Why you need a product strategy, even for your “simple” website

You research the neighbourhood, check the school districts, and evaluate the infrastructure. You think about council taxes, maintenance costs, and how the local market is trending. You have a plan for improvements: a kitchen renovation next year and new windows in three years.

A website should be similar.

Your domain is your address, your CMS is your foundation, and your integrations with CRMs, email platforms, and analytics tools are like your home’s plumbing and electrical systems. It sits on digital infrastructure, like AWS or Google Cloud. Regulatory landscapes, including privacy laws, accessibility requirements, and industry compliance standards govern it. 

Your house isn’t something that you tear down and rebuild every three to five years. But your website? Odds are that’s a different story. 

While website rebuilds are a common practice among companies, the process itself often lacks a clear strategy. All too frequently, we see businesses spend six months and six figures on a complete rebuild, lose traffic in the migration, retrain their entire team on new systems, and wonder why their conversion rates plummeted.

But the real issue isn’t the way website rebuilds are done; it’s that they shouldn’t be necessary at all. 

Google Docs doesn’t do semi-annual rebuilds. Neither do Uber, Netflix, or any other digital product you actually rely on. They plan for the long term and make strategic improvements over time, like a smart homeowner who renovates thoughtfully rather than demolishing.

They don’t need to start over because they’ve started with a great product strategy.

Product strategy isn’t just about having opinions about fonts and button colours. It’s looking at your website through the lens of your business’s next two to ten years and asking hard questions, for example: 

• Where is your company heading? If you’re a B2B software company planning international expansion, your website needs to support multiple languages, currencies, and compliance frameworks. If you’re a local service business eyeing franchise opportunities, you need a content management system that can scale to hundreds of locations without losing brand consistency.
• What’s happening in your market? Consumer behaviour shifts constantly. The pandemic accelerated e-commerce adoption by about five years overnight. AI is changing how people search and discover content. Privacy regulations are making third-party cookies obsolete. Your website strategy needs to account for these macro trends, not just react to them after your competitors have already moved.
• How do your initiatives connect to business outcomes? You may want to add a customer loyalty programme. Great idea, but why, for whom, and how does it integrate with your existing systems? If you simply bolt on an off-the-shelf SaaS tool without thinking strategically, you’ll end up with siloed data that your marketing team can’t utilise and customer service can’t access. That’s not a loyalty program; that’s expensive digital clutter.

Strategic thinking means asking these questions before you write a single line of code, not after you’ve already committed to a vendor and blown half your budget.

After working with hundreds of companies on their digital products, we’ve identified what separates wishful thinking from strategies that actually work.

Clear success metrics that drive decisions

Effective strategies start with measurement frameworks that matter. Not vanity metrics like page views or social media followers, but the leading indicators that predict business outcomes.

Take conversion optimisation. Everyone wants higher conversion rates, but innovative companies track the behavioural patterns that lead to conversions: Time spent on key pages, engagement with specific content types, and abandonment points in their user journey. They establish baselines, set improvement targets, and most importantly, they know when to double down on what’s working and when to cut their losses.

Netflix doesn’t just measure subscriber growth; it also tracks completion rates for different content types, user engagement patterns across devices, and the impact of personalisation algorithms on viewing time. These leading indicators help them make strategic content investments months before they show up in subscriber numbers.

User-centric decision-making

Most websites are built around internal org charts rather than user needs. Effective product strategy flips this dynamic.

Use frameworks like Jobs-to-be-Done to understand what users actually hire their website to accomplish. A professional services firm might discover that potential clients don’t just want to read case studies; they want to assess competency in their specific industry and understand pricing models before they’re ready to talk to sales.

For example, instead of generic “About Us” content, create industry-specific capability demonstrations. Instead of hiding pricing behind “Contact Us” forms, you provide transparent cost frameworks that pre-qualify leads. The website becomes a strategic sales tool rather than a digital brochure.

Technical architecture that enables strategy

We often see teams choose technology first, then try to fit their strategy around those limitations.

An effective product strategy starts with business goals, then selects technology that enables those goals. If your growth plan includes partnerships, acquisitions, or new product lines, you need APIs that can integrate with diverse systems. If you’re planning to personalise user experiences, you need a data architecture that can collect, process, and act on behavioural insights in real-time.

This is why companies like Airbnb invested early in headless, API-first architectures. It seemed like over-engineering at the time, but it enabled them to launch new features (host onboarding flows, guest verification systems, dynamic pricing tools) without rebuilding their entire platform each time.

Cross-functional alignment and governance

The best technical strategy in the world fails without organisational buy-in. Effective product strategies include clear governance frameworks: who makes decisions about new features, how resources get allocated between new development and technical debt, and how success gets measured across teams. Establish decision rights, communication protocols, and change management processes that persist beyond individual projects or personnel changes.

Competitive intelligence and market timing

Ultimately, effective strategies strike a balance between innovation and market reality. They track what competitors are doing well (and where they’re vulnerable), assess emerging technologies for strategic fit rather than novelty, and time major investments to align with market readiness.

The companies that implemented AR try-on features in 2019 were probably too early. The ones doing it now are probably too late. Strategic timing isn’t about being first; it’s about being right for your market and your customers.

“But we’re not Netflix. We’re just a mid-market manufacturer with a simple website.”

That’s precisely why you need a product strategy. While you’re treating your website as an afterthought, your competitors probably are too. Which means you have an opportunity to build a genuine competitive advantage through better digital products.

After all, if strategic improvements to your website increase lead conversion by just 15%, even a modest traffic increase translates to serious revenue impact. 

More importantly, product strategy transforms your total cost of ownership. Instead of massive capital expenditures every two to three years, you shift to predictable operational investments that compound over time. You stop losing institutional knowledge in rebuilds and start building on what works.

Your website is either appreciating or depreciating. There’s no neutral ground.

Every day you operate without a digital product strategy, you’re choosing depreciation. You’re accepting technical debt, missing user insights, and letting competitors gain ground. You’re perpetuating the expensive cycle of rebuild, retrain, and regret.

But, once you start treating your digital presence as the strategic asset it actually is, everything changes. Your website becomes a competitive moat. Your team becomes more effective. Your customers have better experiences. Your business grows more predictably.