Not “Strategic” Enough? Here Are 5 Ways to 10X Your Strategy Game
Four key shifts leading to product strategy mastery, together with one involving a totally different strategy
Our first Upstream Full-Stack Journal of 2024!
If you have a moment, hit “Reply” and let me know your comments and feedback around specific areas of interest as I iterate through the choices in the upcoming editorial calendar.
In this edition, we’ll break down 5 actionable points to start the New Year shifting towards strategic mastery.
In this edition:
Of the five concrete ways for Product Managers to become strategic, four deal with Discovering and Delivering better products:
1: Look at everything as a client-centric problem
2: Understand the difference between Strategy and Planning
3: Get out of thinking you can design strategy by yourself
4: Learn how to gather and use Qualitative over Quantitative insights fueled by regular client touch points
And one that will challenge you to expand your Personal Strategy this year:
5: Manage the three levels of Execution, Impact, and Optics
Let’s dig in!
1: Shift to looking at everything as a client-centric problem
This is probably the main differentiating point in the practice of human-centered strategy.
Our goal is to shift from looking at our work from the point of view of
What we want to push out into the world
What we want to get out of it
In other words, optimizing for “Growth” or “Retention.”
Or worse, “Cost Reduction.”
And start by working backwards from the problems our clients are having.
In order to achieve the keystone mindset of a strategic PM, we need to understand our goal is to influence something we can never directly control:
Client Behavior
When we shift our focus from what we want to get out of our work, to making changes our clients will benefit from, we realize our goal is to influence client behavior to produce outcomes in ways that mean success for them, as well as for our business.
Because counterintuitively, when we’re focused on meeting our customers’ unmet needs, we’re forced to expand our thinking and innovate in ways that inevitably create the sustainable growth, retention, and effectiveness we seek.
How to increase your client-centricity
This one’s easy to say, and tough to do – get out and speak with your clients!
I would encourage you to read Teresa Torres’ excellent book “Continuous Discovery Habits,” as well as her regular articles on the ProductTalk.org blog.
2: Understand the difference between Strategy and Planning
In keeping with the theme of shifting from an internal to a client-centric focus, we bring our attention to planning.
Many new Product people believe it’s their job to start by planning, breaking down activities and steps that lead to a successful launch.
And planning has its place, and we’ll get to it, but first we have to understand the difference between Strategy and Planning.
Strategy vs. Planning
Strategy is a client-centric, creative, problem-solving framework focused on driving Outcomes through effectiveness.
It’s the heart of Product Management.
Planning, by contrast, is an internally-focused, analytical approach focused on delivering Outputs through efficiency.
It’s the heart of Project Management.
One is not necessarily better than the other — both are necessary.
The work still has to get planned & managed
Just because we don’t have a Project Manager working on our product, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for Project Management.
It’s just that we can’t start by thinking internally and analytically to create plans.
We need to think client-centrically and creatively to first design a set of strategic choices.
Only once we’re clear on the choices across the five boxes of our strategy, can we move forward to planning.
But before we can design truly great strategies, we’ll need to have the right team for the journey.
How to understand the differences between strategy and planning
If you’re a long-time subscriber here at Upstream, Full-Stack, you’ll be familiar with this.
But if you’re new, or haven’t seen this yet, this short 9-minute video will challenge everything you think you know about “strategy,” “planning,” and definitely “strategic planning.” (Which you may be surprised to learn is not a thing, btw.)
3: Understand you can’t design strategy by yourself
Many still have the image of the PM going off and spending days designing the “perfect” strategy and handing it off to the team for “execution.”
But that’s simply not how effective strategies are designed.
Because great strategy design is always a team sport.
And bringing the right people on the journey can make the difference between successful strategies that exceed customer and company goals, and wasted effort.
The core strategy team
At a minimum, our core strategy team will include our UX design lead, Tech Lead / Architect, and one or more people from our leadership team.
This core team will speak with clients and gather the necessary qualitative insights that will inform our starting strategic problem.
We’ll continue forward with this team throughout all 7 steps of the Strategy Choice Structuring Process.
The role of the broader organization in strategy
Working outwards from our core strategy group, we’ll also want to share our prototypes, strategic choice sets, and learnings with our Sponsors, Stakeholders, and Subject Matter Experts (“SMEs”), making them part of our strategy design process.
They can help the strategy team by asking the right probing questions, giving helpful organizational background, and connections to other key people to talk to.
This will be important both as we move through the strategy design process, as well as during the planning necessary to bring our strategy to life.
But we’ll need to be smart about making our clients part of our strategy design, as well.
How to learn more about the “social” aspects of strategy
One key concept is one that Marty Cagan has called the “Three Amigos,” and Teresa Torres calls The Product Trio. Key takeaway: The Product Trio will be your core Product Strategy team.
But it goes farther than that, and IDEO U has a great course called “Activating Strategy” as part of their “Human-Centered Strategy” certificate program which emphasizes the social and collaborative nature of winning strategy.
4: Learn how to gather and use Qualitative over Quantitative insights fueled by regular client touch points
If our goal is to influence client behavior, we’ll need to draw on a key foundation of Design Thinking: starting with empathy.
And the only way to develop empathy for and understanding of our client’s unmet needs is to maintain a series of regular client touchpoints.
By grounding our work through a cadence of short, generative interviews, we can make sure we’re always solving the right problems. This starts with the framing of our starting strategic problem and working backwards from designing the right set of choices to meet those needs.
Building and maintaining relationships with a core group of clients will allow us to test our assumptions as we develop and iterate through a series of prototypes. The faster we can rapidly prove or disprove our assumptions, the sooner we’ll know we’re on the right track before we code anything.
These same core customers can also help give us a head start as we roll out our strategy, in our pilot “go to market” phase.
How to get better at gathering Qualitative over Quantitative data
Again, the key is getting out and speaking to your clients.
And if you think this is only for small software teams, here’s a great article from Harvard Business Review on how speaking to clients led directly to McDonald’s recent brand turnaround.
5: Manage the three lenses of Execution, Impact, and Optics
Through shifts 1–4, we’ve started to develop the core foundations of great strategy design.
But before we can make progress in our career, we’ll need to take a step back and understand how we’ve been approaching our work at a more holistic level.
There may be key areas of our role we’ve been emphasizing at the expense of others.
Any progress will require us to grow in areas we may be overlooking.
The 3 Levels
Product thought leader Shreyas Doshi has evolved a powerful model for understanding the three levels across which we need to manage our work:
https://x.com/shreyas/status/1427116992536801280
Our default focus
Many PMs who work their way up from Business Analyst to Associate PM to PM to Senior PM, tend to move from pure Execution focus to an Impact focus, moving from the details of implementation to more mission-critical work.
Ironically, when PMs are described as not “strategic” enough, I’ve found more often than not it really means they’re just unskilled at the Optics level.
Ironically, when PMs are described as not “strategic” enough, I’ve found more often than not it really means they’re just unskilled at the Optics level.
The way to improve here involves learning how to write effectively, as well as speak crisply, clearly, and compellingly about our work, especially with senior leadership.
This will allow us to craft the right story around our Execution achievements, and allow us to expand to increasingly meaningful work that provides Impact for our clients and our organization.
Upping our Optics
Books on copywriting or an online writing cohort can radically boost our writing skills.
And joining a Toastmasters club and getting regular, supportive mentoring and feedback can radically improve our ability to speak in a clear, communicative, and captivating manner.
As a final note, Optics also involves making a sincere effort to invest in genuine relationships, both vertically and horizontally. Our goal isn’t to do this in a transactional way, but to honestly care about and be interested in the other person.
Together, these three keys of written & spoke communication, and investing in your “community” at work, will provide powerful keys in improving our Optics.
This will open the door to being considered for increasingly senior roles with greater Impact.
Takeaways & TL;dr:
When we learn and start working through the five key strategic shifts:
1: Look at everything as a client-centric problem
2: Understand the difference between Strategy and Planning
3: Get out of thinking you can design strategy by yourself
4: Learn how to gather and use Qualitative over Quantitative insights fueled by regular client touch points
5: Manage the three levels of Execution, Impact, and Optics
Keep these 5 things front and center, working on them regularly as part of our daily habits.
By regularly improving them by just 1%, we can reap the benefits of compound interest.
Over time, this will lay the foundation for us to truly realize our potential as linchpin “strategic” product people.
References
Strategic Choice-Making for Product Managers
The “Playing to Win” framework:
https://michaelgoitein.com/the-playing-to-win-framework-a-global-strategy-experts-proven-method/
The 7-Step Strategy Choice Structuring Process
https://michaelgoitein.com/the-playing-to-win-framework-part-ii-the-strategy-process-map/
The Strategy Choice Cascade
https://michaelgoitein.com/the-playing-to-win-framework-part-iii-the-strategy-choice-cascade/
Tying together Strategy, Planning, and OKRs for Product Managers
https://michaelgoitein.com/boost-your-product-management-skills-through-strategy-planning-and-okrs/
Starting with a Plan is wrecking your Product
Generative Interviewing
That’s it for this edition!
Join me next time as we continue to go upstream to make you more effective going from idea to execution via strategy, Product Management, and the full end-to-end delivery stack.