You’ve probably been there: The teams are shipping, but it’s unclear how much the work will actually impact your overall business metrics.
Product leaders must be able to create clear, opinionated strategies that grow their business today and set up for future growth tomorrow.
Unfortunately, many struggle with balancing their portfolio of different product bets and driving meaningful impact on the top-level business metrics. New product leaders tend to over-index on whatever type of product work they’re most familiar with, instead of approaching different types of work with the appropriate toolset. This leads to being held back by massive opportunity cost: working too much on initiatives with diminishing returns, and missing out on the step-function investments that change the trajectory of the company.
When faced with the challenge of creating a strategic portfolio, product leaders need a framework to ensure they’re spending the right amount of time and effort on the right priorities.
In my advisory roles, the framework I’ve helped folks with, that leaders seem to find most useful is: thinking about your product strategy in terms of offense and defense.
In this post, we’ll cover:
About the Author:
Ely Lerner is an Executive in Residence at Reforge, and advises founders of product-led startups on product and growth strategy, and the path from initial traction to driving sustained growth. He was previously Head of Consumer Product at Chime. He also held Product Leadership positions at Yelp, across the Consumer, SMB, and Marketplace domains, and was Head of Product for Eat24, a fast-growing food delivery marketplace.
How to Think About “Offense” vs. “Defense” in Your Product Strategy
We’re borrowing the terms “offense” and “defense” from sports here: Offensive strategy is about scoring points for your team, while defensive strategy is focused on how to prevent the other team from scoring.
It’s not so different when we apply the distinction to your product strategy:
In product, your “offense” is any investment that is moving the business forward. Something that is strategically important to the business — driving meaningful business returns now or moving your strategy forward in a significant way to drive meaningful business returns in the future.
Your “defense” is the investments you make in order to prevent potential downside for the business. If you don’t invest in defense, you’re putting the business at risk, but making these defensive bets doesn’t generally drive upside in itself.
Offense and defense are equally important. You'll see better results for your business if you approach offense and defense as unique and distinct types of work.
When it comes to offense, the more you invest in it, the bigger the returns you’re likely to see. On the other hand, defensive bets come with a diminishing returns curve: There’s an amount of investment required to de-risk the situation you’re defending against, but any investment beyond that point doesn’t generate value.
Because defensive investments have diminishing returns, you should take the approach of trying to find the absolute minimum necessary to ensure the downside risk doesn’t happen, with some added margin of error. Any additional time or focus won’t generate additional upside — and would all be better spent focused on offensive initiatives to move the business forward.
I’ve seen that you can increase your chances of success as a business — driving more meaningful outcomes and making progress more quickly — by understanding which initiatives are offense and which are defense, and taking a unique approach aligned with each type of investment.
What Does “Offense” Look Like?
Identifying offensive bets tends to be a bit easier than identifying defensive ones.
Offensive bets generally meet the following criteria:
They move key business outcomes in a meaningful way — usually acquisition, retention, or monetization.
They are leveraged and compounding.
They make meaningful progress in a direction aligned to your strategy. Even if they don’t move business metrics today, they move you closer to significant business impact in the future.
Ideally, your strategy should only have two or three key offensive pillars. That’s because a key component of product strategy is focus — and companies that try to do too many things end up succeeding at none of them.
Some examples of offense are:
Expanding or accelerating your growth loops. This might look like increasing the number of users who generate content for a UGC loop, or adding engagement triggers to bring people back into a social network.
Expanding product-market fit (PMF) into new platforms. For example, Yelp doubled down on mobile right as the iOS app store launched to capitalize on new capabilities and diversify engagement channels away from Google search.
Expanding into adjacent audiences. Eventbrite built multi-event functionality to expand their core value applicability into an adjacent segment of users who run frequent and recurring events as their primary livelihood.
Laying down groundwork for future strategic success. Like when Slack invested in Slack Connect to drive cross-org network effects, or when Facebook added infrastructure for users to upload videos outside of the feed, later enabling the strategically important Facebook Video product. Neither of these efforts moved business metrics initially, but they were necessary on a defined strategic path to future outcomes.
One type of investment that can trip folks up is product market fit expansion to find your “second wave.” (We cover the three types of PMF Expansion in a lesson in Reforge’s Product Strategy program.) While this type of investment to expand and/or disrupt yourself is about “defending” your business from the evolution of competitors, the market etc., in this framework it should be treated as offense. This is because it is strategic work that is compounding to drive significant future business returns.
Offense is easier to identify than defense. But don’t assume that everything that isn’t offense is defense.
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What Does “Defense” Look Like?
Defensive work is, critically, about minimizing downside and risk for the business.
Most defensive work falls into three categories:
Sustaining your core value prop: Maintaining pace on incremental improvements to the core value prop of your product/experience to retain a competitive edge.
Scaling capacity and performance, technical debt, people, and process infrastructure — but just enough.
Safeguarding from harm: Risk, fraud, regulatory, and trust & safety work is a necessary part of your defense roadmap.
Here are a few examples of each, to help you better identify in your own work:
Defense Type 1: Sustaining Your Core Value Prop, Incrementally
Once you’ve reached Product Market Fit and are transitioning the majority of your focus into growth, incremental improvements in the core value prop of your product and that product experience are still necessary to maintain your competitive edge.
This is above and beyond any investments in the core value targeted at expanding the applicability of your solution to significant sub-segments of users etc, and other core product work that will move business metrics.
The Reforge Product Strategy program outlines the concept of the “PMF treadmill” in a lesson on Feature Product Fit. One key learning from that lesson is that the PMF threshold actually moves up over time, due to increasing shifts in the market and customer expectations.
Because the market evolves, competitors evolve, and people's expectations evolve, your team needs to keep making some investments in your core product value just to sustain your current level of PMF.
Treating your efforts in this area explicitly as defense will help you achieve the best outcomes. Those investments likely aren’t going to move business metrics up substantially but they are necessary to keep them from going down — and that is a perfect archetypal example of a defensive investment.
There is an almost infinite backlog of potential "core experience improvements" you could make, that would be valuable to users, but won’t move business metrics. Because it’s generally impossible to identify a specific diminishing returns point for this kind of defense, one approach is to intentionally constrain by only having a small team, focused on these, to help ensure you don't over-invest.
Defense Type 2: Scaling Product Infrastructure, aka Technical Scaling
One example of scaling-type defense work is technical scaling. As products grow, teams must invest in scaling technical infrastructure.
Leaders frequently struggle to decide how much to invest in scaling now vs. later. In my experience, people tend to end up investing too much now (at the expense of more impactful offensive bets), or waiting too long and running into performance and capacity problems that, at worst can impact customer’s trust, and at best still require you to eventually hard-pivot a lot of your org’s focus into fixing urgent fires.
Here’s an example: A few years ago, Hubspot faced a “code red” moment related to technical scaling, according to former VP of Revenue Product (and current Reforge EIR) Michael Pici. Product teams had been aggressively investing in adding value and expanding product functionality at the expense of technical scaling and reliability work, and eventually got to a point where leadership had to completely pause all feature work and direct everyone’s efforts toward fixing the problems. Hubspot likely would have been better off if they had been diversifying their effort by prioritizing a defensive swimlane all along.
The best way to handle scale work is thinking about it as an important defensive bet.
Consider using the “work backwards” approach:
Begin with the team’s projection of when your company’s next scale milestone will be reached.
Assess the amount of time your product teams will need to work, to scale your technical infrastructure to match. And importantly, give yourself an additional buffer for margin of error — say 20% of extra time.
Work backwards, subtracting your work time from the scale milestone, to arrive at a date when scaling work will need to begin, to meet the milestone.
Once you know that date, don’t start the work until that point. Instead, put your current cycles towards offensive bets now.
Starting scaling work early — or similarly, scaling more than you need to — seems like an efficient move, but it doesn’t shake out economically.
Opportunity costs are much higher than the apparent costs of the “total cost/rework” fallacy. I often see leaders looking at their investment options and saying something like: “If we build the 10X scale version now, then we have to throw it away and rebuild the 100X scale later, it will cost XYZ in total dev work, but if we build 100X scale from the start it will be much cheaper.” They fail to take into account the opportunity cost of failing to use those cycles to make more leveraged offensive bets now.
You’ll also want to keep an eye on where you are vs your projections periodically, and make adjustments as necessary. The faster you’re growing, the more often you’ll want to check in: Most fast-growing startups take at least some time to look at this monthly, and if something happens to cause a drastic change in terms of your growth velocity, that is definitely a great time to reassess your defensive scale work.
Defense Type 3: Safeguarding Against Harm Through Risk, Fraud, and Trust & Safety Work
Risk, fraud, regulatory, and trust & safety work is essential work for many companies. But the fact that it is essential doesn’t mean there isn’t a diminishing returns curve when deciding how much to invest.
Fraud prevention is one area where investing just enough to keep fraud to an acceptable level is better than trying to reach the potentially impossible goal of “zero fraud.”
Retail stores know this — that’s why they just account for some baseline level of theft as cost of doing business because they know that the investments needed to have no theft are higher than the costs of that theft.
Similarly, it’s generally impossible to get to zero theft or fraud without significantly impacting the experience of legitimate customers to an unacceptable degree.
That said, there are some situations when investments in trust and safety do become offensive bets, when those elements become a key part of your brand messaging and differentiation.
In early stages, a marketplace or UGC platform generally has to invest some in trust & safety as a defensive measure. But once that marketplace gets large enough to be in the public eye, investing in trust & safety moves from being a defensive investment to a core part of the strategy.
It’s why you see organizations like Uber and Airbnb investing so much here. And why Bumble gained a differentiation edge on Tinder by making trust and safety a core part of their value proposition: focusing on building a safer place, especially for women. I think of this like investing in brand — making this trust a key part of why customers choose you.
If it’s Not Offense or Defense, Don’t Do It
Here’s the tough love: As you evaluate your plans, if something doesn’t fall into either the offensive or defensive buckets, think long and hard about if you should be doing it right now, or at all.
Here are some examples of things that may look, at first glance, like offense or defense, but are actually neither:
“Future Defense”: Per the above example, defense that will be essential in the future, but isn’t needed now.
Short-term metrics movers: Investments that drive near-term results, but are misaligned to your broader strategy as a company, and not compounding toward great impact. Although this work might move metrics in the short term, they lose on opportunity cost, stealing focus away from strategic investments. Public companies can be especially vulnerable to the trap of focusing on short-term, non-compounding gains, at the expense of longer-term investments, which can lead to a dreaded death-spiral.
Investing too much in core product value beyond a point: As mentioned above, continuing to invest some in your core experience and core value is essential, but these investments generally are not going to improve your business outcomes. It’s best to keep these constrained and put the majority of your focus on offensive bets.
Copying competitor’s features: Many see this as defense, but the reality is more nuanced. Especially in Enterprise B2B there is frequently a “remove reasons to say no” defensive swimlane. But one hyper-focused just on those features that truely block a significant number of sales, and frequently just the “minimum viable” versions of the features. Copying a feature only because a competitor has it isn’t defense.
How Do You Put This to Work? There Are 4 Steps
Executing against this offense/defense framework starts with four steps:
Evaluate your initiatives
Resource by investing in offense and defense appropriately
Communicate your initiatives based on either an offense or defense approach
Reassess your priorities at least quarterly
Step 1: Evaluate
Your first step should be to take a look at everything you’re currently working on and planning to work on, and determine if each investment is offense, defense, or neither. If you’re not quite sure on any particular investment, that’s ok, intentionality is what’s most important. It’s better to do an evaluation, write down and share your reasoning, and make a determination, even if it’s “wrong” vs getting stuck when you’re unsure.
Step 2: Resource
When it comes to resourcing, as a general rule, consider over resourcing your offensive bets.
Remember one key trait of offense work is that investments here generally compound, so you’ll benefit by investing, more, earlier — and the more you invest the more you’ll return.
Frequently there is a limit to the total number of people who can be helpful on an initiative, but think about “over-resource” in the broad sense: You can clear people’s plates, so they can focus solely on these efforts; or over-resource central supporting teams so folks on the initiative will always have a dedicated person on a shared team ready to help out as needed.
On the defense side, you’re trying to invest just enough to stay ahead of the risk, but no further. Resourcing should likely follow one of two patterns:
For “on-going” investments, such as core experience improvements, where the specific diminishing returns point is unclear, if you have no specific parameters to guide you, consider constraining to 20% to 25% of your overall investments as a generic heuristic.
For investments where the “what is needed by when” component is clear (scaling etc), resource as needed but use the “work-backward” method outlined above to decide when to resource.
Step 3: Communicate
Another important part of execution is communicating these approaches and priorities to your teams. There’s power in helping your teams to understand what kind of project, offense vs defense, they are working on and how they should approach it — as long as you’re careful to keep them motivated and excited.
Remind your teams that defense is just as important, if not more important than offense, it’s just a different type of work that they need to approach differently.
Defense work is inherently not about over-achieving — so it may take some coaching to help your team change their mindsets.
In my experience, product professionals tend to think like overachievers: More is always more, and faster is always better. That mindset works for offensive work. But teams doing defensive work may need help shifting their mentality to an optimization mindset: “Bigger” and “faster” isn’t the goal; defense wants to invest the minimum amount possible, as late as possible, to get to the finish line just in time.
In that way, teams doing defensive work have an important role: They’re poised to acutely optimize day-to-day tactical decisions to maximize outcomes for the organization overall, not just their team. One thing you can do to set defense teams up for success is make it clear that they're in this crow's nest position and should keep their eye out for threats, while also making sure they know where the point of diminishing returns is. Give them the tooling and permission to say "we're at the point of diminishing returns on this."
Step 4: Reassess
Evaluating which initiatives are offense and which are defense (or the third important category of: “we probably shouldn’t do this right now”) is something you’ll want to keep doing on an on-going basis — as things can and will change.
You’ll likely want to be checking in on your priorities at least quarterly at minimum.
On defense, in particular, it’s important to periodically evaluate if the point of diminishing returns you identified has moved — in either direction — so you can continue to tune your efforts.
Here’s What Happens When You Do This Well
Many organizations spend a large amount of effort and focus on things that aren’t key to growing the business and moving things forward.
When you’re able to identify your offensive and defensive initiatives — as well as stop investing in initiatives that are neither — your ability to make more progress more quickly, drive meaningful business outcomes, and your chances of success go up dramatically.
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