How to Crack Your Product Strategy | Jackie Bavaro (best-selling PM author)

So the first part is your vision and this is where you want to go. This is your inspiring view of the future. But this is what you're using to like motivate your team and say like, imagine like three years from now and how amazing it's going to be. The next part of the strategy is, I call it the strategic framework. This could be your strategy document and this is where you lay out like, what's the market we're going after, who are the customers or the users that we're trying to win and and what does it take to win them? And then the third part is the roadmap and this is your strategic roadmap. It's a kind of different, a little bit different than a backlog because your strategic roadmap is your timeline of like what you're going to do when. And what you do is instead of working forward, you're working backwards. And that's the wake up call that you need to hire more people or cut down your plan or work faster or do whatever it takes to get onto a good path.

My guest today is Jackie Bavaro, author of Cracking the PM Career and Cracking the PM Interview, two of the most popular books on product management out there. Jackie was also head of PM at Asana. I spoke to Jackie about how to be more strategic, how to define a great vision and strategy for your team and how to communicate your strategy to.

The rest of the company.

You know, there are so many misconceptions about strategy, but Jackie makes everything crystal clear. Consider subscribing for more great interviews every week.

All right, Jackie, welcome. When I was getting 2pm, I read your Cracking the PM interview book and I haven't read your Cracking the PM career book, but I'm not sure I get onto that. But yeah, I'm sure you've helped like thousands of people get into this profession. And you started a newsletter recently and you started writing about. I really loved reading a blog post about strategy. And you of course also taught a course about strategy. So yeah, so I would love to talk to you about that today.

Yeah, that'll be really exciting. And yeah, I've got the new book is the Career one. And you see how thick it is.

Yeah, I did a lot of it.

That's kind of what inspired me to start my substack is I was like, look, this is gigantic and maybe I just need to get some of the most important ideas out there so that people will actually see them if they don't have the patience to get through all that.

Yeah, Exactly. You probably have like two years of newsletter material in that book. So it's like, yeah, so let's talk about strategy. Right. It's kind of this, like, nebulous term. Maybe you can start by sharing like a personal example of why strategy is important and kind of like how you learn about the stuff the hard way.

Yeah. So I was really lucky that early in my career I started at Microsoft, I was there for a few years, and then I went over to Google and I was there for a few years, and the companies are so different, and so I really got to sort of compare and contrast. And that's kind of what helped me get a bigger picture on some of these things like strategy. And Microsoft is very structured about strategy. And I was in the Office division that had really great strategy, lots of great, like, purposeful intent and communication. And I, like, really saw how all the pieces kind of connected together to this bigger picture. Then I went to Google, and Google is not the same kind of culture around strategy. And when I joined as an APM, I joined on the Google Data APIs team. And that is part of. Was part of Google's sort of developer group. So I was there sitting next to the people who were the person who was the PM for App, Google App Engine, which was like the early version of Google Cloud, and some people that worked on developer tools and things like that.

And.

And we didn't, I would say that we did not really have a strategy. We had, I think, a mission. So sometimes we'd say, like, hey, why do our teams exist? Why is Google paying us to do this work? And the answer we got was, well, Google makes money on search. The more people search, the more money Google makes, and the better the Internet is, the more people will search. So basically, we can get more good websites out there and make the Internet better, especially the open Internet, as opposed to, you know, Facebook, which is kind of closed and locked and Google can't search. The better we make the open Internet, the better it will be for Google. So there was a mission, there was some purpose, but that's as deep as it got. We didn't have long strategy discussions. We didn't get giant strategy documents. We didn't get vision presentations about, like, here's what the future of the world will look like when all of this is done.

Yeah.

So we just plotted ahead, doing stuff. And I, at the time, I mostly prioritized things. I saw my role mostly as I'm surrounded by these really smart engineers and some other people, like the developer support and things like that. And my job is to help them launch the things they want to launch. So I was like, they had a very clear list of like, this is what we want to do next. And I was like, yep, I'll help you get that done. Yep, I'll help you get that done. But it was really execution mode. And what was really an interesting learning for me is that I got kind of actually like a really a two step approach to seeing kind of how important strategy can be. The first is that the PM who took over the team after me did more of a big picture vision. And he looked at the team. We were building these like the infrastructure for the APIs, like the calendar API and the Contacts API and things like this. And he said, look, this entire infrastructure is too complicated to use. We need to one, switch it over to be much simpler. And two, what if it's not just Google products that could use this, but what if we make it gigantically, broadly available for anybody on the Internet who wants to create APIs like this? So he had like a much bigger picture vision. And when I heard that, I was like, oh, wow. It like never even occurred to me to think that big. So that was like a first. Aha. But now looking back at it a few years later, I realized that at the time Amazon Web Services was, had started, but it wasn't this giant behemoth that it is today. And so Amazon Web Services is a huge moneymaker for Amazon. It's not just like, let's make the Internet better. It's like, look, we can provide the operating system for the Internet and take a small cut of that and enable. And that does eventually enable a lot more sites. And this line of reasoning, the idea of making Google Cloud a moneymaker, making app engine and selling people paid for. The idea of using it to support this vision, of using it to support these big websites was just not on our radar at all. It was all about like tiny little developers who are starting a new company who might want to build on this like really kind of unique and bespoke infrastructure. So it was just this aha moment of, you know, the team hadn't even taken that step back and had that deep discussion and looked out in the world to see what are the options for our strategy, what could the best strategy be? And just didn't take strategy so seriously and miss this huge opportunity.

That's kind of like the beginning of Google Cloud, right? Or like, I guess it could. Yeah, it could have been. Yeah, got it. Okay, so I guess let's start from the basics, like, you know, like, can you walk us through the three core components of a product strategy just like at a high level?

Yeah. And so these three components are sort of how I see strategy. And the reason I have them is because there was no definition of strategy. And I found that a lot of people who would talk about what is strategy would just be missing one of them. And you'd get, get miscommunication because somebody would think they had a strategy and the other person wouldn't. So it's totally fine to break down your view of strategy in a different way, but if you do cover all three of these, then you'll have a complete strategy that works for everyone. So the first part is your vision, and this is where you want to go. This is your inspiring view of the future. We can get into examples later if you want, but this is what you're using to like motivate your team and say, like, imagine like three years from now and how amazing it's going to be. Our product was wildly successful and here's what people's lives look like, here's how the lives and our users and our customers are, and look at how exciting they are. Don't you want to go there with me? The next part of the strategy is, I call it the strategic framework. This could be your strategy document. And this is where you lay out like, who are, what's the market we're going after? Who are the customers or the users that we're trying to win and what does it take to win them? What are the principles we need? What are the themes that we're going to go after? What are the product pillars? What are all the different components we think it takes to make so that we actually can win the market and have a successful product? Okay, and then the third part is the roadmap, and this is your strategic roadmap. It's a kind of different, a little bit different than a backlog because your strategic roadmap is your timeline of like what you're going to do when. And what you do is instead of working forward, you're working backwards. So you're saying, great, want to achieve my vision in three years. Let's work backwards and say, what does that mean we have to do two years from now and one year from now. Let's see, does it all fit in? And almost 100% of the time the answer is no, it does not all fit in. And that's the wake up call that you need to hire more people or cut down your plan. Or work faster or do whatever it takes to get onto a good path.

Got it. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So it's more like a roadmap for like, you know, a couple years as opposed to like a couple quarters. Right? It's kind of.

It's a couple of years and it's not a commitment, it's not an actual plan. It's not saying, I know we're going to do A, B, C, D. It's saying, hey, is there any way we could achieve our vision? And does it in a way that fits? So say like, hey, at least one option is abcd. Seems like it could potentially get us to a good future. Like, okay, we can go ahead and start with A and then reevaluate as opposed to saying you never looked at it at all. And you realize that at our current pace, we're gonna. In three years, we will have almost nothing important built and we won't have made any substantial progress towards our vision. And so then you've had three years of people working really hard and they don't have much to show for it. They haven't had the impact on the world that they wanted to have.

Got it. Okay. Got it. So, yeah, so that's a great framework. And you know, other people have like, other frameworks, but I think like, personal opinion, like more important frameworks is just like knowing the market and like knowing what the hell's going on. So I guess for the PMs out there, like, when do you think they're actually ready to start thinking about product strategy or how do they balance with, like, understanding, you know, what's going on?

Yeah, yeah, really good question. And I think that usually the timing is around six months. It might be a little bit earlier if you're more senior, but the. There's a bunch of stuff that you kind of want to do before then. So you want to have like, really. You want to start by diving really deep into the users and the product and the company. I think that, like, at a very bare minimum, you should have had like an actual personal conversation with at least 10 of your users or potential users and the number we're going for is enough that you're going to start to see patterns. So if you're a new per. If you get hired into a company and, and your first thing has to do is launch a feature. As part of launching that feature, you're going to be talking to customers. You're going to mostly be trying to learn what you need to know for that feature, but you'll also Be seeing other things at the same time. It's. You're going to start noticing these patterns, noticing other problems that come up. You'll spend that time also looking at your data, getting to see, like, what do your stats do? Are any numbers, like, surprisingly high or low? Are there any, like, weird usage patterns? And it was really kind of start to understand how your product fits into people's lives. And then the other thing that you'll get a chance to do during that time is also getting to understand how your company works, getting to know the people who are involved. What's the culture like, what's the planning timeline like? Is there a time when strategic decisions are made and then are they kind of locked down for a little bit of time? And once you have all of those things, then you sort of have enough to start building a strategy.

Got it. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So let us cover each piece of it. Dive a little bit deeper. So I've been a PM for, like, many years, and, like, I still sometimes get confused between what a mission is and what a vision is. Like, do you have any perspective on that or can it be combined in one?

Yeah, so they can sometimes be combined in one. And I think especially in consumer companies, you might get them, like, a little bit more combined into one. So your mission is sort of your purpose. It's like, the reason why we're doing this. And, like, I think a lot of companies do kind of, especially in the consumer space, start to, like, blur them. But, like, Microsoft's mission was like, enable all humans to realize their full potential. Right. That's like a purpose, but it doesn't give you a picture of what that means that they're going to do. And I think that a good vision gives you a picture of this future. So realize your full potential could mean absolutely anything. There's not like some shared thing that pops into our head, but a vision where you say, like, okay, imagine you wake up in the morning and you check your dashboard and it's automatically highlighted the five most important things for you to work on today. There might be parts of it that seem a little bit magical, but it's got the concrete details that tie into the real pains that resonate with you. So that you're like, yes, I can imagine what this future looks like to an extent that it feels inspiring and believable.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And what are some great ways to bring the vision to life that you've seen? Like, is it just writing, like, a description of the user experience or, like, getting a Designer to help on this stuff or.

Yeah, definitely working if you're doing a like, one for. Depending on your size. But working with your designer is a great idea, and there's, like, a few different ways. So I really like to have narrative visions. So what I mean by that is you kind of start with, like, so and so. Imagine so and so. They wake up in the morning, they do this really kind of tying the pieces together, talking about, like, a day in the life of a person.

Yes.

That you kind of have, like, push yourself forward into the future. The other thing I think can be really helpful is thinking about infomercials, because infomercials do a really good job of sort of building up this problem that it's, like, so hard to open, you know, jars. You're like, oh, no. And then they say, but there's a better way. And then they introduce their new product, and you see it and see how happy people are using it. Like, it really. It ties into that emotional resonance, which I think is so important.

I see. Yeah. And, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And how do you know when you have a good vision? Like, you know, like, when you see the fire in your team's eyes or something?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Just because people are excited, it's like, you can't be sure that the vision is good. But so much of the time, people's vision is just this kind of meh, blah. And if tell people, you can tell your coworkers, you can tell potential people you're trying to recruit to your team. You can talk to your customers about it. And you want people to say, like, yes, I want that. I want to get there. Like, how soon can we have it? Like, yes, I want to join your company and work on that. You, like, the minimum. You need that level of excitement, because that's the sign that all of this effort will get you somewhere that's worth it. Because imagine you work for three years on a vision that no one's excited about. People get to that future, and they're not that happy that they got there.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Do you have a good example of, like, a vision from any company or.

Yeah. So at Asana, our vision was about this idea, like, early on days. It's changed since then, but we had ideas of, like, Asana as your team brain, and the same way that, like, your human brain, when I'm playing the guitar, it helps my left and right hands work together effortlessly. Your team brain is going to. Is going to help all of the teams at your company. Work together effortlessly, be aware of what everybody else is doing. And so you kind of say like, hey, can you imagine this future where you come into work every day, you know exactly what you're going to be working on because it's been live updated and you know, as you're checking off tasks on your personal to do list, it's updating the centralized source of truth so that everybody's working off of the current state and nobody ends up working on the wrong thing. And you don't have to spend as much time keeping everybody updated. And you can avoid all that endless work about work and status update meetings.

Yeah, and I love that because, I mean, I'm assuming I'm like the target customer for Asana and it's not only inspiring, but it's also like a real problem. Right. When I'm new to a team, I have no clue what other people are thinking. It just takes a lot of work and documentation. So yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so how about the next piece? In terms of the strategic framework, I think you had like three separate sub pieces of that or something.

Yeah, yeah. And this is an area. Yeah. So there's basically there's going to be like, who is your target audience and like, what does it take to win them? So certainly making sure that you've gotten really crisp on who your target market is, like, who are the users and then how are you going to win them? There's sort of two parts to the how it's, you know, are there. Do you have a philosophy on like where your areas of investment are going to have to be? So I usually call those are the product pillars. And so that's, you know, the parts of your product that you think are going to have to get better in the future to achieve that vision. And then you've got your strategic principles and those are the things you believe are super important to achieve the vision. But they are, they're not necessarily like, I'm staffing a team to build this. It's more like how I think about problems and resolve tough trade offs. So, for example, security is more important than stability is one that we had at Asana, which was, you know, kind of straightforward, but if there was a security breach, we would take the site down.

Yeah.

And stability is more important than performance, but performance is more important than features. So this was sort of a principle. It wasn't like a specific staff team, but it was a way that we thought about the relative trade offs between teams.

It's like helping you make decisions every day. Right. Basically yes.

And I'm a really strong believer that if your job as a product manager is tough, if you're constantly getting into debates with people about what feature to launch or how to build it, or you and your designer can't agree on something, whenever you get into these like repeated disagreements, it's very often because you're missing a strategic principle that you need or it could be like a design principle or product principle that you need. So for example, at Asana, we got into one of these types of repeated disagreements we got into was whether to opt to design the product in a way that optimized for people at really small companies or to optimize it for people at really large companies. Because if you're at a large company, I can assume you have your own email domain. You probably have some sort of single sign on service. The information architecture and finding things can be really important and you'll make different decisions than if you're really trying to help. Like the new two person startup that's still working off of their Gmail addresses.

Yeah, yeah.

And so just adding in a strategic principle there really helped.

Which one did you guys pick? The small company or large company?

Large companies. Yeah.

Okay. Because bigger market opportunity or something.

Yeah, yeah. So part of it, one of the. This is a little bit of, you know, story here is that one of the patterns that I've seen a few times at Asana that's really interesting is that a lot of the time when there's more than one customer that you can build for, one of them is harder than the other in a. And there's two ways design can be harder. Right. One way it can be harder is, you know, you want to build for one first and then you, it'll be easier to make them happy and then you build on top of that to make the next set of people happy. But for Sauna, a lot of times it was different than that. It was if you build to make the easy group happy, it's almost impossible to make that next harder group happy. You have to build for the more complicated group and then bring it down to the easier. So the first way we saw this with individual versus collaborative. So you know, you've got like, remember the milk like a personal task manager or Apple reminders. Those are very easy to build. And everybody who has one of those companies really wanted to make it more collaborative. But collaboration isn't something you can tack on after the fact. So we went after collaboration and really de emphasized individuals because we could tack on individual after the fact. But if we didn't start by priority prioritizing collaboration, we wouldn't be able to do it well. And same thing for large companies. If you don't start by prioritizing them and their needs, you won't be able to serve them well. But it's much easier to scale down.

Yeah, I think what you're talking about is actually a pretty classic example of like picking the right market. Like, like. Yeah, I totally agree that you can design yourself into a corner if you only solve for a simple use case. Yeah. So yeah, I mean all these things like the market, the pillars and the principles are. I mean it all comes down to like just like picking the right folk focus. Right. And I've worked at companies where like the CPO will come out and say like, oh, you know, we have like nine strategic priorities. It's like that's like one too many, you know, like what do you think about that? Like does it come down to like maybe picking three things or maybe one thing to focus on?

It's going to depend on the size of your company. So at Asana, we did a really interesting thing with OKRs. So objective and key results. The way that most companies do it is each team picks their objective and key results. We instead had company wide objectives and each team could pick their key results that had to tie into an existing company wide objective. So our company wide objectives were sort of our strategic focus. And the first year we did this, I think we had 56 of them. It was a gigantic number and I think we cut it in half and then eventually we got it down to 10 and this was 10 across product and business teams which ended up working really nicely. So we'd say like one of them was like win the work management space. That's something that involves a lot of work from the marketing team and also a lot of work from the product team of like building a product that, that has the cutting edge features that we believe need work management.

Yeah. And like let's say your team has like three objectives, like three pillars. Like this comes down to like the roadmap which is like do you kind of just like work on all three at the same time or do you try to sequence it?

Yeah, great question. So I love to think about a roadmap or even a backlog. You can do this as the Charcuterie Board. I'm not sure if you've seen this article, but the Charcuterie Board is just one of my favorite frameworks and I used to call it a portfolio of investments, but Charcuterie boards makes a lot more sense. So if you're building a charcuterie board, you don't stack, rank your meats versus your cheeses. Instead you think at a really high level, like, okay, I want a charcuterie board that's like half meat and half cheese and then you go and buy the best thing in each category. And so same thing for your company's strategic pillars, your investments is it really helps at a high level to think about what percentage of your team's effort do you want to put towards each of these strategic goals. So you might decide that half of your energy should be towards winning new users and the other half should be making your product better, more useful, improve engagement and retain and retention for existing users. And then once you have that high level split and you know how you want it, then you can make the decision about whether to do all of them at once or to do some of them in sequence based on the size of your team and what it takes to do them well. So if you've got a big company, you can probably go after a few of these at once, but if you are smaller or you have too many of them, then you might decide that like it doesn't make sense to have one engineer working by themselves for a quarter. Instead we will get five people together and sequence the goals.

Okay, so like you kind of decide at a high level what percent for each category and then maybe you sequence it every quarter or like every half or something. Right. Is that kind of.

Yeah.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think I've seen it done both ways where like you kind of split it across different objectives and then, or like people have like pre constrained resources, then just try to go out through one thing and hopefully that works and then they move on to another one. But yeah, I've kind of seen it done both ways.

Yes. And I think basically the smaller you are, the more I think it ends up making sense to do things sequentially and have everybody focus on one thing at a time. And then as you get bigger, you know, a company like Microsoft couldn't have everybody working on the same priority at the same time. Time.

Yeah, I also noticed, just like continue to talk a little bit more. I noticed that especially if you're trying to introduce a new product in a market with a bunch of existing players, like you kind of want to pick which one you really want to differentiate, like which area you really want to differentiate on, otherwise you'll play catch up the whole time. And it's like yeah. Have you thought about this or.

Yeah, definitely a bunch. And also this comes into this idea of like, do you. Especially with business software, there'll be a checklist that your competitor has of all the features they have, and inevitably they're going to make one that shows that they have a lot of features and you're missing a bunch of features.

Yeah.

And it's not going to be successful to try to compete on that checklist for like a brand new entrant. It might become more important as you get bigger. Usually it's a lot better to pick a narrow use case and, or narrow customer type that you can do really well with, and that is being underserved by the existing competitors. So I think about like the Asana work management space, there are some people out there that try to do really well for marketers or things like that. And so with Asana, I would say we did not differentiate on the specific customer type that we went after because we do try to be kind of very horizontal, very broad. But we did actually have a slight customer differentiation in that a lot of our competitors were bug tracking tools. They really specialize in software engineers. And we're not trying to compete with them. We try to be something that regular people can use. And then differentiating for us was a lot on this balance between power and ease of use. So almost all the other competitors out there for work management chose to either be the powerful tool, so you think about Jira, or the easy to use tool. You think about like Trello. Right. And what we said is we don't. We think that's a false trade off. We think that we can be both powerful and easy to use and we can basically invest a lot in design work so that we can have lots of powerful functionality without making it harder to use.

Okay, so maybe like simple and then powerful. Like kind of like simple surface and then powerful if you dig into it. Yeah. Interesting. Jira is like very on one end of the spectrum.

Yeah. And I mean, one of the reasons it's so important is that it's not that some teams need powerful and some teams need easy to use, it's that within the same team, one person needs powerful and everybody else needs easy to use. And that's why it's so important to bring those together into the same product.

Totally. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's kind of move to communicating your strategy because I think that's like just as important as building a strategy. Well, let's talk about crafting a strategy first. Do you Kind of just go off for a weekend, just write your own strategy or how do you involve your team in this stuff?

Yeah. So I have a particular way that I think is useful to do this, which is that you go away by yourself. Think about your strategy. This could be a half day. Think about your strategy. Write your drafts of the vision and the strategic framework and the roadmap, whatever is in your mind, get it all down and you into paper, work through it a bit. You know, if there's questions that come up, like new data, you need start, you know, getting some of this, spend a small amount of time on this and then hide that draft. Don't bring it over to your team and say like, hey, I've got a strategy. You can, depending on your team culture, but for an important strategy, a lot, especially if it's a shift in directions, hide that strategy and then work with your team and maybe set up a team off site or do one on ones with people and kind of kick off like, hey, we're going to build a strategy and get everybody involved in the creation of the strategy. So that prep work was so important because you need a point of view, you need to have surfaced, like, what are the trade offs that are going to come up? You don't want to be just a facilitator in that meeting. You want to be someone who is driving and noticing the problems when they come up and who is, who is able to actually lead the team to a good strategy. But you don't want it to be an independent strategy. You want it to be collaborative because then people will really believe in it and support it.

Oh, interesting. Like so. Yeah, because if you just share that draft with people, then they're like, oh, you already did this. Right. Is that kind of the flaw?

Yeah, yeah. And I've done strategies like that before and it wasn't the worst thing if your goal is to like get promoted, but it is probably the worst thing if your goal is to actually change the direction of your team.

Got it, Got it. Yeah. People want to feel like they own something. They don't want to get handed something. Right. It's just kind of human nature. Yeah. And usually with the strategy stuff, like there's like a big exec meeting, right. Where like you present it to the execs. How do you kind of de risk that? You know, like, how do you like not have it be like all of a sudden you presented like, they hate to hate the strategy.

Yeah. So invite them to that original kickoff meeting. Getting their input early is definitely really nice and depends on the size of your company if they'll actually attend. But get the highest person in your company that you can to join that meeting and get their brainstorming ideas out there. Make sure they tell you all their concerns up front and them also be part of the strategy. So it's less that I've created a strategy that I'm presenting to you, but I've gathered all the ideas, listened to everybody, including you, and here's how I think it comes together.

Okay. Yeah, I think that's like underrated because it's like it's a lot easier to get an exec's opinion through like a coffee chat or something than like at this big me me meeting. Yeah, yeah. So that's really good advice. And I also really liked your post about working your strategy into the day to day work. Like a lot of times like people just do stuff and like put it aside and people don't look at it anymore for, you know, six months. So yeah, how do you do that? Like how do you weave in?

Yeah, yeah. So I think that the best way, if you've got a really strong strategy, you can make almost every piece of feedback that you give to your team. And every time you talk to your team, you can almost speak entirely out of things from your strategy document. So somebody says like, hey, do you think we should add this feature? And then you say like, okay, let's. How does that fit into our strategic investment on giving you insights into your work?

Yeah.

Or they say like, hey, do we want to build it this way or that? And you're saying, well, how does that fit into our strategic principle of prioritizing large teams? And you can also, you know, when they show you their designs, you'd be like, that's great. That's really captures being powerful and easy to use at the same time.

Yeah.

And as a pm, you're going to feel like you're repeating yourself non stop. Right. You're going to feel like you're constantly talking about it. You can introduce teams, like if you're doing like an all hands or something and you're like, great, I'm going to pull up the calendar team and they're working on our strategic pillar of improving insights. So you're going to feel like you're repeating yourself all the time and that means that maybe you're halfway there, you need to repeat yourself twice as much to the point that you feel ridiculous. And as you talk to people on your team, you'll start to see, especially if you Question them. If you try to quiz them, you'll see that nobody else has been as immersed in the strategy as you are. And it's very easy for teams to get a little bit or a lot off track.

Yeah. In some ways it makes your job a lot easier because you don't have to, like, think fresh every time a problem comes up. You can just apply where you wrote down. And I really love that because also you don't have to like, hey, read my strategy. Read my strategy. Just bring pieces of it two to the fourth forefront. And then people are like, why is this guy talking about his strategy all the time? They can read his strategy. Yeah, Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I feel like, personally I should do that more. I don't do that enough. I try to solve problems fresh instead of bringing up the principles and stuff.

Yeah. Being able to communicate in terms of those strategic principles and themes really helps for a few ways. Is it makes your job easier because you don't have to think about things fresh and you can just reuse content. It helps your team because they really understand things more deeply so you can delegate more to them. They can make more good decisions on their own when they really deeply understand all of this. And it helps earn trust with your team because it shows the way that your decisions are consistent. So a common thing people worry about with their pm, so they feel like their PM is pulling them in all directions and constantly changing their mind at the whim of the senior leadership. And when you have that sort of consistency of communicating in terms of the strategy, then it takes away from that feeling that you're making decisions at a whim. It shows the consistent structure to your decision making.

I love that. Yeah. I think of everything. The strategy, like, the principles part is, like, hard to be affected by the market. Right. Like, the other stuff might change if market changes, but principles like how you operate should be, like, pretty. Pretty. Should stay pretty consistent, I hope.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of the ways your strategy is like the bet that you're making that your product team or your company in particular is making. And it can include the validation part of it. You can say, hey, we're making a really big bet that winning big companies is important. And here is how we'll know if it's time to change that idea.

Okay, so. So this. Then it doesn't seem like a surprise if it turns out that it didn't work out or something?

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, I guess, yeah, just. Just like hitting that point home a little bit. Like, what happens if, like, you're working on a strategy, and then all of a sudden, like, the market, you know, like, yeah, the market changes or you write something. A key assumption was totally off. Like, how do you just keep the document updated? Or how do you.

So, no, I would not just keep the document updated because nobody else is going to read your document. So you've changed the strategy and no one else knows. And now you're frustrated that people are working off the old strategy. If it's a big change, if it's something that's going to be substantial, I would bring all those people that you brought in the first time you were creating it, bring them back together, make sure people are in the loop, and say, like, hey, we have this new information. Let's, like, work together and figure out how we want this to adjust our strategy and do we want to create a new strategy or how much do we think we can save and keep? And depending on, you know, your team and your level at the company. If you're a senior leader, you probably want to start that with the other senior leaders. You don't want to immediately let everybody. If they don't know about it. You don't want to randomize people who are doing the work until you have a little bit more of a sense. So I would start with a little bit smaller and then bring it it down. But then eventually, you do want to be including people. Make sure that, like, it's a learning opportunity for them. They can see, here's what changed. Here's what we learned from it, and, like, let's talk about how that should change everything. That way you bring them along again.

Got it. Got it. Okay. Got it. So it's a key point with this just to, like, make sure you bring people along, like, seek their input along the way.

Yeah.

You know? Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah. I think that's all the questions I had, Jackie. Yeah, we can probably. Well, actually, why don't we stop with this? Where can people find you online? You know?

Yeah, so I have a substack, and I'm pretty. For the time being, I am still pretty active on Twitter for as long as that lasts.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool.