1. SWOT to TOWS Product strategy
Write down on this title sheet the top 5 highest business priorities your currently working on
Don’t share the list but we will revisit it later in this module.

2. Developing product strategies
How to use SWOT analysis to develop ideas for your product strategy
Technique used in consulting assignments
Achieves wide engagement
Uses a SWOT analysis (situational audit)
Powerful approach to prioritising actions
Called SWOT to TOWS
An effective approach to developing strategies for companies, product portfolios and individual products
It provides a step by step approach that is easy to understand, that engages people from around the company and that delivers results that are easy to communicate and easy to audit and review when circumstances change.
We’ve used this technique in consulting assignments and it has proved to be very effective. In order to avoid bias, it is useful to have the process facilitated.
There are a couple of reasons for its success
It is simple to explain
It gets engagement from many people which helps people to buy into the results, feel ownership for the outcome and support the action plans that come from the process
At the heart of the process are several simple stages:
SWOT analysis
Development of strategic options
Development of an action plan
At each stage we prioritise and agree our position in order to minimise the backward and forward discussion that are so prevalent and such a time waster using other techniques

3. Stage 1: Product manager kick-off to get everyone on the same page
Market conditions
Lifecycle stage
Competitors
Current positioning
Typically meetings take several hours.
To begin the product manager provides background on the product and their perception of the market place and trends. This gets discussed.

4. Stage 2 Brainstorm SWOT Strengths Help Harm Weaknesses Internal
Opportunities
Threats
External
To begin, everyone is provided with post it notes and asked to post these on a wall with their assessment of the product and market against these SWOT categories.

5. SWOT Template

6. Stage 3 Prioritise 1 2 3 Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats
Potential to make a material difference in their own right 1
Potential to make a material difference if grouped with other ideas 2
Business as usual 3
Once complete, these post-its are filtered to clear out duplicates and then each post it is worked through in turn to categorise them as:
1) Significantly impacts the business on its own
2) significantly impacts the business when actioned along with several other ideas
3) will have an impact but is really business as usual
There is no rule about this categorisation but we would expect 3-5 ideas to come into category 1) those that significantly impact the business if done on their own.
The other two categories will be fairly evenly split and have the bulk of the ideas
The work is documented and we move onto the second stage
In practice, this is likely to be another 2-3 hour meeting a week or two after the first. You could, of course, compress this down to a much shorter time interval.

7. Stage 4 1 1 2 2 1 2 1 2 Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats
Strategies that use strengths to address opportunities
Strategies that prevent weaknesses from undermining opportunities 1 2
Threats
Strategies that use strengths to address threats
Strategies to prevent weaknesses being exploited by threats 1 2
Using the top 2 categories, a worksheet is prepared in this format. On the orange background are the ideas that came out of Stage 3.
Participants are asked to document their ideas on the strategies and actions that could be undertaken in order to address the challenges and opportunities that have been thrown up in the earlier stage.

8. Template Strengths 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 Weaknesses Opportunities Threats
Strategies that use strengths to address opportunities
Strategies that prevent weaknesses from undermining opportunities
Threats
Strategies that use strengths to address threats
Strategies to prevent weaknesses being exploited by threats 1 2

9. Stage 5 Prioritise proposed strategies Finalise strategic choices
Take strategies at priority level 1 & 2
Roll-in approaches already in progress
‘mini business case’
Estimate effort
Estimate value
Sanity check with key stakeholders
Finalise priorities
This information is collated by the facilitator who weeds out common ideas and then
The ideas are then combined with current activities on the product and as a group, the ideas are discussed and again prioritised
The highest priority strategies and actions are then progressed to the next stage of evaluation, looking at:
Feasibility
Resource impact
Market value
After this, we have a prioritised list of activities together with an impact assessment that we can take forward to our key stakeholders and prioritise.