EMPOWERED

PART VIProduct Strategy

Ultimately, empowered product teams are all about giving teams hard problems to solve, and then giving them the space to solve them.

But, how do we decide which problems they should solve?

Answering that question is what product strategy is all about.

An effective product strategy is absolutely essential to enabling ordinary people to create extraordinary products, because it focuses and leverages their talents.

Remarkably, most product organizations I meet don't even have a product strategy.

They have no shortage of features and projects being worked on, and everything they are building is being built for a reason, but as you'll see, they have no product strategy.

If you've never seen the great South Park clip on the Underpants Business,¹ I'd encourage you to pause for a minute and take a look.

Seriously, this is really what I see in so many of the companies I visit. They have product teams that are more accurately feature teams, and they're slaving away—pounding out features all day—but rarely getting closer to their desired outcomes.

This results in two things:

First, there is a depressing amount of wasted effort (primarily due to their dependence on product roadmaps).

Second, they are not putting enough concentrated brainpower behind the most important problems to achieve the results their company needs.

You may wonder how it is that so many companies ...