How to Make Excuses for Not Having a Product Strategy (and How to Stop Making Excuses)

0:02 product people they generally have a few excuses for not working on strategy most common excuses I don't have time for it I would love to work on strategy I would love to clarify our strategy I have it in my head and we are already operating according to our strategy the plans and goals reflect the strategy but I am so busy with operational day-to-day work I'm so busy with firefighting I'm so busy playing vacle that I don't have time to sit down

0:35 and articulate the strategy number one excuse of product people anywhere between a senior pm to a director level PM number one excuse of why there is no strategy second most common excuse is well you know what we don't have a company level strategy so how can they expect me to create a product strategy this is ridiculous the company keeps changing priorities all the time and here's the CEO asking me what our strategy is or here's the CEO saying he

1:03 or she's confused about whatever it is that was presented to them because it's not strategic enough but guess what they haven't produced a company level strategy or it's not clear what the company level strategy is right I'm almost literally using the words that many people have said to me in one-on ones people on my team but here's the reality for the second one the reality is that you do not need an entirely crisp company level strategy to set your

1:29 product strategy even if there were a very clear company level strategy it would only give you very tiny directional guidance you need to figure out on your own independent because you need to use your common sense and you need to make some assumptions how much does the company care about Revenue growth how much does the company care about this type of segment of users how much does the company care about active users even if they are free users

1:52 whatever the case might be use some of that common sense that's step number one step number two look for cues at all hands when you're see CEO is speaking or in some investor deck or in some company level update they send so even if there's not a company level strategy you can look for cues like this is a priority this is a priority this is a priority so take those cues take whatever you can and now I want you to

2:14 use that as one of the inputs for your product strategy while company level stuff is obviously important the main thing that you need is insights and creativity around your specific product your target segments the way you're going to differentiate in the market based on where all the competitors are positioned and to come up with interesting and usually correct ways to differentiate all of that the company level strategy is not going to help you in any sort of way and that is the

2:45 difficult part of strategy so don't use the company level strategy and the lack of it or the lack of clarity of it as an excuse because look the reality is working on strategy is very scary work the two main reasons why working on strategy is very scary work number one deep down we know we are not very good at strategy and number two we are afraid of how people will actually receive what we produce we're afraid of rejection and

3:08 because we are afraid of rejection just like an author going through writer's block what happens is we just invent excuses for why we are not doing it so recognize that fear once you recognize the fear accept that this is reality and then work to combat it but if you keep fooling yourself that no no I can do strategy I just don't have time or the company level strategy is not you're not going to get

3:40 anywhere