I’ve been a full-time Product Manager for a little over 1.5 years at this point. Like most people in the role, I didn’t formally learn how to PM. I picked it up on the fly and went deep when gaps in my skillset appeared. I’m still doing that, and the most recent gap I discovered was around developing and articulating a strategy in different product areas. I was recommended Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, to help out.

I’m happy to say it did the trick, and while I’m still putting learnings into practice, I’m feeling a lot more confident in the realm of strategy as it applies to product. While I'd highly recommend taking in the whole book, if you're looking for a taste, these are the quotes that especially stuck with me:

Quotes

  • The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.
  • A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them.
  • Like a quarterback whose only advice to teammates is “Let’s win,” bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vision, and values.
  • Rather, the term “strategy” should mean a cohesive response to an important challenge. Unlike a stand-alone decision or a goal, a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to a high-stakes challenge.
  • Many people assume that a strategy is a big-picture overall direction, divorced from any specific action. But defining strategy as broad concepts, thereby leaving out action, creates a wide chasm between “strategy” and “implementation.”
  • A good strategy includes a set of coherent actions. They are not “implementation” details; they are the punch in the strategy. A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component.
  • Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests. Of course, a leader can set goals and delegate to others the job of figuring out what to do. But that is not strategy.
  • A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. The guiding policy specifies the approach to dealing with the obstacles called out in the diagnosis. It is like a signpost, marking the direction forward but not defining the details of the trip. Coherent actions are feasible coordinated policies, resource commitments, and actions designed to carry out the guiding policy.
  • The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or, if you prefer, strength applied to the most promising opportunity.
  • Having a coherent strategy—one that coordinates policies and actions. A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength; it creates strength through the coherence of its design.
  • Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.
  • Half of what alert participants learn in a strategy exercise is to consider the competition even when no one tells you to do it in advance.
  • “Good,” I say, and point out to everyone that Wal-Mart’s policies fit together—the bar codes, the integrated logistics, the frequent just-in-time deliveries, the large stores with low inventory—they are complements to one another, forming an integrated design. This whole design—structure, policies, and actions—is coherent. Each part of the design is shaped and specialized to the others.
  • Their insight was framed in the language of business strategy: identify your strengths and weaknesses, assess the opportunities and risks (your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses), and build on your strengths. But the power of that strategy derived from their discovery of a different way of viewing competitive advantage—a shift from thinking about pure military capability to one of looking for ways to impose asymmetric costs on an opponent.
  • If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen
  • Importantly, opportunities, challenges, and changes don’t come along in nice annual packages. The need for true strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.
  • To help clarify this distinction it is helpful to use the word “goal” to express overall values and desires and to use the word “objective” to denote specific operational targets. Thus, the United States may have “goals” of freedom, justice, peace, security, and happiness. It is strategy which transforms these vague overall goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives—defeat the Taliban and rebuild a decaying infrastructure. A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives.
  • Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.
  • Thus, the objectives a good strategy sets should stand a good chance of being accomplished, given existing resources and competence. (See the discussion of proximate objectives in chapter 7.) By contrast, a blue-sky objective is usually a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge. It skips over the annoying fact that no one has a clue as to how to get there.
  • When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance. Unless leadership offers a theory of why things haven’t worked in the past, or why the challenge is difficult, it is hard to generate good strategy.
  • Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favor of others. When this hard work is not done, weak amorphous strategy is the result.
  • Grove recalls the turning point in 1985 when he gloomily asked Intel’s chairman, Gordon Moore, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore immediately replied, “He would get us out of memories.” Grove recalls that he went numb and then finally said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”
  • Strategies focus resources, energy, and attention on some objectives rather than others. Unless collective ruin is imminent, a change in strategy will make some people worse off. Hence, there will be powerful forces opposed to almost any change in strategy.
  • The core content of a strategy is a diagnosis of the situation at hand, the creation or identification of a guiding policy for dealing with the critical difficulties, and a set of coherent actions
  • A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.
  • An explicit diagnosis permits one to evaluate the rest of the strategy. Additionally, making the diagnosis an explicit element of the strategy allows the rest of the strategy to be revisited and changed as circumstances change.
  • A good guiding policy tackles the obstacles identified in the diagnosis by creating or drawing upon sources of advantage
  • A guiding policy creates advantage by anticipating the actions and reactions of others, by reducing the complexity and ambiguity in the situation, by exploiting the leverage inherent in concentrating effort on a pivotal or decisive aspect of the situation, and by creating policies and actions that are coherent, each building on the other rather than canceling one another out.
  • Many people call the guiding policy “the strategy” and stop there. This is a mistake. Strategy is about action, about doing something. The kernel of a strategy must contain action. It does not need to point to all the actions that will be taken as events unfold, but there must be enough clarity about action to bring concepts down to earth. To have punch, actions should coordinate and build upon one another, focusing organizational energy.
  • Good strategy and good organization lie in specializing on the right activities and imposing only the essential amount of coordination.
  • A good strategy draws power from focusing minds, energy, and action. That focus, channeled at the right moment onto a pivotal objective, can produce a cascade of favorable outcomes. I call this source of power leverage
  • To achieve leverage, the strategist must have insight into a pivot point that will magnify the effects of focused energy and resources.
  • A pivot point magnifies the effect of effort. It is a natural or created imbalance in a situation, a place where a relatively small adjustment can unleash much larger pent-up forces.
  • A “threshold effect” exists when there is a critical level of effort necessary to affect the system. Levels of effort below this threshold have little payoff. When there are threshold effects, it is prudent to limit objectives to those that can be affected by the resources at the strategist’s disposal.
  • One of a leader’s most powerful tools is the creation of a good proximate objective—one that is close enough at hand to be feasible. A proximate objective names a target that the organization can reasonably be expected to hit, even overwhelm.
  • Phyllis’s insight that “the engineers can’t work without a specification” applies to most organized human effort. Like the Surveyor design teams, every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting. An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem—one that is solvable. Many leaders fail badly at this responsibility, announcing ambitious goals without resolving a good chunk of ambiguity about the specific obstacles to be overcome. To take responsibility is more than a willingness to accept the blame. It is setting proximate objectives and handing the organization a problem it can actually solve.
  • Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be.
  • To concentrate on an objective—to make it a priority—necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care of
  • A system has a chain-link logic when its performance is limited by its weakest subunit, or “link.” When there is a weak link, a chain is not made stronger by strengthening the other links.
  • What kind of customer needs technical help to get their product into a can?” My question only evokes blank looks. I have lectured on how to tackle seemingly formless questions like this. The first trick is to replace general nouns with specific examples. I wait a moment, and then I do it for them, a concrete example of replacing the abstract with the concrete. “What about Coors, does it need technical assistance from can companies?”
  • A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work. Not a wild theory, but an educated judgment.
  • The problem with treating strategy as a crank-winding exercise is that systems of deduction and computation do not produce new interesting ideas, no matter how hard one winds the crank.
  • Making a list is a basic tool for overcoming our own cognitive limitations. The list itself counters forgetfulness. The act of making a list forces us to reflect on the relative urgency and importance of issues. And making a list of “things to do, now” rather than “things to worry about” forces us to resolve concerns into actions.
  • To guide your own thinking in strategy work, you must cultivate three essential skills or habits. First, you must have a variety of tools for fighting your own myopia and for guiding your own attention. Second, you must develop the ability to question your own judgment. If your reasoning cannot withstand a vigorous attack, your strategy cannot be expected to stand in the face of real competition. Third, you must cultivate the habit of making and recording judgments so that you can improve.
  • What issues do you expect to arise in the meeting? Who will take which position? Privately commit yourself in advance to some judgments about these issues, and you will have daily opportunities to learn, improve, and recalibrate your judgment.
  • Social herding presses us to think that everything is OK (or not OK) because everyone else is saying so. The inside view presses us to ignore the lessons of other times and other places, believing that our company, our nation, our new venture, or our era is different. It is important to push back against these biases. You can do this by paying attention to real-world data that refutes the echo-chamber chanting of the crowd—and by learning the lessons taught by history and by other people in other places.

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