Product Strategy

Make decisions oriented toward long-term company success, accepting short-term trade-offs

Allocate 70% to core, 20% to strategic initiatives, 10% to bets

Combine a distant North Star with incremental steps within arm's reach

Three AI market segments with different dynamics: foundation models, tooling, and applied AI

Go many miles wide and only inches deep—your value is integration, not individual excellence

Take over a big market by dominating a niche first, then expanding pin by pin

Design for users who will get it immediately, not edge cases

Build a complete small thing first, not a component of a big thing

Software adoption moves through three stages: what's possible, how it creates value, then how to scale it

Design the market category, not just the product—category kings earn 76% of the value

Surface AI help at the moment of relevance, not through notifications or manual invocation

Launch MVPs that create joy and excitement, not just MVPs that work

Design combines creative expression with utility—lose either and you lose the magic

Decision-making tools that resolve recurring team debates, unlike generic design principles

Product strategy is about delighting customers in hard to copy, margin enhancing ways

Build products that are both different from AND better than what exists—in ways that matter to users

Two categories of video with opposite AI implications—documentation should stay real, storytelling can be generated

The tension between optimizing for engagement (what feels good) versus genuine value (what is good)

Train algorithms on expert judgment, not just engagement metrics

Three-phase process for developing and sharing a compelling product vision

An operator's guide to developing product strategy in 8-12 weeks through a collaborative, defensible process

Narrow your target personas ruthlessly so teams can actually prioritize

Allocate product resources across Brilliant Basics, Bread and Butter, Big Bets, and Breaking Bad

A compelling product vision must be lofty, realistic, tech-agnostic, and problem-grounded

Categorize product work into feature, growth, PMF expansion, and scaling to build a balanced portfolio

Look for things that can grow on their own, not just things you can manipulate

Force rank Growth, Engagement, and Monetization to align your organization on priorities

A good pivot gets warmer—closer to your expertise and builds on what you learned

Shift investment percentages across strategic horizons as you mature toward your vision

Adding features doesn't add value linearly—complexity compounds and coherence degrades

In rapidly changing markets, find the new demand pockets—not the legacy incumbents

Find startup opportunities by targeting large incumbents whose customers hate them

Legendary companies get product, company, AND category right at the right time

Build products people love, not just products that work

Great companies succeed through authentically different approaches: technical, growth, design, or operational excellence

Build software with best practices baked in that guide users to better outcomes

Advanced features are discoverable when you look, but invisible if you don't

Adapt your psychology, timeline expectations, and stakeholder principles for platform work

Build products that think, live, and learn—not static artifacts you ship and forget

PMF doesn't last—user expectations and competition rise daily, eroding your advantage if you stand still

In fast-moving markets, PMF must be recaptured every 3 months, not sustained for years

Separate user requests from breakthrough innovations with two distinct roadmaps

Create entirely new experiences rather than digitizing what came before

Two complementary approaches to strategy—present-forward problem-solving vs future-backward aspiration

In the AI era, software becomes more like content—cheaper to create, more personal, more abundant

Software is an emotional medium like film or music, not just a functional tool

Structure your product portfolio with a core 'sun' and satellite 'planets'

Strategy is selecting the frequency that creates exponential impact between your product and the market

Kill features used by only 2% of customers—they create complexity without moving metrics

Never compromise on quality, UX, and aesthetics—even for MVPs

You need to be right about something that other people think you're wrong about for a very long time