Join 📚 Felicity's Weekly Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Felicity's read, .
Our new process: 1. Sit and chat about what we need to build, doing research with Deep Research as we go. 2. Have AI record everything and turn it into a spec. 3. Clean up the spec, adding any design requirements / other nuances. 4. Have Devin code it up. 5. QA, merge, (auto-)deploy to prod.
- [Sahil Lavingia](https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1887495898822787189?ref=ghuntley.com) (Founder of Gumroad)
The Future Belongs to Idea Guys Who Can Just Do Things
Geoffrey Huntley
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
If you’re only responsible for a part of the user experience, and not the whole thing, then you should think through the core benefits you can offer users (i.e. the value proposition from JTBD), and how you can reinforce these benefits in ways that competitors will find difficult to replicate.
This can take the format:
*[Imagined feature] might offer [core customer benefit], whilst being difficult to copy because [hard-to-copy superpower].*
**Example**
**Smart locks** on home dramatically improve guest experience (never lose key) and host safety (change code for every stay). This is difficult for competitors to copy because integrating hardware and software at scale and cross-platform is a huge task.
How to Write a Product Strategy in 1 Day / 1 Week / 1 Month
Aakash Gupta
...catch up on these, and many more highlights