Product strategy is a combo of hands-on and intellectual work. Outcomes and processes are sometimes fluffy - after all, we’re trying to come up with an idea of what a product should do. When the “fog of war” surrounds you, you can still follow some principles to ensure you provide value to clients and help your colleagues deliver the product.

Collaboration

Yep, we're starting with the most “Gary V LinkedIn entrepreneurial influencer” principle of them all. You need to work with others to set the strategy, validate both problem and solution, and provide business value to clients.

Sync with your project team often, show them your work, and proactively ask for their opinion and input. You must show some deliverables (Review of deliverables) to other project team members. But don’t stop there. Ask for feedback on anything that affects other people’s work.

Besides your project team, you can rely on your colleagues to provide you with feedback, ideas, and pointers. A quick call or ping goes a long way.

Strong opinions, loosely held

Your job is to create order out of chaos with only a limited amount of information. There's no “one size fits all” regarding product strategy. Each project will throw its own curveball that you need to hit.

This means you need to be a nimble and open-minded thinker.

How does that look in practice? You’ll create an initial hypothesis about the product based on your experience and expertise. And you’ll keep tweaking it based on the signals you’re getting from stakeholders, SMEs, competitors, and users.

Knowing if you should persist or change your opinion is a skill you’ll learn as you go. You should fall somewhere between sticking to your guns no matter what and being a yes-man.

High agency (and saying no)

You’re not just a go-getter. You’re a change initiator. You need to see the potential and a vision of a better future for the project and the product you’re working on. Even when the immediate next step isn’t clear, you should be looking for a way forward.

The high agency is just that, your belief that you can affect what the product will be, what value it’ll provide to its users, and how it will compete in the market. Out of that belief comes the drive to validate problems and solutions, ideate value propositions, and thoroughly test them with users.

Part of the high agency is confidently saying no to clients and other team members. Strategy isn’t just about finding the right direction to pursue. It’s also about discarding the product directions that don’t make business and user sense.