Your product vision is a position you aspire to have in the future: be the best solution for a problem a set of customers care about. That should drive your strategy. And I had the fortune of discussing positioning in detail with April, the biggest guru.

We started in a very controversial way: you should not base your strategy on your positioning! Wait, what?

• Positioning is an exercise to formulate how your current product is the best for a specific customer need.

• Strategy is not about your current product! It is about the value you want to create in the future.

Confusing those can get you in trouble.

But there is a catch. Product Strategy is about “how you will achieve your Product Vision.” However, if your vision potentially goes 3, 5, or 10 years into the future, your 6, 12, 18 months strategy is getting you closer to smaller milestones that still need to be differentiated and sellable!

These milestones have a “positioning thesis,” and your strategy needs to build a product that can deliver on the promise you aim to make.

Resources

• AprilDunford.com

• April’s newsletter and podcast

• Obviously Awesome book

• Sales Pitch book

Strategy and its role in connecting vision to execution is one of those n-dimensional problems that is hard to think about, let alone describe in a chart.

Fortunately, Martin Eriksson, the author of the decision stack, did just that. In his work, he describes a mental framework for navigating this challenging space and how you can think about connecting the decisions and artifacts of your vision, strategy, objectives, and opportunities.

In this episode, we navigated the hard questions about this mental model: common pitfalls, what to do as a PM if you don’t have a Vision or Strategy, what is the right level of strategy definition to enable empowered teams, and much more!

Find the Decision stack at: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/

Alignment is one of the hardest challenges of strategy. Conflictive goals, every department fighting for their priority, opposed world views and interpretations of how the future will unfold…

Luckily, Bruce McCarthy is an expert on the topic, and in this episode, he shares many tactics and tips on how to surface these conversations, use the right artifacts, and create alignment.

Resources

• New Book: Aligned

• ProductCulture.org

• Follow Bruce on Linkedin / X