Join 📚 Felicity's Weekly Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Felicity's read, .
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
Make a list. Then, for each item on the list, ask, “How could we have learned that sooner?” The answers to these questions will help you improve your discovery process.
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
Three helpful lines of questioning to strengthen your scope:
When someone decides to buy and read your book, what are they trying to achieve or accomplish with it?
Why are they bothering?
After finishing it, what’s different in their life, work, or worldview?
That’s your book’s promise.
What does your ideal reader already know and believe? If they already believe in the importance of your topic, then you can skip (or hugely reduce) the sections attempting to convince them of its worth. Or if they already know the basics, then you can skip those.
Who is your book not for and what is it not doing? If you aren’t clear on who you’re leaving out, then you’ll end up writing yourself into rabbit holes, wasting time on narrow topics that only a small subset of your readers actually care about. Deciding who it isn’t for will allow you to clip those tangential branches.
Write Useful Books
Rob Fitzpatrick und Adam Rosen
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise