How to conquer the dreaded feedback: You’re not thinking strategically.

PM 101 — where we all start

When I was 22 and an APM, strategy was a vague concept. It sounded important but I wasn’t sure what it meant. My first product was Gmail and my first project was vacation autoresponder. It was a feature a lot of users wanted and success was clearly defined as shipping at a high quality bar quickly. So my job was to:

1. Think through the details so the product is designed to meet user need. (Even a small feature involve a lot of detailed decisions. I remember a heated debate on how often we sent an auto response.)
2. Project management work to help the team ship a high quality product quickly. (What are the dependencies, what are the high priority bugs? How can I help the eng team?)

That’s basically PM 101, skills all PMs need to master.

But it’s not enough (the strategic wall)

About 5 years into my career as a PM. I was working on Facebook’s first generation mobile products. My engineering team was amazing and we were shipping all the time. We embraced the Facebook motto of “Move fast and break things”. I loved my job and my team. But I kept getting this feedback:

Rose, you are great at getting stuff done and rallying a team, but you’re not being strategic.

Or this feedback which I hated even more.

For this next phase of the product, we need to be more visionary and creative!

It was frustrating and I had no idea how to become “visionary or strategic”. The biggest hurdle was being humble and putting myself in a growth mindset. I learned a lot by watching and listening to people who are great at strategy, as well as making decisions and analyzing the results of those decisions.

A helping hand — Product Strategy 101

So my goal today is to save everyone a few years by providing a basic framework for product strategy. This framework isn’t meant to be a fill in the blank worksheet. The PM role is a combination of art and science. The science comes from hard work understanding the market, the users, the team, and the technology. The art comes from intuition, experience, and our own creative spark. But it’s nice to get a little help. So let’s try to break down the problem.

First, what is strategy. Strategy is an intentional plan with priorities that gets us to a goal. We’re generally trying to answer these three questions.

• What are the specific outcomes/goals we are targeting?
• Given our goals, why are we building the products/features we are building? Just as important: what are we NOT doing and why?
• What is the best path to our goals?

Notice, we’re emphasizing a lot the why and what vs the how.

Step 1. Do the work: There is a myth that strategy comes from a “natural genius”. That we just need to lock ourselves in a room and