Product Strategy

“The key job of a great chief product officer is essentially setting the direction, not worrying about every single feature, not worrying about even big, even reasonably, reasonable sized products down to every feature level. But setting the vision and the dire…”

“You could, we can ship trash faster every single day. We need strategy and really smart decisions to know what to ship, what to experiment with what features we want to do in what order and what rollout, right? The strategy is the core piece. And then think ab…”

“A lot of people think, like, strategy is about, like looking at portors, port forces, a lot of slides. We're looking at some data and slicing it and saying we need to go here or there. All of it is largely a, some sort of package intuition, and the challenge w…”

“That, that's still a very human problem that I think we're at least three years away from the models being, being solving at that level of abstraction.”

“Strategy sits between the mission and vision. And the plan... So it sits between the two and it forces choice to deploy Scarce resources to generate maximum impact... And it ideally includes three components. The first is a handful of areas to focus on. And I …”

“The basic sort of strategic process, I would say is takes about eight to 12 weeks long. It's something that I think people often underestimate how long it takes and eventually end up taking a lot more time... And the way to justify the ROI on that is typically…”

“In two years, because that's the typical time horizon of a smaller strategy. It's like 18 months to 24 months.”

“And in the appendix, you include the full table that you generated on day two of your strategy sprint. You include the full table in the appendix, including the criteria. That's going to be really important because most people are going to ask, like, why did y…”

“And then, finally, you end with, you know, some kind of alignment questions. Like, hey, do these feel right? Like, you know, are there things we are missing? So that it creates that framework for alignment in the subsequent meetings.”

“It's important not to include like a roadmap as part of a strategy doc, because the strategy doc is meant to be separate from the roadmap. It's meant to be a companion to your roadmap.”

“There's different ways to do this, but the one that I feel is most effective is the roadshow where you have like about eight, eight to 10 people in each sort of session, so people feel more comfortable to ask questions. And it's more sort of like conversationa…”

“So I actually don't recommend thinking about resources in the strategy phase, because what you're saying is these are the areas of focus. And the resourcing question becomes more relevant from a roadmapping standpoint, because then you say, okay, what percenta…”

“So before, you know, it took weeks to write and revise and sharpen a long product strategy. Now I'm hanging out in my minivan talking to ChatGPT on my way to work.”

“Actually, if you have a real product strategy, a real one that everybody is aligned with, that you have got pre-alignment on, then a lot of this nonsense we tend to do with annual planning actually goes away.”

“I think when people say, I want someone that's strategic, what they're really saying is, I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product. So that's number one. An…”

“I typically like to start with the former, which is just like, what will the world move towards absent me? Just trying to pick a, you know, kind of bird's eye view of what I think is the trajectories are and trends and what's gonna happen. And then, yeah, you …”

“Cause if you don't do, if you only do incremental, then you'll end up random walking into a corner. And if you only do the longterm, you end up dreaming big and designing castles in the sky that are impossible.”

“In fact, you can build a whole strategy just on a data collection and fine tuning and your product will see tremendous success. Or you can delegate it and it will never happen.”

“If you have great strategy, perfect strategy, but poor execution, you don't win. Because your strategy never makes it to the market. And what's even worse is that you have learned nothing. You don't know whether it was your strategy that was wrong or whether i…”

“Almost all the product fights I've seen around at the Execution level for feature design or prioritization actually stem from misalignment at the strategic level.”

“Broadly speaking, listen to customers about their problems and generally ignore their recommendations around solution because they may not, building exactly what they want may not be the most elegant way to solve the problem.”

“And strategy to me, and hopefully we'll talk about strategy in a bit, it's one tiny slice. You do a strategy, but it's five percent of the work that you do. Yes, it's important because you want to get your strategy right and you need to pick the right products…”

“You should be able to walk all the way from your company's mission down to the individual priority on your team and see the logic chain and why you got there. And if anyone doesn't agree with it, they can call out where their disagreement lands, like in that l…”

“Typically speaking, when you're doing a strategy, you're doing it at a higher level. So I don't think, like, every product needs a strategy. Like, every feature doesn't need a strategy, for example. Like, you don't need to do this if you're, like, working on a…”

“If you're a startup, you need to invest a lot more in differentiation. And then over the years, I think you start to balance the books a bit.”

“Product strategy is probably the most difficult for candidates as they work through sort of their impact.”

“It's okay to then build another product that caters to the same customer or sell the same product to a different customer. What's really difficult is to build a different product for a different customer because that's just a new company.”

“The analytical approach will get you a lot of, like, doubles and triples. But I think the home runs really come from this, like, intuitive call for, like, how do I think the market is going to work? How do I think the world is going to work? And, like, let me …”

“More often than not, when I talked to teams and helped to debug that issue, What it came down to was that there wasn't a deep enough understanding of what the strategy is. So what is the framework that should actually inform that prioritization? And so oftenti…”

“Oftentimes when you talk about strategy in words alone, everyone takes away a different interpretation of that strategy. Whereas when you actually can show people wireframes of what the product will look like when that strategy Is implemented. It creates much …”

“Typically what happens is goals are almost the start of a strategic process rather than the end of it. A company will say, we need to increase our revenue by X. We need to increase our retention by Y. What's our strategy to be able to do that? And what I found…”

“I've met a lot of organizations that think most of their issues are in the training of their people. And 99% of the time I see that it's actually in the way that they're setting their goals and deploying their strategy. Because once you train those people. The…”

“Signs that there are no strategy. Teams are all working like dogs. Like they're working. 80 hours a week. I see this all the time. People are heads down, crunching, crunching, crunching, releasing, releasing, releasing, or sometimes not releasing, but they're …”

“Turns out that if the same company introduces new products to the existing audience, there's a much higher likelihood of success than if you introduce the same product to a new market. Because the market knowledge and the understanding of the needs of the peop…”

“Turns out that many cases, founders or CEOs, they've never actually articulated a clear product strategy.”