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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
        • icon picker
          Part III. Strategy
          • 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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Part III. Strategy
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A good strategy is not a plan; it’s a framework that helps you make decisions. Product strategy connects the vision and economic outcomes of the company back to product portfolio, individual product initiatives, and solution options for the teams. Strategy creation is the process of determining the direction of the company and developing the framework in which people make decisions. Strategies are created at each level and then deployed across the organization.
Executing better on the core mission is the way to win.
Gibson Biddle, Netflix strategy, 2007
Key strategies
Tactics
Metrics
Personalised
Ratings wizard, Netflix prize
Percentage of customers who rate ≥ 50 titles at 6 weeks; RMSE
Instant
Hub expansion, streaming
Percentage of disks delivered in one day; percentage of customers who watch ≥ 15 min/month
Margin-enhancing
Previously viewed, advertising, price & plan testing
Gross margin, LTV
Easy
Simplify and kill, progressive disclosure
Percentage of customers with ≥ 3 titles in queue on day one
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This combination of vision, goals, and key initiatives helps create a system in which Netflix can make decisions about its products—sometimes difficult decisions, like killing Roku. Netflix can change tactics or kill ideas because it commits itself not to the solutions they are building but rather to the outcomes these solutions produce. The company then enforces this mentality with a product strategy that is coherently aligned and decision enabling.
The powerful thing about a strategic framework like the one Netflix uses is that it forces you to think about the whole before zooming in on the details. When we’re developing software, we often think of the details and neglect the big picture. What feature can we build? How do we optimize that feature? When will it be delivered? When a company thinks only about the feature-level model, it loses track of the outcomes those features should produce. That is what lands you in the build trap.
Gibson Biddle, Netflix strategy, 2007
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