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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
At lower levels, people’s objectives and key results might encompass close to a hundred percent of their work output. But managers had additional day-to-day responsibilities. If my objective is to grow a beautiful rose bush, I know without asking that you also want me to keep the lawn green. I doubt I ever had a key result that said, “Walk around to stay on top of employees’ morale.” We wrote down the things that needed special emphasis.
Measure What Matters
John Doerr
There is no formula for an effective product strategy. Such a strategy requires immersing in the insights, the data, the customers, the technology, and the industry trends and learnings; assimilating as much of the relevant information as possible; and then thinking through the various options. This is often referred to as product sense, but it's really the result of spending all this time immersed in the details.
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