product strategy for Open source companies

Product strategy is business strategy, especially for open source companies. When we work together on product strategy, the final outcome / deliverable is a product roadmap that is for both internal and external consumption. Yes, it’s a deliverable! And what should it do?

  • Get your entire team aligned about:

    • The company’s place in the ecosystem you play in

    • The differentiated value your project and your product delivers to users / customers

    • A single set of priorities

    • The difference in value and outcomes that can be expected between the OSS and the commercial product

    • Who the target market is for the project and product, and how the two do (or don’t) overlap

    • The framework for how to decide what to prioritize in project and product development

    • What your open source project and your commercial product are each supposed to do for your business

  • Communicate all of the above ⬆️ to your open source community, your customers and your investors! And why would that matter?

    • Get your customers, your potential customers and your users excited about your project and product’s direction

    • Help your community understand whether they are a best fit for project or product

    • Assure your OSS community that you have a real commitment to open source as well as a plan for financial survival

    • Communicate to your investors that you have a real plan to make OSS work for your business and build a financially successful software company

The deliverables

There’s a deliverable: A product roadmap, in the style of Product Roadmaps Relaunched. That means it’s a strategic document, not a list of features and dates. The roadmap comes in two versions. One for internal consumption and one as an external communication tool.

Both will be in a Google Slides format.

Here’s what’s on the roadmap:

  • The core positioning for the company, the project and the product (some people call this a value proposition template or elevator pitch template, it’s a positioning statement to me)

  • The company’s point of view on the ecosystem it plays in

  • The specific characteristics of your:

    • ideal open source user

    • ideal paying customer

  • How the ideal user profile and ideal customer profile relate to each other (target, Venn diagram, two circles?)

  • The pain points your project and your product solve, and were the overlap and divergence between the two exist

  • The differentiated value delivered by your project and the differentiated value delivered by your product

    • Features that are under development in your product and project mapped to how they reinforce your differentiated value

    • How those features should be prioritized

  • What business objectives the open source project is expected to deliver, and how you will measure how well those objectives are being met

  • The top priorities for the company in the next 12 months

Who is this for?

This is appropriate for companies who fit at least one of the following three criteria:

  • You have an open source project and are developing a commercial product

  • You have a commercial product and are planning to release an open source project that will be a key part of your strategy

  • You have both an open source project and a commercial product

What pain points does this offering solve?

If you fit the description above and are experiencing any of the following pain points, this offering can absolutely solve what ails you:

  • You don’t know how you are differentiated from competitors in the ecosystem and what differentiated value you deliver to customers and users

  • You aren’t clear on the relationship between OSS and commercial product, including what the OSS is supposed to do for your business

  • You have trouble prioritizing features, and nobody really understands why things are or are not on the roadmap

  • You feel like your company is misunderstood in the wider ecosystem

  • You want to really create excitement among users and customers about how you’re unique and where you are going

Why work with me?

Let’s face it, my background is more marketing than product. Well, at least to those people who think of positioning as marketing, and they are wrong.

Over the past several years, the most common feedback I’ve gotten after working with open source companies on positioning is “thank you for the workshop, we’ve just updated our roadmap as a result of our work together.”

At the same time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the key to making an open source business work is rock solid product strategy. And when done right, sales and marketing get the information they need to do their jobs from the product strategy document. But the product strategy is the starting point for getting alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success.. oh, and your user/contributor community.

So why should you work with me? I’ve worked with dozens of companies on positioning, I’ve interviewed more than 200 people on The Business of Open Source and organized Open Source Founders Summit. I haven’t built an open source company myself, so I don’t have the deep, detailed experience from one company that you’d get from a former founder. On the other hand, I have a much larger sample size than company leaders do — or even than most investors do. I see the forest, they are looking at trees.

But this is a new offering, so I’m looking for some “beta clients” to help me perfect it. Think that might be you? Reach out.

 
 

Get Started

Want to be a beta client and work together on product strategy? This is an opportunity to work together at a lower price than usual as I perfect the product strategy offering.