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A product strategy is your plan for creating the most value possible for your users and your company. And you do this by focusing your time on a small set of really high impact work, rather than diluting your efforts across all the different things you could potentially do.
Product Growth Newsletter
Akashi Gupta
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
To bridge this gap, we need to shift our focus. Yes, revenue and profit matter, but they're the result of customer behavior, not the cause. Instead of fixating solely on financial metrics, we need to ask:
1. What are our customers doing (or not doing) today?
2. What’s stopping them from being more successful and/or satisfied?
3. How might we deliver more/better/different value to drive the behaviors we want to see?
This approach requires a delicate balance. We can't ignore financial realities, but we also can't afford to sacrifice customer value in pursuit of short-term gains. Instead, we need to find creative ways to align customer needs with business goals.
Are Your C-Suite Metrics Ignoring What Customers Really Want?
Jeff Gothelf
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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