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 to Stop Saying Yes to Everything in Your Product Strategy
How to Stop Saying Yes to Everything in Your Product StrategyDear Reader, Three weeks ago, I shared with you Why you don’t get Value from your Product Strategy. Today, we're going to talk about the How. Making your Product Strategy decisive means making choices that help answer "What does this allow us to say no to?" Imagine a b2b SaaS Analytics software called Analytico. If your Product Strategy says you target "Companies building Digital Products," every stakeholder conversation will go like this: "We need customizable dashboards to meet a company's branding." - "That sounds reasonable." "We need a data import from Shopify" - "I guess we could do that." "We need native Android and iOS SDKs" - "Sure, companies might need that." You don't have a basis for saying no to any of these. But if you break down your audience into comically narrow segments, you shift the conversation. You can break "Companies building Digital Products" down by many criteria: Business model, industry, revenue, number of employees, geography, technology used, etc. This might lead you to a segment like "European Web-first eCommerce companies making 10-50M€ per Year in Revenue." Nobody knows exactly if this is the right segment. It's an informed assumption. But at least this choice shifts the priorities: "We need customizable dashboards to meet a company's branding." - "No, our customers are scrappy and don't represent their data to the outside." "We need a data import from Shopify" - "Yes, 75% of our target customers run on Shopify." "We need native Android and iOS SDKs." - "No, there are only 100 native eCommerce apps in the European App Store, and none of them fall within our target segment." Other possible tentpoles you can establish to make your Strategy conversation more decisive are:
Next week, we talk about how Analytico can ensure its Product Strategy is Layered. Did you enjoy this one or have feedback? Let me know and reply. Hearing from you is what motivates me whenever I sit down to write this newsletter. If this newsletter isn't for you anymore, you can unsubscribe here. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim Good News!There are a few tickets available for my 1-day Product Strategy workshop in Cologne on November 14. Learn how to navigate the practices of Product Strategy with confidence.
What did you think of this week's newsletter? As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on 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 #419 Decision Journaling YourWay to Product Sense PUBLISHED Jul 31, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, I know, I know. You probably can't hear the term product sense anymore (welcome to the club). But I recently arrived at a non-thought-leader-y practical angle for cultivating it. "Product Sense is the ability to usually make correct product decisions, both macro & micro, even in the face of major ambiguity"- Shreyas Doshi In a recent client workshop, the topic of product...
Product Practice #418 The Essence of Every Mapping Technique PUBLISHED Jul 24, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Ways we can work together 1️⃣ Order my book: Real Progress: How to Connect the Dots of Product Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery, which readers call "a practical guide you can return to again and again." 2️⃣ Join my Workshop From Staring at KPIs to Prioritizing with OKRs, in 6 Hours, for turning generic dashboard metrics into useful goals, helping you prioritize and measure your work. 3️⃣ Join...
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...