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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
        • Part II. The role of the product managr
          • Chapter 6. Bad product manager archetypes
          • Chapter 7. A great product manager
          • Chapter 8. The product manager career path
          • Chapter 9. Organising your teams
        • Part III. Strategy
          • icon picker
            Chapter 10. What is strategy?
          • Chapter 11. Strategic gaps
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
Book summaries
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Chapter 10. What is strategy?
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Chapter 10. What is strategy?

Good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. It’s a framework that helps you make decisions. Too often, people think of their product strategy as a document made up of a stakeholder’s wish list of features and detailed information on how those wishes should be accomplished. And they’re peppered with a ton of buzzwords like platform or innovation. Communicating the end state of a product is not inherently wrong. You should be striving toward a vision. However, it becomes dangerous when we commit to these visions and lofty feature sets without validation.
Question: “How do you know that this is the right thing to build?”
Many companies spend months in ”strategic planning” for the following year, creating comprehensive and detailed outlines of the tasks they will accomplish, the cost of those actions, and the revenue they will generate. This often is tied to the budgeting process, and teams must present business cases and timelines in order to secure funding for these projects.
Thinking of strategy as a plan is what gets us into the build trap. We keep adding new features to the list but have no way to evaluate whether they are the right features in the holistic context of our company. Stephen Bungay, one of the most respected leaders in strategy deployment and creation, has a different take on the concept of strategy. In his book on the subject, The Art of Action, he writes:
Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.
A good strategy should transcend the iterations of features, focusing more on the higher-level goals and vision. A good strategy should sustain an organization for years. If you are changing strategy yearly or monthly, without good reason from data or the market, you are treating your strategy as a plan rather than as a framework.
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