Defining Product Strategy

"There are three parts to a strategy: (1) vision, (2) strategic framework, and (3) roadmap. You can get started with whichever one calls to you:"

"Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product—the rest is noise."

"A product succeeds because it solves a problem for people. This sounds very basic, but it is the single most important thing to understand about building good products. The first step in building something new is understanding what problem you want to solve, and for whom."

"Even the most genius of strategies will fail if communicated badly. To influence day-to-day activities, strategies need to be simple enough for leaders at every level of the organization to understand, communicate, and remember — a strategy that gathers dust on a shelf is nothing more than an expensive bookend."

"Our team then dove into each of these tracks — developing hypotheses, ideating on solutions, and launching dozens of experiments to make steady progress towards our goal. Every quarter or so, we re-evaluated the opportunities, shifted our strategy, and got to work."

"Once you align on your Mission and Vision you can focus on your Strategy — which then informs the Goals and Roadmap: Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap"

"To write out a strategy, I usually start with this company strategy template or a team strategy template, and then roughly follow The Minto Pyramid Principle: 1. What is the current situation? 2. What is the complication? 3. What is the solution? 4. How do we achieve this solution?"

"Step 1: INSIGHT: Come up with your idea. Step 2: AUDIENCE: Identify your super-specific who. Step 3: HOOK: Craft your pitch. Step 4: REACH: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale. Step 5: RETAIN: Iterate until enough people stick around. Step 6: SCALE: Build your growth engine."

"The Foundation Sprint is a two-day workshop for a team at the beginning of a big project. On the morning of day one, you’ll define the basics of your project; then, in the afternoon, you’ll craft differentiation to help you stand out from the competition. On day two, you’ll evaluate multiple options and choose an approach to your project."

"The Founding Hypothesis is a handy Mad Libs–style sentence that we can fill in to understand and test a team’s strategy. Yes, the Founding Hypothesis is simple, but that’s exactly what makes it so powerful."

"On day two, you’ll evaluate multiple options and choose an approach to your project. By the end, you’ll have a Founding Hypothesis: a clear statement of what you believe that can be proved (or disproved) with Design Sprints."

"Horizontal products win if a specific audience encounters enough use cases that they want one tool to address them all. Figma won because it captured a much larger portion of an app designer’s workflow than Sketch or Illustrator did. Notion won because it addressed the vast array of documentation tasks faced by product managers in San Francisco."

"Normally you start with your mission—why does your team (or company) even exist? What are you trying to achieve? What is your purpose?"

"Your strategy is simply your plan to achieve your vision—your plan to win. a strategy is essentially a short description of your plan, with 3 to 5 concrete investments that, if you get right, will bring you closer to winning (i.e. achieving your vision)."

"Strategy: Get into casino cage → get through doors with code that changes every 12 hours → Get into an elevator that requires fingerprints and vocal verification → Get past two guards with Uzis → Get into the vault that all three casinos share → Steal money → Get away"

"The wedge metaphor to me is most useful in making sure you’re not a blunt instrument trying to chop into a market by being everything for everyone, but instead the sharp blade with extraordinary focus on a specific persona/use case to start."

"A wedge seems most essential when you’re going after a market that is (1) entrenched or (2) crowded. When it’s hard to break in head-on."

"Wedge selection should be very intentional. Don’t just build for the first customer persona you think of or the closest city to where you live. Build for the group that has the most acute pain point, or the highest willingness to pay, or the fastest sales cycles."

"Liquidity is the name of the game with marketplaces. It’s faster to build liquidity in more narrowly defined market segments. Building density in one subvertical helps a team more effectively build a playbook before expanding to the next."

"Developing a roadmap without a strategy is like heading into battle without a plan. Your prioritization needs to be driven by your Goals/KPIs, which come from your Strategy, which are rooted in your Mission/Vision. It’s all connected 🌀"

"Day 2 of the strategy sprint is the single most important day of the whole 8-to-12-week strategy process. This is where the actual strategic pillars are selected."

"Key leaders like founders/CEO have really important nuggets of wisdom tucked away in their back pockets, which structured leadership interviews can unearth. And I’ve found that these leaders typically enjoy engaging in these kinds of conversations as a creative outlet, and a channel for their desires and frustrations."

"A good strategy articulation typically includes three components: 3 to 5 areas for the company or the team to focus on, which we will henceforth refer to as strategic pillars; Several areas that should explicitly not be the focus; A clear set of explanations for why these choices were made."

"Product strategy sits in between the mission and vision and the plan, either at the company level or at the team level. At the company level, the mission and vision is typically articulated by the founders/CEO and tends to be durable over time. The plan or roadmap is basically an ordered list of projects based on some notion of prioritization and sequence of delivery. There is a steep drop in elevation between the mission/vision and the plan, and strategy occupies this large void."

"Similarly, when crafting your product strategy, my favorite product 1-Pager template follows the SCR format fairly directly (Situation = Description, Complication = Problem, and Resolution = What):"

"Shipping isn’t success. Success is shipping work that (1) has meaningful impact on the business, (2) has high ROI relative to other opportunities, and (3) moves you closer to achieving your strategy. Teams become factories when they lack a strategy."

"B2C subscription businesses come in many shapes and sizes, but you can roughly break them down into three categories: Content, Software, and Physical Goods."

"We waited too long to expand into dog walking, and into other services for the marketplace. One specific downside of that is Wag existing. It’s exactly the same demand base."

"We made a critical decision the helped early on, but then bit us in the ass later. The only way you could be listed on our site is if you used us fully — you had to use us for internal bookings and online bookings."