Crafting a good strategy

Des Traynor

All startups go through three distinct phases – birth, growth, and survival. You start by making the product work, then you have to grow the product, and then, crucially, you have to focus on survival – on keeping it relevant

The practical examples of a burning platform are startling - and relevant

Michael Porter

A nice little visual as to why it pays to go deeper then generic labels when segmenting audiences.

A vital product strategy lesson that many PMs miss: your customer segmentation should be tailored to your product & its category. Generic axes (e.g. SMB vs enterprise) are usually not super-useful.

Jeff Patton

Minimum Viable Product is one of the most misunderstood, misused, and abused terms in contemporary software development. In this talk, Jeff will explain the misunderstandings made by thought leaders that lead to the confusion we all deal with today. You'll learn the counter-intuitive concepts hidden in the term and why really using them is so hard. You'll learn about techniques that will ultimately help you find smaller successful releases, test your ideas faster, develop higher quality software more predictably, and release more confidently than ever before. Because hidden in this nasty little term are clues that can help you do all that.

It's Jeff Patton, need we say more? Well if we did, we'd say that he is really one of the original product mindset coaches and advocates and his voice continues to be needed

Shreyas Doshi

Great Twitter thread by the one and only Shreyas on why products fail. Hint it's not because they are late.

Another gem of a thread by Shreyas Doshi. This one examines some of the reasons behind why products fail to gain traction and what biases Product Managers carry that contribute to less than great outcomes.

Shreyas Doshi

The fifth stages of strategy at a company

Shreyas lists out the 5 stages of strategy at a company

Porter

Understand how these 5 forces shape the market your product operates in: 1. Buyer bargaining power 2. Supplier bargaining power 3. Existing competitor rivalry 4. Threat of new entrants 5. Threat of substitute products

Another really good and short primer on a foundational strategy for products

Kent Beck

A product can be in one of three stages and as a product leaders its extremely important to understand which stage so the appropriate decision can be made.

A great framework to develop better decision-making and sensing as a product manager. It Will help with creating a good structure to understand problems and being better at communicating ideas and solutions

Hiten Shah & Patrick Campbell

A show tailored toward product pros—created by ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell and FYI's Hiten Shah—addressing the biggest tradeoffs SaaS companies make

A really great podcast where Hiten and Patrick break down product decisions by a couple of industry veterans. It's rare to have this access and see how these veterans assess other products.

Joan Magretta

Competitive advantage. The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter’s frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter’s name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts. Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter’s revolutionary thinking. Written with Porter’s full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this new book delivers fresh, clear examples to illustrate and update Porter’s ideas.

What is better than Michael Porter's treaty on strategy and is getting an explainer guide. This is a must-read for anyone wanting to deepen their strategic chops or wanting a refresher course

Shreyas Doshi

An incredible thread on product frameworks (think strategy) started by Shreyas, but with contributions from Marty Cagan and

A great thread because it mentions some of the most popular product management framework. Contributions from Gibbs and Cagan also amp up the value.

John Doerr

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth - and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress - to measure what mattered.

The Father of OKr, John Doerr treaty on how to measure performance is a must-have companion for strategy as it allows us to understand how to define and measure success.

Marty Cagan

Marty Cagan is at his best describing in great detail the terrible ways the vast majority of product teams work ie waterfall with a sprinkle of agile. But as he says fret not, as he does offer best practices to counter these bad habits.

Marty breaks down the issues that come with traditional prioritization and build practices, creating a Top-10 list of reasons why these ways of working cause failure

A.G. Lafley

How Strategy Really Works is a book about strategy, written by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management. The book covers the “transformation” of P&G under Lafley and the approach to strategy that informed it.

This summary article about the How Strategy Book has one of the clearest explaination of strategy i have seen in a long time.

Clay Christensen

This jobs to be done (JTBD) article is a classic now and written by the father of JTBD Clayton Christensen. In this article he describes that consumers hire products to do a job. Understanding is a fundamental to your companies success.

To innovate, you need to understand what jobs your customers are hiring your product for. Look beyond the obvious utility of your product. I like how JTBD emphasizes customer psychology & creative execution.

Garett Moon

When describing the difference between building a great product and an ordinary product, one of the most often used analogies pits a vitamin against a painkiller. The idea here is that painkillers fly off the shelves and vitamins don’t. Therefore, the general conclusion is that we should be focusing our effort on building painkillers and not vitamins.

A great little framework or at the very least analogy to understand the type of product you are building.

Shreyas Doshi

A basic product framework to help you develop your B2B product strategy. This will help answer the following 3 questions: 1) What customer segments are we targeting? 2) What differentiation will we create for them? 3) How will we reach these customers?

A B2B framework to help you create a product strategy.

Richard Rumelt

For Rumelt, the heart of good strategy is insight into the hidden power in any situation, and into an appropriate response - whether launching a new product, fighting a war or putting a man on the moon. Drawing on examples of the good and the bad from across all sectors and all ages, he shows how this insight can be cultivated with a wide variety of tools that lead to better thinking and better strategy, strategy that cuts through the hype and gets results.

Another must-read, according to Shreyas Doshi and countless others, when it comes to strategy. The great thing about this book is that it includes clear examples of what they consider good vs bad example of strategies

Ravi Mehta

Strategy is often misunderstood. The word "strategy" has been stretched to a point where it is almost devoid of meaning. Too often, the terms "vision," "mission," "strategy," "goals," and "roadmap" get conflated into a jumbled mess—leaving product leaders without the context they need to focus their work on the difficult task of moving the company forward.

A great read that tries to surface a unified theory of strategy and outcomes. Well worth the read if you are trying to understand how to get from mission to OKRs

Nathan Baugh

Steve Jobs said: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” Here’s the storytelling framework Jobs used (that you can too):

A nice rundown of the story telling framework Steve Jobs leveraged

Porter

Quick introduction to Porter's generic strategies which are a staple of MBA schools across the U.S.

Really good and short primer on strategy fundamentals

A.G. Lafley

How Strategy Really Works is a book about strategy, written by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management. The book covers the “transformation” of P&G under Lafley and the approach to strategy that informed it.

This is a great review of the book and really helps demystify strategy, an often misrepresented and misunderstood word in product

Clay Christensen

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights.

Clay Christensen's ideas and books are nothing short of mind blowing. The Father of Jobs to be done, this is a must on any respectable strategist enthusiast bookshelf, virtual or otherwise.

Jay Haynes

Imagine you are on a product team and your mission is to beat Apple and Google. How would you do it? We are excited to launch our JTBD YouTube channel today to help your product team use Jobs-to-be-Done innovation methods. Our first 15 minute video covers all the basics of JTBD and shows how you to beat Apple

Some of the most useful resources is when someone applies a framework to a real world use case. This resources looks at how we can use Jobs To Be Done to beat some world leading companies in their own space

Eran Arkin

A short post that covers the different types of goals a platform team can take on

There aren't a lot of resources at all when it come to PM'ing a platform team, even though it seems we live in the age of platforms. So a great resources if you are interested in platforms and product

Stewart Butterfield

The memo was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, on July 31st, 2013. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’

A rare and incredible valuable look at the inner workings of a startup about to launch a preview of their software. This is a master class on product development, on finding product market fit, often its about creating that market and not settling for optimization of what users want, but rather communicating a better way to do their job and therefore transform it.

Hamilton Helmer

A review of 7 Powers Book. It’s about competitive strategy, and more specifically moats. Moats fascinate me, and I know my understanding of them still has important deficiencies.

Never hurts to read a book recommended by Peter Thiel and Patrick Collison