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

We all know Strategy is complex, cumbersome, and foggy. We strive to navigate and make strategic decisions in this environment, which usually leads to opinionated battles and stakeholder misalignment since we can all interpret the signals in different ways. Remarkably, Dan Olsen, my guest in this episode, created simple tools and one-pagers that help you crystalize your thinking, find the opportunities that can truly make a difference, and have more meaningful conversations with...

Ready for some strategic wisdom? In this episode, I had the honor of delving into the depths of product strategy with Marty Cagan, a true luminary in the field. I asked the hardest questions and tried to explore topics beyond what you would normally find in Marty’s writing. From the pitfalls of neglecting strategy to the necessity of ongoing adaptation, Marty's insights are a game-changer for product leaders. We explored controversial topics, such as why strategy trumps discovery and the...

There are infinite ways to define strategy. Most involve finding a critical challenge and defining the big strokes of how to solve it. This can be an intimidating task to any leader! Furthermore, if we spend the high effort involved in putting it together, and communicating it as our brilliant strategy for the next 12 months, chances are that the organization will not be super receptive to feedback, learning and iteration on this critical strategic bets. This is a very complex and nuanced...

Strategy is messy. It’s happening simoulteaneously at different levels, with different lenses, different time horizons, among many other stakes at play. My guest in this episode, John Cutler, has a remarkable ability to bridge the world of theories with what we actually face down the road when executing. Together, we unravel the intricacies of the 'messy middle,' that challenging space between lofty company aspirations and the day-to-day grind of teams. The conversation was extremely...

We often talk about strategy diagnosis and insights as if they were something we go through in isolation when defining the direction of our product. However, those insights come (or should come) from our discovery efforts. Unfortunately, this connection is often missing, and to be fair, it can be pretty messy. That’s why I had a wonderful conversation with Teresa Torres, one of the top voices on product discovery, and we went deep into the hard questions of connecting these two worlds: ...

While strategy is always difficult, large corporations add complexities into the mix: dependencies, politics, complex budgeting processes, and more. In this episode, I spoke with Phil Hornby, a Product Coach with vast experience in different contexts, and we discussed his experience with the product strategy for a business unit within Continental, a large German automotive company. Phil shared great examples and tips on how to gain alignment, deal with politics and dependencies, handle...

Few elements wield as much influence over a company's fate as the art and science of monetization. And I know from personal experience that this is a hard-to-master topic for product people. Consider the multiple complex questions that may arise: do we go for a subscription or pay-as-you-go model? How many tiers of subscriptions? What’s the right price? Do we include ads? How frequent? How intrusive? At the core of all these questions is the value exchange: how much are users willing to pay...

Frequently, strategies are about finding avenues for growth. We often think about that as directly impacting the core company metrics. But when developing platforms that allow integrations to the core product, the strategy is more complex: we enable entry points that enable 3rd party developers to solve “edge but valuable” use cases adopted by users who *only then* increase the core product metrics. In this conversation with Frank Harris, VP of Platform Product at Slack, we discussed how...

When doing expansion strategies, we need to come up with insights about what markets we can penetrate and win. Combining that with product-led growth thinking, you can review the pull from existing users to come up with underserved needs and sizing opportunities. That can be easier said that done, but in this episode of 100 Product Strategies, Markiyan Matsekh, ex-Director of Product at Vimeo, shared the steps he took to conquer the enterprise segment. Besides the very insightful strategy...

Why do we create strategies? To focus on the most critical problems or opportunities which will help us get closer to our vision. And the first step of putting that focus into action is concentrating our resources there. This is easier said than done, and the complexity becomes more evident when we have more than one product, at different maturity stages, and with very different strategic paths ahead of them. While this problem can fall into the Portfolio Strategy space for larger...

Many of us work in complex environments where the set of opportunities we can potentially pursue to impact a desired outcome is very wide. As you can imagine, at Google, you can find both very complex and large environments, and opportunities to innovate in multiple directions. In this episode, I spoke with Stefan Schnabl, who works in the education space at Google, with the potential to cover very different audiences, problems, and solutions. He shared many tips and stories, from how they...

Most companies' strategies are “roadmap on steroids”: large plans of multiple big ideas to implement, which usually have not been validated. To differentiate and create thoughtful and successful strategies, you must start with evidence-based insights. But how do we collect that evidence? How do we gain confidence and compare opportunities? After selecting opportunities, how do we keep validating the strategy through the multiple solution ideas we may pursue? I had the pleasure of...

TL;DR: Platforms are everywhere, and their challenges are hard to understand and impact even non-platform products. Thor is an expert who shared his learnings building the Miro Marketplace and, previously, the Google Maps Developer’s Platform. Many times when discussing strategy, we focus on the most typical scenarios: consumer apps, B2B SaaS, media, etcetera. But platforms are continuously emerging, and even if you are not working on one, they are probably impacting you: app stores,...

Startup challenges change as they grow. The focus and needs of the product strategy also change, as the company moves through funding rounds and product maturity stages. What are the critical factors leaders should consider at each stage? How does collaboration among different areas evolve? What’s the impact of funding rounds on focus areas? In this episode of 100 Product Strategies, we spoke with Lily Smith, CPO at BBC Maestro and co-host of the Product Experience podcast, who has been...

We all love good strategy stories. What is better than good strategy stories? The ones that are simple and that we can derive lessons to apply elsewhere. In this episode, Saeed Khan shares his stories and thoughts collected over 25 years of product management experience. Different from other episodes, in this one, we started with the core elements of strategy, which Saeed simplifies as building hypotheses on how you can achieve certain objectives. Making some mapping to the Playing to Win...

Over the last 18 months, I have interviewed 29 product leaders, inquiring about their strategy formulation and challenges. We covered different industries, customer types, company scales, product types, and geographies. As I shared in the podcast intro, after writing Product Direction, I felt we didn’t have enough examples out there of how people do strategy work and what challenges they face. My secret project all along was to compile a list of different examples and also tag them...

If you create a great strategy and communicate it properly, and have good people to execute it, what can possibly go wrong?  Well, as you can imagine, multiple layers of complexities can get in the way.  In this episode, Randy shared two stories where different company intricacies made good strategies fail. The learning will help you view your strategy process from a wider perspective, and help you avoid these pitfalls. Randy is the author of What Do We Do Now?, host of The Product...

The world is full of hard problems, which led to opportunities to tackle them using groundbreaking innovative products.  Bigger companies are in an interesting position: they can invest in exploring new problems related to their core mission, but which can be years ahead in terms of helping them expand their business. Yet, for many reasons, they fail to innovate. And the first problem is how they strategize in this context. Luckily, in this episode, Andrew Skotzko shares a great story about...

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 has helped many organizations and leaders create their product strategies and answer these questions. In this...

How do you navigate the intricate balance between the rapid-paced weekly sprints of agile software development and the long-term planning cycles inherent in hardware components? In this episode, I spoke with Dominik Busching -Head of Product at Tado- and unveiled how they create innovative solutions that not only enhance user satisfaction but also contribute to the sustainable transformation of the energy industry. In this episode, we talked about: What are the challenges of Strategy...

In this episode, I spoke with Nils Janse, CEO and co-founder of Delibr, a tool to help Product Managers organize and structure decision-making across the entire product flow. We covered amazing insights, going from crafting a value proposition, followed by how to select the focus areas and how to be stubborn on the vision while flexible on the execution based on customer feedback. Pay special attention to Nils’ definition of the “three interacting trees” (minute 20 approx). He uses three...

The role of strategy in pre-market-fit startups can sometimes be unclear. How would we focus or double down on a path when we have so much uncertainty and risk? We would likely pivot many times before finding what we need to double down on, and doing a deep strategic exercise is a waste of time.  But when we neglect strategy, the consequences can be worse. Not having clarity on what we are trying to achieve and testing random things has crashed many startups. Luckily, there is a middle...

Playing to Win is a strong framework, but it can create some confusion during its implementation, like making your winning aspiration “be the #1 of X”. I spoke with Stuart Congdon, a strategy veteran, who has used it many times and walked us through a complete example with my typical annoying questions to get to the root of their strategic decisions! In this episode, we talked about: A real implementation of the Play to win framework Using Customer Journey and Service Blueprint to...