Entries from June 2009 ↓

“Of course strategy is hard — it’s about making tough choices.”

“Strategy 101 is about choices: You can’t be all things to all people.”

“It’s extremely dangerous to bet on the incompetence of your competitors — and that’s what you’re doing when you’re competing on operational effectiveness.”

“Sound strategy starts with having the right goal. And I argue that the only goal that can support a sound strategy is superior profitability.”

“Strategy is about the basic value you’re trying to deliver to customers, and about which customers you’re trying to serve.”

“The chief strategist of an organization has to be the leader — the CEO.”

“In any organization, thousands of ideas pour in every day — from employees with suggestions, from customers asking for things, from suppliers trying to sell things. There’s all this input, and 99% of it is inconsistent with the organization’s strategy.”

“A leader also has to make sure that everyone understands the strategy.”

“The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy. They go out to employees, to suppliers, and to customers, and they repeat, “This is what we stand for, this is what we stand for.” So everyone understands it. This is what leaders do. In great companies, strategy becomes a cause. That’s because a strategy is about being different. So if you have a really great strategy, people are fired up…”

Image Source: fastcompany.com

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I am suggesting reviews of your problem statements with your peers. Specifically the other product management types you work with. I know, you are the only product manager in the company. This is a great excuse to have a sit down with the head of marketing or an executive. At this point, I am trying to stay away from the people who will build the solution.

This doesn’t have to be a formal review with an official sign-off process. You are looking to validate a few things including that you have a well defined problem statement that is devoid of solution, within your market segments, measurable, observable and answers all questions.

Since the problem statement is technically your first official analysis of the idea (no matter who or how it was sourced.. err.. sensed), you want the extra eyes to validate whether it warrants further processing. This is a great gating factor to help save some R&D cycles by filtering out requirements that are ill-defined or out of scope for your target market. If the problem smells, it’ll never get to the requirement stage.

For what it is worth, this totally works for features and roadmaps too.

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