Shipping Greatness

Chapter 1. How to Build a Great Mission and Strategy

SHIPPING IS ABOUT MEETING customer needs well and quickly, in addition to becoming rich and famous. Your mission, therefore, is to solve a customer problem. Your strategy is your unique approach to meeting a need that a group of people—a market segment—shares. It sounds pretty simple, and it is, in theory. Driving a racecar is pretty simple in theory, too—just brake at the right point, turn in at the right point, accelerate at the right point. In practice, figuring out how to drive a racetrack at a car’s peak performance is very hard, just like discovering exactly what customers need and aligning your mission and strategy with that need. To accomplish these tasks, you’ll need some special skills and a very careful focus on a few important things. So let’s break them down a bit and give you the tools you’ll need for this special task.

Start by finding a big need that a lot of people share.

How to Find the Right Need to Meet

The “wow, this is really cool; let’s make it!” road to product definition does not even come close to the wealth, fame, and success road signs. Your business likely caters to a segment of customers who have many different problems; how do you identify the critical problem you are going to solve first? Let’s try driving the road backward, starting with those who are actually successful, famous, and yes, ridiculously wealthy.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has made a small fortune for his company and shareholders by constantly ...