Join 📚 Felicity's Weekly Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Felicity's read, .
Product evangelism is, as Guy Kawasaki put it years ago, “selling the dream.” It's helping people imagine the future and inspiring them to help create that future. ... If you're a product manager—especially at a large company—and you're not good at evangelism, there's a very strong chance that your product efforts will get derailed before they see the light of day. And even if product does manage to ship, it will likely go the way of thousands of other large company efforts and wither on the vine. We've talked about how important it is to have a team of missionaries, not mercenaries, and evangelism is a key responsibility to make this happen. The responsibility for this falls primarily on the product manager.
What Strategic Thinking Actually Looks Like
Strategic thinking means turning from the strategic process to the actual core questions:
**Instead of:** "What features should we build?"
**Ask:** "Which customer problems, if solved, would most directly contribute to our company's current priorities?"
**Instead of:** "Leadership hasn't told us who to focus on."
**Ask:** "Based on what we know about business goals, which segments would we focus on if we had to choose today?"
**Instead of:** "Which of [Helmer's 7 Powers](https://click.convertkit-mail2.com/8kuokvewzehoh29wkx5akhk6g2g99s3hxqgw2/owhkhwuwgz7do5tq/aHR0cHM6Ly83cG93ZXJzLmNvbS8=) is the right one to focus on?"
**Ask:** "How can we convince audiences to choose us over alternatives?"
Notice the pattern? Strategic thinking means making explicit choices within your context, even when that context is imperfect.
Why Strategic THINKING Matters More Than THE Strategy
Tim Herbig
Most businesses ask “how did the business do last week?” instead of “what did the customer experience last week?” If you ask the first question, you will have an implicit orientation towards internal, business-first metrics. Perhaps you might watch inventory turns, or track changes in free cash flow, or measure the performance of your warehouses. To be clear, these are all important metrics to track. But notice that if you ask “what did the customer experience last week?” you’ll measure slightly different things. And so it’s important to ask *both* questions, and to ask the ‘customer’ question *first* — it’s not for nothing that Amazon aims to be ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company.’
The Amazon Weekly Business Review
Commoncog
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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