Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Vision & Mission
You should be able to walk all the way from your company's mission down to the individual priority on your team and see the logic chain and why you got there.
Great execution multiplied by a poor strategy is a waste of everyone's time. And because the strategy isn't clear, you can waste a lot of time executing years and years against something that was destined never to work.
Strategy isn't an ambitious goal, it's not an aspiration, it's not a set of financial outcomes. It is a coherent plan for how you going to apply your strengths in a leveraged way against a core important problem.
Strategy is really just an integrated set of choices that outline how you're going to win in whatever marketplace you choose. A good product strategy is going to answer questions like what's your winning aspiration? But maybe more importantly, where are you going to play? What are the markets you're going to go after? What are the segments of those markets? What are the personas in the segments of those markets? And then, how are you going to win with a target audience?
For strategy to be useful, it actually has to change our behavior as a team to create better customer outcomes.
The strategy is the logical plan that your company's going to use to bring that mission into being. And so it's got to be very specific, it's got to be very rigorous, and it's basically the approach of the plan that the company will use to make progress on achieving its mission.
All strategy is problem solving. It's a form of dealing with challenges. Strategy is always about dealing with an issue, a challenge, a problem.
Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.
When people say, 'I want someone that's strategic,' what they're really saying is, 'I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product.' So that's number one. And the second piece is, 'I want someone that's going to champion and be a change agent to do things that may be hard but actually best for the long-term interest of the product or company, even though those things are not going to be easy to execute on.'
I would try to ladder that up myself into a strategy and see if it was connected. And if it wasn't connected, that's telling me somebody's not formulating the strategy and deploying it down.
A good test is you go to all of your teams, and you ask them what they're doing and why, exactly what I was talking about before. And they all tell a similar story. We're working on X, Y, and Z because it goes into this initiative, and it causes this type of value for these customers, which, in return, is going to get us this business value.
We may not be right, but at least we are clear. Even if your strategy isn't right, you have a very clear idea of what was supposed to be happening.
Product teams don't do product strategy. Product leaders do product strategy. They need to do the product strategy.
When you focus on the problem, then the problem is going to serve as the north star of your journey. And when you have a north star, you're going to make less deviation from the course and increase the likelihood of being successful.
Even before you have product-market fit, it's worth thinking about strategy. What are the underlying characteristics that might tilt them towards the availability of power or not?
Three parts of strategy are your vision. This is your inspiring picture of what the future looks like. And then you've got your strategic framework. This is where you're saying, 'Here is the market we're going after. Here's what success looks like. And here are our big bets on what we think it takes to win that market.' And then the third part is the roadmap.
I think a good strategy is all about connecting the dots. Connecting the dots from this high level business goal of, 'We want to increase revenue by this much' to, 'This is the feature we're going to do.' And it might have many, many dots in between to help get people from one to the other.
The first rule of strategy is that if you write it down, then you can improve it. If it's not written down, it's hard to say if this PM is just not a good PM or if they're trying to apply the strategy that they've misunderstood.
I started noticing that there was a certain mystique and aura about product strategy. There was this perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not. It was almost as if there was a strategy gene you needed to be born with to be good at it.
A sure far way of identifying those is when you put on a bandaid and the bandaid falls. So, many organizations that are constantly just solving the same problem over and over again... you put the bandaid, but the bandaid doesn't work.
The first is defining the goal and defining the outcome and being really, really crystal clear on what does success look like. If you ask a company to do this, we'll know that this is challenging for humans.
Before I thought it was you do product market fit and then you do strategy, and if you try and put strategy before product market fit, it is not much you can do with it. That's wrong.
Most execution problems that I encounter in a high performing environment where everybody has the right intentions are actually not execution problems, they are either strategy problems or interpersonal problems or cultural problems.
I've seen a lot of director level people through my career who will try to work on strategy in a vacuum alone. They'll write a document and they'll be like, 'Okay, team. Here's what we're doing. Here's our strategy.' And it never goes well.
Bad strategy is a set of profit goals or performance goals. Goals are not strategy, they're ambitions. Ambitions are not a strategy.