Product Strategy

Product Strategy

Strategy Formula

Product Strategy = Delight customers + Hard to copy + Margin enhancing

Three questions:

1. Delight: Are we making customers happier in a meaningful way?
2. Hard to copy: Is there a sustainable competitive advantage?
3. Margin: Are we improving unit economics?

Three Levels of Strategy

1. Direction — What product should we build?
2. Prioritization — What should we build next?
3. Execution — How do we build it?

Key insight: Most "execution problems" are actually strategy problems.

Pre-mortem

Before starting any initiative, ask:

"If this fails, what are the most likely reasons?"

This surfaces risks early and prevents sunk cost bias.

Prioritization Frameworks

ICE (Sean Ellis)

• Impact
• Confidence
• Ease
• Score each factor 1-10, multiply, rank

RICE

• Reach
• Impact
• Confidence
• Effort

Will/Won't/Won't List

Define explicitly:

• What you WILL do
• What you WON'T do (and why)
• What you WON'T do NOW (defer)

Decision Principles

• "If everyone agrees, you didn't add value."
• "Speed to value > Feature count."
• "Underdo your competition."
• "Don't use execution to fix strategy."

Time Allocation

• 20% — Thinking, strategy, research
• 80% — Execution

Warning: "Strategic laziness covered by tactical勤奋" = Bad

Sources

• Gibson Biddle (Netflix)
• Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Google)
• Lenny's Podcast