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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
The output of the product strategy is a set of business or customer problems to solve (team objectives) that the leaders will then need to assign to specific product teams. The product strategy is where strong product leaders distinguish themselves. They decide what the focus will be and what it won't be, and sometimes these decisions are not popular with other leaders. Strong product leaders live and breathe the data and insights about the product and constantly seek the points of leverage that power the product strategy. A strong product strategy can help a small organization outperform much larger competitors.
And the most visible and profound change is typically the move from funding, building and shipping features and projects on specific dates, to funding, building and shipping products to achieve the necessary outcomes.
Today, this is commonly referred to as moving from output to outcomes. I also like to explain this as moving from time-to-market to time-to-money.
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