100 Product Strategies Nacho Bassino

Your product vision is a position you aspire to have in the future: be the best solution for a problem a set of customers care about. That should drive your strategy. And I had the fortune of discussing positioning in detail with April, the biggest guru.

We started in a very controversial way: you should not base your strategy on your positioning! Wait, what?


Positioning is an exercise to formulate how your current product is the best for a specific customer need.


Strategy is not about your current product! It is about the value you want to create in the future.



Confusing those can get you in trouble.

But there is a catch. Product Strategy is about “how you will achieve your Product Vision.” However, if your vision potentially goes 3, 5, or 10 years into the future, your 6, 12, 18 months strategy is getting you closer to smaller milestones that still need to be differentiated and sellable!

These milestones have a “positioning thesis,” and your strategy needs to build a product that can deliver on the promise you aim to make.


Resources


AprilDunford.com


April’s newsletter and podcast


Obviously Awesome book


Sales Pitch book

Strategy and its role in connecting vision to execution is one of those n-dimensional problems that is hard to think about, let alone describe in a chart.

Fortunately, Martin Eriksson, the author of the decision stack, did just that. In his work, he describes a mental framework for navigating this challenging space and how you can think about connecting the decisions and artifacts of your vision, strategy, objectives, and opportunities.

In this episode, we navigated the hard questions about this mental model: common pitfalls, what to do as a PM if you don’t have a Vision or Strategy, what is the right level of strategy definition to enable empowered teams, and much more!

Find the Decision stack at: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/

Alignment is one of the hardest challenges of strategy. Conflictive goals, every department fighting for their priority, opposed world views and interpretations of how the future will unfold…

Luckily, Bruce McCarthy is an expert on the topic, and in this episode, he shares many tactics and tips on how to surface these conversations, use the right artifacts, and create alignment.


Resources


New Book: Aligned


ProductCulture.org


Follow Bruce on Linkedin / X

We all know Strategy is complex, cumbersome, and foggy. We strive to navigate and make strategic decisions in this environment, which usually leads to opinionated battles and stakeholder misalignment since we can all interpret the signals in different ways.

Remarkably, Dan Olsen, my guest in this episode, created simple tools and one-pagers that help you crystalize your thinking, find the opportunities that can truly make a difference, and have more meaningful conversations with stakeholders.

I’m amazed by how Dan brought complex situations down to their essence and explained how framing and structuring them can truly make these daunting challenges approachable and almost easy to resolve.

Important note: In a few moments, Dan shared a screen, so if you can watch while you listen, it could be helpful to get a visual reference (but it is not required to understand the concepts discussed).

You can find Dan at dan-olsen.com

Ready for some strategic wisdom? In this episode, I had the honor of delving into the depths of product strategy with Marty Cagan, a true luminary in the field. I asked the hardest questions and tried to explore topics beyond what you would normally find in Marty’s writing.

From the pitfalls of neglecting strategy to the necessity of ongoing adaptation, Marty's insights are a game-changer for product leaders.

We explored controversial topics, such as why strategy trumps discovery and the critical role of top-level input in shaping successful product strategies.

But that's not all—we also discuss the significance of understanding team scope, capabilities, and experience, the role of strategy in budget allocation, and the importance of seeking guidance from experienced mentors.

Every part of the episode has actionable advice, which Marty very eloquently shares.

Where to Find Marty’s Work:



svpg.com, where you can find the newsletter


Transformed is Marty’s newest book, and Empowered contains many topics we explored in the episode.

There are infinite ways to define strategy. Most involve finding a critical challenge and defining the big strokes of how to solve it.

This can be an intimidating task to any leader! Furthermore, if we spend the high effort involved in putting it together, and communicating it as our brilliant strategy for the next 12 months, chances are that the organization will not be super receptive to feedback, learning and iteration on this critical strategic bets.

This is a very complex and nuanced topic, but I had the fortune to speak with Jeff Gothelf, not only an expert in the topic, but someone who can articulate complex problems in simple ways.

We covered how Jeff defines a “lean” strategy, how connecting strategy to OKRs help you learn fast about your hypothesis, and how leaders should take a more humble (and smarter!) approach to explicitly calling out uncertainty and willingness to learn.

Where to find Jeff:


JeffGothelf.com, where you can find the newsletter


Linkedin


Jeff’s upcoming book, “Who does what by how much”