“Strategy is an explicit set of choices made — to do something and to not do some other things”

Building a strategy is complex; strategy professionals dedicate their entire lives on learning and building strategies. With every product management role, and with the successes & failures, I continue to learn newer aspects of product strategy.

The strategy gurus like Porter said that strategy is a relatively new field. So is software product management, which has been around for less than 50 years. The two combined presents fairly interesting challenges to the product managers/leaders (PM).

As I researched and discussed on the topic for years, almost 90% of discussions and blogs I came across fall into several of these pitfalls:

Product or corporate vision is not strategy

• Vision is a component of strategy but doesn’t provide the choices a PM must recommend and the organization must make.

Roadmap is not strategy

• A well-aligned roadmap within an organization is definitely a key component on how the product strategy will be executed but is not the product strategy.

Best practices or Agile is not strategy

• Following the best methodologies and practices are important to be successful during execution but are not strategy.

Read more on Medium >>