Strategy from Scratch: Going from White Paper to Aligned Execution
If you are a product leader joining a new organization, or if you have recently been promoted within your organization and are tasked with creating a strategy, where should you start?
How do you align on what strategy is?
How do you collect the existing knowledge and past decisions and combine them with new trends and goals?
Besides years of product leadership experience, Tobias Freudenreich has helped many organizations and leaders create their product strategies and answer these questions. In this episode of 100 Product Strategies, we cover end-to-end how to create a strategy from scratch, with many options for the “it depends” parts of the process and many tips to unlock strategic thinking.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
My takeaways from this episode
Even if you are not required to build a strategy, you can detect the signs of a lack of one. For example, if OKRs take too long to create and align.
One way to navigate this space is using the Decision Stack. If you are trying to formulate a Strategy, first start by making sure there is a vision, and if not, create one.
Your first step should be collecting what “the organization” already knows. This means diagnosing insights with a very collaborative approach.
Strategy is not a one-off exercise. This mindset creates a lot of stress on product leaders (“I need to get it right because this is my only chance”). And it isn’t true. The strategy continuously evolves as you learn and execute.
Even for budgeting purposes, this “continuous” approach is very helpful because when you hit this yearly milestone, your strategy has been evolving continuously, and you will have more certainty and information.
As we heard from others, Tobi prefers the written narrative because it forces you to articulate decisions clearly and avoid hiding behind bullet points. Going a bit further, this seems to be a perfect scenario for product leaders that have a strategy in their heads and need to get it out, but new leaders may require more guidance or mental models.
The resulting narrative should cover the diagnosis, the value we want to create for the customers, the problems/opportunities we need to cover, and in which order.
We discussed an interesting approach to selection: you start with a written narrative that is a sort of draft. Your initial hypothesis. By discussing those, you will find where are the weak spots, and you can go back to gather more data (or adapt your strategy if you can’t find supporting material).
“The one product that product people need to sell in their organization is clarity” - great quote to keep in mind!
You test your strategy by telling the narrative and receiving feedback, and adapting it until it truly resonates across the organization. At the end of the process, it should be memorable and accessible.
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