Product Strategy
- There are reversible and irreversible product decisions – reversible are easy to iterate and tweak once in production, irreversible should be thought through during the product development lifecycle
- in good companies the strategy and the story are the same thing thus every strategy produced there is a story and the story of a company goes beyond quarterly and yearly goals and answers around the question "why" → why should I join the company? why should I be excited to work here? why should I buy its product? why is a world better off thanks to what this company produces? ... (Horowitz)
- great CEOs create exceptional strategies that allow them to continuously build internal intelligence to support good decision making (Horowitz)
Good strategy vs bad strategy
- in his book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt describes good strategy as having "coherence, coordinating actions, policies, and resources so as to accomplish an important end"
- he goes on to describe how many organisations don't have this, but instead have "multiple goals and initiatives that symbolise progress"
- to achieve real progress you need a strategy, and to achieve that, ruthlessly prioritising your activities is key
- put really simply, strategy is to get from where we are now (our problem statement) to where we want to be (our vision) - which makes Problem framing and Product Vision the two ends of a strategy