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Mehta: PM prioritization issues usually stem from undefined or misunderstood strategy

Ravi Mehta · How to build your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace) · Jan 19, 2023 · at 19:17

Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder and Product Director at Facebook) explains why product managers struggle to choose between competing product features.

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“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 oftentimes I was seeing difficulty prioritizing, as well as tactical issues surface in the day to day, and be able to be tracked back to pretty fundamental gaps in terms of an individual PM's understanding of strategy.”

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