<aside> 📖 With a compelling vision for a future version of the product’s value proposition firmly in place, product leaders can develop a strategy to guide the development of the product from the current value proposition to the value proposition described by the product vision.

“Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the current context.” — Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action

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Good strategy is simple and obvious. Good strategy helps teams decide what’s important, what they should build next, and what they should say “no” (or at least “not yet”) to.

Good strategy answers two questions clearly:

1. What are we trying to achieve (mission, vision, objectives, and goals)?
   1. in the long-term (mission, vision)
   2. next (objectives and goals)
2. How do we intend to achieve it (strategy)? Or, how do we intend to get there from here (strategy)?

In other words:

1. Our vision is what we intend to create in the future; the value proposition we hope to offer, along with the implicit PMF we believe awaits that product.
2. Our current PMF is how well our value proposition (design + opportunity solutions) meets the opportunities of the markets we serve.
3. Our strategy guides us from our current value proposition to our desired future value proposition. It helps teams make day-to-day decisions that will move us closer to our vision.
4. Strategy deployment breaks strategy down into pieces for different time horizons (EtBT talks about teams needing framing to make good decisions).
5. Outcomes and output seesaw (PMiP, p. 154) talk about something similar, where teams need to be guided by either specifics around desired outcomes or around desired outputs.

Strategy informs the work of the product teams (and others) and the feedback from the product teams’ work (user research and metrics on released features) impacts company strategy (reflective equilibrium). EtBT, p. 73