#9 Product strategy and grand plans
Important message to Product leaders: Product Strategy is not a 20-page “grand plan” that you create out of a vision in an offsite. It’s a flexible, insights-based model for decision-making - crafted highly collaboratively with your teams and through trial and error.
Many product leaders see Product Strategy as a “grand plan" that will set the company’s direction for the next 5 years.
The classical linear and over-simplistic idea of Vision — > Strategy —> Execution.
Boards, who don’t understand Product, love this.
❌ But they miss the whole point.
✅ Strategy is messy, and it should feel like it.
Great companies get to brilliant product strategies by exploring multiple paths, experimenting, and continuously leveraging emerging insights to evolve that conviction and their initial vision. In fact, many times, the vision changes too.
And it’s as much top-down as bottom-up.
To leverage all the valuable insights that are emerging, product leaders must collaborate to continuously extract:
💡Context from company/corporate strategy (CEO, CFO, Board, etc.)
💡Insights, both qualitative and quantitative, from continuous discovery (product teams)
💡Insights from a technology perspective, both trends on what’s just now possible & existing constraints (CTO, engineering)
💡Insights from Sales and Marketing so that Product Strategy is not decoupled from Go-To-Market Strategy
👉 I’ve never met, or heard of, an outstanding product leader who isn’t a great facilitator and a great listener, yet able to make fast decisions to move quickly and try a bunch of things.
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Hey there 👋 I’m Afonso, Founder & Partner at Scandinavian Product Group. Thanks for reading :)