Product Strategy

Strategy is a word used so loosely it has stopped meaning much. A list of annual goals gets called strategy. A set of initiatives no one could object to gets called strategy. The ambition to grow and to be the best gets called strategy. None of these is one. A strategy is a set of deliberate choices about where to play and what not to do, choices a competitor could not copy without giving up something of their own. Exclusion is the point. Where there are no trade-offs, there is no strategy, only a wish list.

This workshop teaches you how to make those excluding choices. Strategy here is treated as a cascade of connected decisions, from the market you choose, through how you intend to win, to the capabilities this demands. Each decision narrows the next. The program draws on three traditions. Strategic thinkers, for whom strategy is choice rather than aspiration: A.G. Lafley, Roger Martin, Richard Rumelt. Product thinkers, who explain why customers choose products and which problems deserve attention: Marty Cagan, Clayton Christensen. Systems thinking, which shows that a strategy ignored in structure and process will not survive contact with daily work: Peter Senge, W. Edwards Deming.

Over two days you work on your own strategy. You break it into decisions, test whether it makes real trade-offs, ask whether a competitor could reasonably choose the opposite, and check whether the organization can actually carry it. You leave with a product strategy built as a cascade of choices, ready to take to your board and to your teams.

Product Strategy settles which problems are worth solving, at the level of leaders and heads.