1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
🛠️ How does your Traffic Light Strategy look?
How does your Traffic Light Strategy look?​Dear Reader,​ Here’s the good news: Your Product Strategy doesn’t have to be 100% proven and watertight based on evidence before you can start sharing and working on it. Instead of trying to hide the assumptions present in your strategy, embrace them by using what I like to call the “Traffic Light Strategy.” This ties in with the idea that your Strategy consists of individual but coherent components that fill universal strategy patterns with life. Once articulated, you can color-code the individual components according to their degree of “unprovenness.”
Green - Let’s go. Your green strategy components are rock-solid foundations for decision-making. This applies to things you can fully control (like the definition of your Vision) or components that are really well-proven, like the choice of user segments based on the strong qualitative and quantitative signal you received. Yellow - Just enough Conviction. Don’t hold back on making decisions based on these components, but be clear about how proven these are. Maybe you have a hunch about the buyer segment you need to serve to reach your target user segment, but not more. Or your strategy metrics sort of tie in with where you want to go, but they lack specificity. Derisking these components shouldn’t be your first priority, but be aware of their somewhat shaky substance. Red - Beware the Assumption. Whether due to a lack of data or the high degree of HiPPO decisions, Some components making up your Product Strategy are just wild guesses. These can either be the assumed reasons why customers will pick you over an alternative (no, a nice UI isn’t a strong moat) or how you will reach users to deliver your value proposition. Making these components explicit has two advantages: First, you get your next Discovery priorities “for free.” Second, you avoid working on your strategy for too long in the ivory tower by being upfront about what has to be clarified further by doing the work instead of thinking about doing the work. Did you enjoy this one or have feedback? Do reply. It's motivating. I'm not a robot; I read and respond to every subscriber email I get (just ask around). If this newsletter isn't for you anymore, you can unsubscribe here. Thank you for Practicing Product, ​Tim​ How to Dive Deeper into Product StrategyLearn how I helped companies like Chrono24 and ausbildung.de hone their Product Strategy practices. I closely work with product organizations through workshops and coaching to introduce and adapt Product Strategy.
What did you think of this week's newsletter? As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I identify and share the patterns among better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #417 User Outcomes are Positively Flipped User Problems PUBLISHED Jul 17, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Last week, I mapped how OKRs connect to the layers of an Opportunity Solution Tree. But especially the Outcome layer deserves its own issue: turning a customer problem into a team-level Key Result. I first wrote about it in 2023, before I had a name for it. Since then, the positivity flip has become one of the most-used tools in my OKR and Discovery workshops, so...
Product Practice #416 How to Connect OKRs to OSTs PUBLISHED Jul 10, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help you measure strategic progress. OSTs (Opportunity Solution Trees) are a visual structure for connecting solution and problem spaces to business goals. Let me break down how the layers of an OST connect to the practices of OKR drafting and execution: Layer 1: The Outcome Teresa differentiates between business outcomes, product outcomes, traction metrics...
Product Practice #415 Accelerated Context and the Validation Sparring Partner PUBLISHED Jul 3, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Most of the AI conversation in product management right now is either describing doomsday scenarios, exaggerated improvements, or warning about what might go wrong. But I am more interested in what changes for product teams doing real work. When a product team adopts an AI tool, what specifically changes about their day? What benefit do they keep coming back for,...