Product strategy answers the question, “How will your product delight customers, in hard to copy, margin-enhancing ways?”

Think about how your product delights customers, both now and in the future.

Hamilton Helmer’s book, “7 Powers,” outlines seven hard-to-copy advantages.

Brand. Building trust with customers takes years of delivering value with a minimum of “trustbusters.”

Network effects.

Economies of scale.

Counter-positioning. This “power” — an offer to customers that is impossible for competitors to match — is rare.

Unique technology.

An example: Netflix’s personalization technology. Because Netflix knows the movie tastes of 185M members, they can generate accurate forecasts of streaming hours for each potential title, and spend accordingly. They effectively “right-size” their investment in original content.

Switching costs. This hard-to-copy advantage exists when a customer invests so much in one product that it’s hard to switch to another.

Process power.

Captured resource. The clearest example of this power is a patent.