level plan of getting to success and tactics could be thought of a lower level plan of getting to success. in defining success, we need to be able to do several things. First, we need to like we need to clearly understand and define the desired like the desired state. What's the star that we're going to get to where are we trying to go? Once we understand what we're trying to go we need to clearly understand where we are now in define our current state.

Once we define the desired state and the current state of our product, as well as how we will be eliminating the gap. It's it's critically important for us to understand the difference between different kinds of variables. Do you have some variables you can manage? And I call them levers, while some others you really cannot. And they're just given to you while they also affect success? So do Do you understand the difference between the levers and non levers and always make sure that you know which levers drive your success.

Finally, let's talk about what success is. So what is a successful product? This is also not a very simple question to answer. And they can be lots of different answers which are all correct, by the way. So let me give you just several first one successful product is the product that has a lot of customers. So if you have lots of customers, that's one of one definition of success.

The second definition of success could be the product is growing fast, even if the number of customers is not big yet, but the product is growing super fast. This is a successful product. My third definition of product success would be that customers are willing to pay for the product. And that one is simple. So some products customers are happy to use for free. But if your product is good enough for customers to pay for it, it is a successful product.

Finally, I'll give you several more definitions of product success just to explain that it's not all about your customers and your girls. successful product is the product that makes Makes company profitable. And that one is quite simple because company is more than just the product you have your stakeholders you have your employees, you have your investors, so you need to be able to make profit. So if product is if company is profitable and product is profitable, the product is successful. And finally, if the company's a desired place to work and if people really want to be able to contribute to this product, this is also a definition of success to me. Now that we start talking about different product lifecycle stages, we will need to clearly define success for new product growth product in mature products.

So we start giving recipe to success for each of those life stages.