Product People Devised The Foundations for Strategic Thinking at a Digital Platform for Independent Musicians

The Client: A Digital Platform for Independent Musicians

Our Client is a digital platform for independent musicians. In a crowded distribution market, it pairs creator-first speed with trusted rights expertise—combining rights management, promotion, and analytics for self-releasing artists.

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The Challenge: Strategy in the Middle of Chaos

Our Client came to us at a critical inflection point: launching their biggest bet (an AI social media coach) while simultaneously navigating their parent organization's strategic repositioning. They needed someone who could build strategic clarity in the middle of organizational uncertainty, and deliver tangible outcomes fast.

The stakes: Launch an AI social media coach successfully or lose market momentum. Build a defensible strategy or risk the parent organization pulling investment. Make smart product bets or waste limited resources on the wrong things.

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The Mission: Interim Head of Strategy and Go-To-Market

Our Client engaged Product People at a pivotal moment: launching the beta of its next big bet, an AI-powered social media coach, while clarifying the company’s long‑term direction. We were brought in for parental cover to guarantee a successful early-October beta release and to craft the strategic vision and impact roadmap that would guide Our Client forward.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Client Team Consisted Of:

• 2 Engineers (1 Frontend & 1 Backend)
• 2 Customer Support Specialists
• 1 Product Manager
• 1 Business Development Manager

The team was on the verge of launching an AI-powered social media coach, which could be Our Client's biggest project yet, and we came in to pressure-test it.

We started by getting a handle on the market, then dove into competitor research, personas, and defining measurable outcomes. But here's where it got complicated: Our Client sits under the parent organization, and the parent organization was going through its own repositioning—which naturally cascaded down to Our Client. Our challenge became two-fold: build a strategy for Our Client while simultaneously accounting for the uncertainty coming from the parent organization's evolving direction. We had to cut through ambiguity and keep momentum going, even with those constraints in play.

Our goal was to bring direction and clarity to the chaos—to create a roadmap grounded in data rather than assumptions. We focused on making progress in a way that was defensible: every recommendation backed by market research, competitive analysis, and user insights. That way, regardless of how the parent organization's strategy evolved, we could present decisions based on logic and evidence. It meant working iteratively—gathering results, and adjusting course as new information came in—so Our Client could move forward confidently even in uncertain conditions.

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Our Main Quest: Building Our Client's Strategic Foundation

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

We hit the ground running with competitive intelligence and market validation. Our first deliverable was to understand the competitor landscape of their upcoming beta product and validate its market viability. We analyzed both direct competitors (offerings similar to ours) and indirect competitors (tools that solved similar pain points in different ways). This gave us the baseline to challenge assumptions and validate what Our Client was doing.

First Deliverables and Results

1. Competitive Research: Comprehensive analysis of positioning, capabilities, and strategic implications for both Our Client and its beta product. This also helped us build trust across the work that we do and set us up for success.
2. Evidence-based Discovery: We setup a Strategy Working Group which brought together key stakeholders to tackle the most pressing strategic questions and provide the clarity the organization needed. We created a clear project plan aimed at gathering data-driven recommendations for how Our Client could maximize value for both the parent organization and its members—giving us a way to drive our own strategic vision forward instead of just reacting to external changes. This work produced a cost model baseline, synthesized our competitive and persona research, mapped out our assumptions about what success meant for the parent organization and its members, identified strategic levers, refined our Opportunity Solution Tree, and developed testable hypotheses about where Our Client could add the most value.

Explore and Conquer: Solved for the Client

With competitive intelligence in hand, we shifted focus to defining Our Client's path forward. The challenge wasn't just about building features—it was about making smart bets in an uncertain environment. the parent organization's strategic shifts meant we needed a flexible roadmap that could adapt while still giving the team clear direction.

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Initiative 1 - From Reactive to Strategic: Building a Discovery Engine

The Business Problem:
Our Client was making product decisions based on whoever shouted loudest. Ideas came from sales, engineering, and leadership, but there was no systematic way to evaluate which opportunities would actually move the needle. This meant wasted development resources on features that didn't align with strategic goals, and stakeholders constantly questioning priorities.

The Value We Delivered:
We established a structured discovery practice with an Opportunity Solution Tree that became the team's single source of truth. This shifted the conversation from "what should we build?" to "what evidence supports this direction?"

Business Impact:

• Reduced decision-making time by creating a visual framework that facilitated faster alignment across stakeholders
• Protected development resources by filtering out low-impact ideas before they reached the engineering team
• Built organizational confidence: leadership could now defend the roadmap to the parent organization stakeholders with a research-backed rationale instead of gut feeling

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Initiative 2 - Turning Ambiguity into Actionable Strategy

The Business Problem:
Our Client faced a dangerous combination: multiple promising directions, limited resources, and a parent organization going through its own strategic repositioning. Without a clear prioritization framework, the team risked either freezing (building nothing while waiting for clarity) or scattering efforts across too many initiatives.

The Value We Delivered:
We created an Opportunity Backlog, a scored, prioritized pipeline of 50+ initiatives evaluated against strategic impact, market timing, and competitive positioning. Each opportunity included clear success metrics and effort estimates, giving leadership a defensible framework for resource allocation.

We also built a Pricing/Value Model that let the team simulate different pricing scenarios and understand the revenue implications before making commitments to the market.

Business Impact:

• Enabled Our Client to keep moving forward strategically despite external uncertainty. No more "waiting for clarity" paralysis
• Created a common language for investment decisions that aligned product, business development, and leadership
• Gave leadership a tool to say "no" to low-impact requests with data, protecting team focus on high-value work
• Set the foundation for future fundraising conversations by demonstrating disciplined, evidence-based product strategy
• Opportunity Backlog

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Initiative 3 - Pricing Strategy That Wins, Not Guesses

The Business Problem:
Our Client operated in a crowded market of 17+ distribution platforms, each with different pricing models and feature bundles. Without understanding the competitive pricing landscape, Our Client risked either leaving money on the table (underpricing) or pricing themselves out of the market (overpricing), both of which would directly impact growth and profitability.

The Value We Delivered:
We conducted a comprehensive competitive pricing analysis across the entire market, identifying three dominant pricing approaches and mapping which features drive willingness-to-pay. This intelligence was synthesized into a feature-to-value ladder that showed exactly where to place paywalls and what belongs in premium tiers.

Business Impact:

• Armed the business development team with competitive intelligence to confidently position Our Client's pricing
• Created a pricing framework that's defensible to the parent organization leadership and tied to market data
• Established a repeatable model to evaluate future feature investments: "Will this move the value perception needle enough to justify premium pricing?"
• Reduced the risk of costly pricing mistakes that could require awkward corrections after market launch

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Initiative 4 - From Scattered Insights to Strategic Direction

The Business Problem:
Our Client had conducted multiple strategy workshops and generated valuable insights, but those insights lived in scattered documents and Miro boards. Leadership couldn't point to a single source that said "here's where we're going and why", making it impossible to align the organization or communicate direction to the parent organization stakeholders.

The Value We Delivered:
We synthesized months of workshops and research into a Potential Direction Analysis that presented concrete strategic options, not just "what we could do" but "what we'd be giving up by choosing path A over path B." This culminated in an Overall Recommendation Document: a comprehensive strategic deck connecting all research, insights, and analysis into one actionable path forward with phased milestones.

Business Impact:

• Gave leadership a clear narrative to communicate to the parent organization executives and secure continued investment
• Aligned the entire team around a shared vision and ended internal debates about company direction
• Created a strategic artifact that can be used in investor conversations, partnership discussions, and recruiting top talent
• Established Our Client as a strategically mature organization, not just a tactical execution team

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Discovery Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

As Interim Product Managers, we supported Our Client’s teams with multiple missions:

• Beta Rollout Support
  • Aligned stakeholders on clear beta success criteria and launch timelines to ensure everyone was working toward the same definition of success for the October release
  • Led technical feasibility discussions with engineering and product teams, navigating constraints to keep the launch on track
  • Conducted hands-on product testing and created a centralized testing hub where all QA work was documented, making it easy for the team to track progress and systematically close tickets
  • Reviewed and provided feedback on user interview scripts to strengthen the quality of beta user research
  • Provided ongoing support in the background for ad-hoc requests and unplanned work, ensuring nothing fell through the cracks during the critical beta period
• AI Model Selection & Optimization
  • The beta product's admin panel offered multiple AI models (GPT and Gemini versions), which confused business users and made it unclear which model best served their needs.
  • Systematically evaluated 30+ AI-generated content pieces across different models, scoring each output on three dimensions: Brevity (0-20), Clarity (0-20), and Usefulness (0-20).
  • Conducted a cost-benefit analysis comparing model performance against API costs to identify the optimal balance of quality and efficiency.
  • Recommended a single model based on scoring results and cost-effectiveness, simplifying the admin experience and reducing decision paralysis.
  • Refined prompts specifically for the selected model to maximize output quality.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Built competitive intelligence infrastructure that pays dividends: The 17+ competitor analysis isn't a one-time report; it's now a living strategic asset that Our Client uses to evaluate every product decision. Leadership can answer "how does this compare to what Spotify/DistroKid/TuneCore offers?" with concrete data, not guesses. This positions Our Client to win in a crowded market by making smarter, faster decisions than competitors.

💡 Turned the biggest product bet from risky to profitable: The AI social media coach launched on time with the optimal AI model (GPT-4.1 mini) that reduced cost-per-user by 83%. Ultimately, making the difference between a feature that bleeds money at scale versus one that's actually profitable. We validated the product with systematic testing across 30+ outputs and 10 models, so the launch was evidence-backed.

💡 Eliminated decision-making paralysis during strategic uncertainty: While the parent organization repositioned and Our Client faced an unclear future, we delivered a structured opportunity backlog with 50+ prioritized initiatives. This meant the team kept shipping value instead of freezing. Every initiative was scored on strategic impact and market timing, giving leadership a clear answer to "what should we do next?" even when the parent company's direction was in flux.

💡 Created tools that outlive the engagement: The Pricing Model, Opportunity Solution Tree, and Strategic Frameworks we built became a decision-making infrastructure that Our Client continues to use. We didn't just give them answers; we gave them a system to generate their own answers as the market evolves.