Mastering Strategic Thinking: A Guide to create a Personalized Development Plan
How to Define, Track and Evaluate Your Growth in Complex Product Skills
👋 Hi! This article is related to what I’m working on: helping product people improve their skills in faster, easier, and more concrete ways. As part of that, I’m launching a *free app* called “Product Coach in your Pocket.” It’s currently invite-only, but I’m opening a wait list first for Product Direction subscribers. If it sounds interesting, sign-up and be among the first to test it!
“How can I be more strategic?” People ask me this question frequently. It is usually due to the fact that they received feedback about it or because they realized they needed the skill to grow into more senior roles.
What’s the problem with this question? It’s too ambiguous, too broad. It’s hard to assess how “strategic” you are and even harder to know if you are improving meaningfully by doing certain actions.
As I described in my latest article, our way out of this problem is to be more specific in what we mean by “being strategic” and what could be some expected attributes or behaviors. Let’s do that!
Assessing Product Direction
I will start by renaming “being strategic” to the skills I capture under the set of responsibilities of the Product Direction phase of our work. Let’s describe those skills and later dig deeper into attributes and behaviors to assess them.
My usual “important disclaimer”: I always try to keep things practical, so I will provide a concrete way to assess these skills. But it’s only a model! Depending on your context, needs, and situation, you should adapt this proposal.
Skills in Product Direction
Product Vision: the ability to facilitate the creation of a strong product vision and share it across the organization.
Strategic Selection: understanding the principles of strategic differentiation and advantages and using them to focus on the critical actions that will make a difference
Communication of vision and strategy: having good synthesis and storytelling, enabling the artifacts to be known, understood, and used for decision-making at all levels.
Strategic Planning: the ability to define a solid sequence that indicates what should be achieved first in the strategy and why (for example, through an outcomes-oriented roadmap), with a time horizon according to the maturity of your product.
Definition of strategic objectives: the ability to create good objectives, which allow for outcome-oriented management and continuous alignment with the strategy.
Expected Attributes and Behaviors - Product Vision
While the above description may help make the skills more specific, it can still be hard and ambiguous to know your proficiency with any of them.
That’s why we need a set of specific expectations for each of them.
Let’s do it for Product Vision:
The vision for your product is defined and meets the high-quality criteria: aligned to the company vision, tangible (storyboard, vision type, press release, etc.), ambitious but achievable.
The vision is focused on the user and has a differentiating component ("This is why users will choose us in the future")
The vision inspires and motivates, serves to retain and recruit talent (it can be shared in a few minutes in an interview and be understandable to an external person)
Ensures that the vision is known, understood, and used in the organization.
These attributes are easy to evaluate. You can use “Yes/No” or adapt to some Likert scale to complete an assessment.
Remember: you will need to define it for each skill.
Want to see it complete and as an actionable assessment? It will be part of the app “Coach in Your Pocket.” Join the waitlist to be among the first ones to test it.
Personalized development plan
A specific assessment is great because you can make better action plans to improve.
Keep in mind that to create one, you also need to consider things from your context:
B2C, B2B, B2B2C
Type of product (SaaS, eCommerce, Media, etc.)
Company and product maturity (Startup, SMB, Enterprise, etc.)
and whatever may be relevant to the skills you are working with.
Now let’s make it more concrete with an example.
Our hypothetical scenario is a recently promoted product leader in a B2C e-Commerce product.
As part of assessing the vision, they concluded that what they have lacks in many aspects:
It’s not challenging or futuristic. It’s mostly about improving the status quo
It’s not concrete. It’s mostly a phrase that doesn’t describe the future of the product.
Thus, it’s not very motivating or differentiated around the user value.
So on a hypothetical 1 to 5 scale, they score “1” in most of the desired attributes.
Now we have specific things we need to improve. Some of it will be related to gaining a better understanding (“What are the attributes of a good product vision?”), others would be around testing how to improve characteristics (“How can I make a more motivating vision?”).
So, let’s again make it tangible with an example action plan to help them have one that “meets high-quality Product Vision criteria.”
Our hypothetical recently promoted lead needs to improve some understanding, so some reading and examples will be required. They will also need to put it to the test, first with some scenarios and then with their own.
We can keep going with examples, but I assume you get the idea. These are very specific actions that can help you get concrete results fast.
Next Steps and Conclusion
With all this in place, you can start regular check-ins to see your progress and adapt the future next steps of your action plan.
You can imagine that doing it for all skills can be time-consuming, so you should select and focus on what are the ones more critical to progress in your career (“being strategic about your career growth” if we want to make it a bit meta).
But it definitely is a much better way to improve skills, compared to the “How can I be more strategic?” question that we started with.
What’s the role and interaction between people managers and the ones developing skills? Stay tuned for our next article, discussing how to team up to boost progress!