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
The Post-it trap: Why Strategy needs more than Workshops
The Post-it trap: Why Strategy needs more than WorkshopsDear Reader, 'Product Strategy by Post-it' occurs when teams prioritize filling out frameworks over making real strategic choices. It's a common symptom of treating strategy as a checkbox exercise rather than a tool for decision-making. John Cutler even suggests that most frameworks should feature a warning label like this: "This framework is synthetic. It was designed to be "foolproof" and adoptable under less-than-ideal conditions. Under different conditions, your team could learn much faster, so don't infantilize your team. Doing this framework "well" is not a prerequisite for doing well." While frameworks and canvases can be valuable tools for synthesis and communication, they shouldn't be the starting point for strategy work. They often suggest a linear, oversimplified approach to what should be a dynamic process of making clear choices. The real value of Product Strategy comes from enabling teams to confidently say yes or no to opportunities over the next ~6-18 months. Any framework or template should serve this purpose, not become an end in itself. When teams start with fill-in-the-blank templates to form their Strategy, it‘s tempting to work through a given artifact in a one-off „Product Strategy Workshop.“ You shouldn‘t over-analyze every aspect of your Product Strategy before getting started. But believing something accurate just because it exists as a post-it note is equally dangerous.
One example is the decision to serve and not serve which audiences. This shouldn't just be a debate of opinions when comparing notes after „brainstorming." It should be an evidence-informed choice based on insights probably gathered outside meetings. Given your company's strategy, capabilities, and market opportunities, you need to understand not just who you could serve but who you should serve. Your Product Vision and Strategic Metrics should guide these decisions, helping you evaluate opportunities against clear criteria rather than gut feelings. This means connecting your audience choices to measurable indicators of progress and success. Evidence-informed decisions in Strategy involve not achieving 100% certainty and not acting solely on gut feelings and anecdotes. Strategy work should be treated like tending a garden—an ongoing process of nurturing and refinement rather than a one-time exercise. Templates and canvases can help synthesize and communicate your choices but shouldn't drive the process. The real test of your strategy isn't how well it fills a framework but how effectively it helps your team make decisions and set clear priorities for Discovery and execution. For example, instead of just writing "integrate with third-party mobility providers" on a Post-it, you might document:
This evidence-based foundation helps you confidently say no to other integration requests and defend your choices in stakeholder discussions. The synthesis of assembled Product Strategy Components should help you prioritize and make decisions. Templates and canvases can benefit from this act of synthesis and communication. But the more their contents are an uninformed guess, the less supportive they will be when translating your Strategy into OKRs and Discovery priorities. Did you enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes two clicks. Creating this one took two hours. 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.
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 #393 How much Money willthis Feature make? PUBLISHED Jan 30, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO I'm hosting my first free live webinar in 2026: Go From "We Need a Strategy" to "Here's Exactly What We're Doing and Why" — In 60 Minutes on Feb 11 at 5:00 PM CET (11:00 AM EST | 8:00 AM PT). Bring all your questions, and I will work through them on the spot. Note that there will be no recording - this is about hands-on interaction, not just information transmission. CLAIM YOUR FREE SPOT Dear...
Product Practice #392 From Product Jargonto Plain English READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Jan 23, 2026 READING TIME 3 min & 29 sec Dear Reader,I often feel that, somewhere along the way, we, as an industry, started optimizing for sounding like product people instead of speaking like humans in plain English (or any other language). What would happen if we dropped the product lingo and used plain English to describe what's needed? I find it increasingly liberating for product teams to describe...
Product Practice #391 Four Pragmatic Ways to Improve Opportunity Solution Trees in Practice READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Jan 16, 2025 READING TIME 3 min & 56 sec Dear Reader, Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs) are a widely popular visual aid for connecting solution space work to business goals through problem space elements (similar to Impact Mapping). From seeing the way product teams adopt them in practice, here are four ways I've seen improve their impact for your work: Remember that OSTs...