EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 49Insights

In this chapter, I'd like to discuss my favorite, yet the most difficult, aspect of product strategy, which is to generate, identify, and leverage the insights that will provide the foundation of the product strategy.

You've probably heard the stories about the insights about customer behavior that drove early Netflix to rapid growth and profitability, or the insights around new‐user onboarding that drove early Facebook to explosive growth, or the insights around customer trials that Slack and Salesforce.com leveraged to spread like wildfire across businesses.

In this chapter, we explore where these critical insights come from, and how to make sure you're finding them, as they can hide among the thousands of other data points you're likely collecting.

There are a few things I need to make clear before we get into this:

First, if you're looking for some paint‐by‐number playbook or framework for coming up with these insights and a solid product strategy, I'll save you some time and tell you right now you're not going to find that here.

As I've tried to emphasize throughout this book, product strategy requires real effort and thought. Says Richard Rumelt:

Good strategy … does not pop out of some “strategic management” tool, matrix, chart, triangle, or fill‐in‐the‐blanks scheme. Instead, a talented leader identifies the one or two critical issues in the situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focuses and concentrates ...