Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices

​Dear Reader,​

During a recent webinar, someone asked a question I had to think about a bit longer: "What do you do when your strategy is still early, and you're not sure if it's right?"

The answer that popped into my head was based on an incredible piece of advice (or admission) I received from a former boss 10+ years ago: No one knows if their strategy is right in the beginning, anyway.

So, you probably can't know if it's right. Not yet, maybe not ever. But you can know if it's coherent.

Correctness means your strategy will align with reality. That's something you only learn after you start execution.
​Coherence means the individual components of your strategy reinforce each other and don't contradict the overall choice you make. And it's something you can test right now.

I see teams discussing: Is this the right audience segment? Is this the right revenue model? The questions are important but unanswerable with 100% certainty in advance. Nobody can tell you if your pricing is "correct" before you've tested it in the market.

What you can tell, though, is how well your pricing assumption fits your distribution assumption. Whether the problem you want to solve truly exists within the target audience you have chosen. Whether your differentiation makes sense given your team's capabilities and the strengths of your product's alternatives.

This is similar to what The Product Field calls Checks across individual components:

Incoherence doesn't just make your strategy weak; it undermines it. It makes it impossible to say no to anything. If your components don't connect, every opportunity looks equally plausible. Every feature request has a case.

A team I worked with had inherited a company strategy from above and was building product strategies below. They were stuck because they kept trying to make each product strategy "right" on its own. The shift happened when I encouraged them to stop asking "Is this correct?" and shift to "Does this tell a coherent story across layers?" Strategy storytelling is about coherence rather than being right or wrong. Because, you guessed it, no one knows what's right anyway (which makes the translation to measurable progress goals and actions reducing uncertainty even more important).

That reframe changes how you use a strategy. Instead of defending each component as the right answer, you test the assumptions that connect them. Does our belief about the user problem match our belief about willingness to pay? Does our channel assumption support our growth model? These connections are where strategies actually break.

So if you're early and unsure whether your strategy is right, try a different question: Do the assumptions behind each component fit together? Can you tell a story that connects them without contradicting yourself?

If you can, you have something worth testing. If you can't, no individual component being "right" will save you.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

If you consume one thing this week, make it this...

Who is Tim Herbig?

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.