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Without clear (enabling) constraints, everybody will self-invent their own constraints from their limited team or department perspective to make the right decisions possible. And because everyone has their own constraints and agenda, they will be serving the insular perspective of their little snow globe and diminish each other’s autonomy.
Autonomy Is Overrated: Why Alignment Beats Autonomy
Maarten Dalmijn from Maarten’s Newsletter
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
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
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