From Scattered Inputs to a VP-Aligned Product Strategy

Background

Workday Journeys is a platform built for the moments that matter most at work: onboarding, parental leave, a job change. The PM team running it was distributed across five cities and time zones: Dublin, New York, Denver, London, and Vancouver.

The problem

We had five PMs each balancing customer research, market analysis, organizational asks, product reviews, and daily development team rhythms. The work was happening, but without a shared perspective of where the product was going, every decision was slower than it needed to be and every new request competed on equal footing.

That meant the team was reactive; prioritizing whatever felt loudest rather than what actually moved the product forward. Our investments were misaligned and we were wasting cycles working from an incomplete picture. We had raw inputs and individual perspectives, but not enough focused time on the right things and no framework for turning those inputs into decisions.

How I approached it

I took this on because the gap existed and no one was acting on it. The goal was not to come up with the strategy on my own, that is a cross-functional and team activity, but to design the methodology, determine the next steps, and push the work forward.

The first design decision was structural: not every conversation could happen in every format. I built the methodology in three parts, each using the format that matched the work.

Foundation and audit was remote. Each PM independently assessed where we stood: who we built for, why users chose our product, whether our market segmentation was correct, how we compared against competition, and more. We brought those raw outputs together into a shared view and showcased the foundation to cross-functional partners for input. This phase produced our criteria: who we cared to build for, what was working, and what could be deprioritized; all grounded in evidence rather than the assumptions we had been operating on.

Opportunity mapping was also remote, then brought together to align as a team. The team built out a comprehensive opportunity space: not just existing roadmap items but customer requests, new functionality, connective tissue, and new positioning. We evaluated those against the criteria from the first phase and shaped them into eight potential investment areas. Cross-functional partners were involved at every step so they felt heard and bought in.

The offsite was where the decisions got made. The first two phases gave us the inputs and the tools, but narrowing eight investment areas to three required being in a room together. I negotiated and planned an in-person week for the PM team and key cross-functional partners: engineering director, research, design, and PM leadership. We applied the criteria and foundational work, evaluated each area against market opportunity and company priorities, pressure-tested what else we needed to consider, and came out with three core investment areas.

What changed

The team went from scattered inputs to a VP-aligned strategy: three investment areas with a three year outlook, a pressure-tested mission statement and north star metric, and explicit agreement on the five areas we were saying no to and why. That last part mattered. Having a documented frame for what we said no to meant those conversations stopped being relitigated every time someone brought them up.

The three investment areas shaped a streamlined vision that the team could actually operate against. Each PM owned a workstream that contributed to the larger picture, with the autonomy to move independently based on the maturity and needs of their area. Our near-term strategy focused on wrapping up in-progress items and reshaping the existing roadmap. Beyond that, new roadmap candidates were evaluated through a prioritization framework we created together, giving us an aligned six-month roadmap the team would execute against.

Then I built the accountability structure to keep it alive. A quarterly business review across PM and leadership tracked sales numbers, customer feedback, marketing progress, and resurfaced the strategy and success metrics. A second quarterly review for the broader team kept everyone along for the ride. The strategy did not get filed away after we built it, and the team could act with deliberation instead of reacting to whatever was loudest.

What I'd do differently

I designed the methodology and drove it, but I held the pen too long. Delegating ownership of major workstreams to team members earlier would have moved us faster, and having their name on the work would have meant deeper buy-in. The need was clear to everyone, but not everyone engaged themselves equally in creating it.