The agile manifesto tells us it is better to respond to change than following a plan.
Product strategy is a tool to do that.
The first thing you should ask yourself - do I have a product strategy?
Ask yourself: Is my product strategy making it safer to make decisions?
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The product strategy is an important artifact that drives team alignment. If one isn’t in place, it falls on the product manager to create one.
This isn’t to be confused with a roadmap. Let’s be very clear here - the roadmap is derived from the strategy, not the strategy itself. If you have no product strategy, you have no roadmap - at best, you have a release plan. You shouldn’t be surprised if you look back in a year and see no story tying your product releases together - without a strategy, you’ve spent a year reacting to shiny objects.
You can’t build a vision reacting to shiny objects.
Richard Rumelt says that strategy is visible as coordinated action imposed on a system - action that wouldn’t occur without the hand of strategy.
The second question is - is my strategy prescriptive - are we allow to change direction or is it a plan?
Put another way, strategy is designed to be an uncomfortable way to organize our resources to tackle hard, complex problems.
Plans don’t allow room for tension - being prescriptive leads to “my way or the highway” and often, teams will choose the highway. There is no strategy there.
That is why part of the job of the product manager, whether you’ve created the strategy or not, is to help create a high-trust environment that allows the team the freedom to change - and that includes building a place for pushback. I often define that as tension.
No tension, no strategy.
High-trust environments allow that tension to create better results - whether that’s securing your market share, or innovating to find something new.
So how do you do that?
Be as clear as possible about the strategy. What works? What doesn’t? What has changed?
Why? Why? Why?
Those questions help you create a narrative that can give the team a shared reality where that tension and safety exist. When team members feel that they’re not in danger of making mistakes, they feel more freedom to experiment and engage their creativity.
As a product manager, your job is to help the team make better decisions over time. Clear strategy allows the team to feel confident that they are - even when - and especially when, they feel good enough to argue about it.
For those interested in diving deeper into the topic - I offer office hours.
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