Hey product folks!
Today, we're starting our conversation about the fourth of the 5 Deadly Sins of Strategy: Selfishness.
Have you ever crafted a strategy you thought was brilliant, only to watch it slowly unravel? You're not alone. I've been there, and I'm about to share my own hard-learned lessons from the trenches of product management.
In the next newsletters, we'll explore:
- How the sin of selfishness sneaks into our strategies
- The warning signs you might be missing
- Battle-tested tactics to overcome this strategic pitfall
- My personal story of triumph over selfishness (spoiler: it wasn't pretty, but the lessons were invaluable)
Remember that strategy you poured your heart into? The one that had your team fired up and early wins rolling in? What if I told you it might be secretly sabotaging your success?
I've been there.
The Illusion of Success: My Journey into Strategic Selfishness
When I started as a product strategist at a new company, I was eager to make an impact. I crafted a bold strategy focused on empowering my team—getting them aligned and excited to execute. For a while, it worked. We moved quickly, shared big ideas, and celebrated early wins.
But soon, I noticed something unsettling. The energy faded. Deadlines slipped. Conversations with other teams felt strained, and requests for support were met with resistance. I couldn’t figure out why. After all, wasn’t this strategy designed to drive success?
The cracks became undeniable when a major project failed—spectacularly. I realized I had been so focused on what my team needed that I never considered what the rest of the company needed from us. Our strategy was a one-sided conversation, leaving other teams feeling excluded, unheard, and ultimately unmotivated to help.
Red Flags in Product Leadership: A Self-Reflection
This hit every pain point I now see in struggling product leaders:
- I had data but couldn’t make sense of what it meant for others.
- My goals weren’t actionable across the organization.
- Stakeholders nodded politely but didn’t trust me to get it right.
- Resistance and skepticism flourished because I hadn’t aligned their needs to mine.
Painful Truth
Even the best-intentioned strategies can become myopic. We get so focused on our team's needs that we forget we're part of a larger ecosystem. It's like throwing a party and forgetting to invite the guests - sure, you might have a great time, but you're missing the point.
The cost? Isolated teams, strained relationships, and strategies that look great on paper but fail in practice.
Selfishness in strategy occurs when the planning and execution are narrowly focused on the interests of a specific group within the organization, undermining collective effort and collaborative spirit.
So how do we fix this? The answer is simpler than you might think: we need to shift from monologue to dialogue. How should we do that?
Share your experiences in the comments. Have you ever fallen into the selfishness trap? How did you overcome it?
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