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I am describing a strategy as a design rather than as a plan or as a choice because I want to emphasize the issue of mutual adjustment. In design problems, where various elements must be arranged, adjusted, and coordinated, there can be sharply peaked gains to getting combinations right and sharp costs to getting them wrong. A good strategy coordinates policies across activities to focus the competitive punch.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt
It turns out, though, that, if teams’ goals are set in terms of changing customer behavior rather than shipping a set of features, they end up delivering superior results.
Sense and Respond
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
Four key Strategy takeaways
1. It’s a set of choices
2. You work backwards from a client-centric problem
3. It’s fundamentally creative
4. You seek to influence, but recognize you don’t control the Outcome
Planning
Planning, by contrast, is a fundamentally analytical and internal-centric approach to laying out a series of activities.
Planning involves sequencing how you will bring certain internal organizational resources (people, time, software, knowledge, money) to bear in ways you hope will accomplish a seemingly-sensible set of “initiatives.”
Outputs
The result of these planning activities are known as “Outputs” — lines of software code written, interfaces designed, software upgrades implemented, platforms “lifted and shifted.”
The important contrast with Strategy is to recognize *Planning is always within your control*. Perhaps this is what makes it preferred by many in business — there’s a great sense of comfort in focusing on only that which you can control.
If you have a Product Manager title, yet spend all your time in meetings with stakeholders, planning activities, and creating Roadmaps and budgets, you’re really a Project Manager.
Four key Planning takeaways:
1. It’s a sequence of activities
2. It’s Internal-centric
3. It’s fundamentally analytical
4. You are in full control the Outputs you create
Boost Your Product Management Skills Through Strategy, Planning, and OKRs
Michael Goitein
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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