Jackie Bavaro - Lennyspodcast

mostly about product strategy

9/28/20233 min read

There's three key components to strategy:

  • Your vision. This is your inspiring picture of what the future looks like. And this is like, "Hey everybody, this is where we want to get to, don't you want to come join me, come build this future with me? Won't this to be exciting?”

  • Your strategic framework. This is where you're saying, "Here is the market we're going after. Here's what success looks like. And here are our big bets on what we think it takes to win that market." That's where you get your pillars, and it's your unique way of breaking down the problem to understand who you're going after and what it takes to win them.

  • The third part is the roadmap. This is where you work backwards from your vision. You say "Okay, I think as a company, we can achieve our vision in five years or 10 years or two years or whatever it is.”

    • A roadmap in strategy is not a commitment. Instead, it's a way to double check if your plan makes any sense at all and is even anywhere near feasible. Because what happens to every team I see do these roadmaps, you put it together and you realize "We're not going to hit our vision in five years or 10. This is like a 30 year vision, if we keep going at the pace we're going.”

What is a good strategy ?

I think a good strategy is all about connecting the dots. Connecting the dots from this high level business goal of, "We want to increase revenue by this much" to, "This is the feature we're going to do." And it might have many, many dots in between to help get people from one to the other of like "Given that this is our big picture of view of what we're doing, what's the next step? And what's the next step? And what's the next step?”

It's your job to take those things you want to work on and the reasons why you think they're important, and match them up against what that larger financial target was or whatever strategy or vision you're getting from the executives. And basically see "Which of these feature work? Which of this product work that I want to do best matches up with those goals and why?”

I think it's that connecting the dots. And the only way you find out what dots are missing is by talking to people and communicating your strategy and communicating it again and again, and really listening for people's confusion. Because people will try to hide their confusion. They won't get your strategy, there's going to be some assumption that you're making that they are not making. So you have to pay really, really close attention to find those missing assumptions so that you can then explain why this connects to this.

Strategy really should be collaborative work. I think that there's some amount to which the PM should go off by themselves and think about what strategy they want and have that in their back pocket, because that way you actually can contribute to the conversation, but real strategy should be very collaborative.

  • I think the best way to learn and improve your strategy, one of them is going to be working with the other stakeholders and listening to their feedback and understanding what do they agree with or not agree with. Sometimes it's as easy as a conversation.

How long should people, I guess, early PMs maybe, how much time should they spend on strategy development? And then, when does it make sense to start investing in that?

Yeah. I think that for your first six months on a product, probably don't worry about strategy. For your six months really, you should be talking to customers, researching your product stuff. Really starting off by saying, "I'm going to learn the strategy, whatever strategy my company already has, and I'm going to do my research, but I'm going to deliver on that strategy.”

But all this time, while you're doing your regular product work, so you're visiting customers and you're analyzing data and all these things, you are probably having ideas pop up in your mind. You're starting to notice trends. You're starting to notice what are the pain points people have and just stay open to that. And after about six months, I think is when you can start to put together a draft of a strategy for your own team.

Books: Cracking the PM Interview and Cracking the PM Career: https://amzn.to/3If6X9U

References:

Link to the podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/jackie-bavaro-on-getting-better-at-product-strategy-what-exactly-is-strategy-pm-pitfalls-to-avoid-advancing-your-career-getting-into-management-and-much-more/