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The consequences of indecisive strategy
Instead of treating product strategy as a monolith that you have to make more decisive all at once, consider it a cohesive machine with different dials to turn. In essence, you have to make choices across a few core questions that the strategy needs to answer:
Why do you want to act now, and what long-term ambitions drive your actions?
For whom do you want to solve problems, and what are these problems? Who else tries to solve that problem?
How do you plan to reach your audience? What makes them choose you over an alternative?
The answer to each of these questions represents a choice. And the specificity of each choice influences how decisive, and therefore practical, your product strategy will be.
Great Strategy Gives You Permission to Say "No"
Ravi Mehta
Don’t Jump Straight to Your Conclusions When preparing for a meeting with stakeholders, we tend to focus on our conclusions—our roadmap, our release plan, our prioritized backlog. More often than not, this is exactly what our stakeholders are asking us to share. Even in companies that espouse a focus on outcomes, we still tend to spend most of our time talking about outputs. The challenge with this approach is that our stakeholders often have their own conclusions. It’s easy to have an opinion about outputs. We all have our own preferences about how a product or service should work. When we anchor the conversation in the solution space, we encourage our stakeholders to share their own preferences. However, these preferences aren’t always grounded in good discovery. After all, it’s our job to do discovery, not our stakeholders’.
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
The leads of the product teams came together to organize the wish list of initiatives. They grouped the initiatives in terms of which themes each project supported and then stack-ranked them in terms of the contribution they believed each initiative would have—that is, they associated each initiative with the outcome they thought the work would create and showed how those outcomes would support the strategic goals expressed by leadership. They estimated head count for each initiative and sent the results to the finance experts, who correlated these plans with some of the major financial metrics they tracked and considered how the proposed work might impact results. When this was done, the plan was sent back up to the executives for review.
Sense and Respond
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
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