If you ever read a strategic document and were left with a feeling of “ok, so what does this actually mean?” you are not alone. Many companies look at their strategy as a general vision, potentially with forecasts and trends if they try to get more detailed, but without any bottom-line conclusions. Last week I wrote about what a good product strategy should include, and one of the components is decisions about what you are going to do (and what you decide not to do, which is at least as important). This is a key part of making your product strategy an actionable document and not just nice background information. If only it was that easy 🙂

Complex decisions are always hard to make, and product strategy ones are among the most complex you can find. The first step in making the decision is to understand the world you are living in – both externally (the market) and internally (what the company needs). That in and of itself is a hard task since there are so many things to take into consideration. Some of them even contradict each other. But that’s not the trickiest part.

There is one other factor that typically prevents people from both understanding the world they live in and making decisions about where to go from here, and that is the need to give up on their ideal view, vision, or desire. When expectation meets reality, oftentimes things don’t work well together. But a good product strategy must be rooted in reality (or an informed and well-explained belief about what reality would look like in a while), and when leaders are unwilling to let go of their ideal expectations, no real decisions can be made. In fact, sometimes it prevents you from even seeing the world around you as it is. When what is out there is not what you want to see, it is easy to convince yourself that the world is wrong. For some people, acknowledging that the world indicates something different than they expected already puts them in a very inconvenient place, and they try to avoid it at all costs. In most cases, this process happens in your subconscious mind, so you even don’t know that you are doing that.

Unfortunately, as a product leader, not only you have to be able to let go of your ideal desire in order to make real decisions, but also in most cases it is your job to convince everyone else to do so and let go of their ideals. To help you do that, here are the necessary steps that you must take and lead others through.

Acknowledge the Gap

There could be many reasons for a gap between the company’s original ideas and desires to reality. It could be, for example, that you had a grand vision from the day you started and were even able to raise solid amounts of money around it, but now the market is pulling you elsewhere. It could be that what you really want to do requires you to develop a whole new technology, that would take years to mature but you need revenue now. It might be that you want to serve the entire market, but you end up chasing requirements from multiple market segments and unable to fully satisfy any of the segments. 

This first step here is similar to the first step of the 12-step program for addiction recovery: first, you have to admit that you have a problem. State clearly that there is a conflict between various strategic considerations, that could be of equal importance. Talk about it out loud, and explain the concerns in detail.

Doing so serves you in two ways: first, it allows a broader discussion that might resolve itself in the form of a clear path forward that is actually a minor compromise. But more importantly, it sets the stage for compromises that need to be made. When people see (and debate) the fact that these desires conflict and even contradict each other, it might take them a while but eventually, they would not only understand but also accept the fact that something has got to give.

Note that at this point you don’t need to have a good solution to the conflict. Merely getting everyone to acknowledge that there is one goes a long way. Understanding that the original ideal idea cannot yield takes you 80% of the way to a resolution.

Frame the Discussion

To resolve a complex situation, it is important to understand which decision is it that you are really looking to make. When product strategy is on the table, there are so many things that could be relevant: are you looking to make your next big bet, or are you looking to scale your current success? Do you need to decide on an immediate next step, or are you building a long-term vision that would make sense? 

The goals of the product strategy discussion as well as the hard constraints you have must be stated as clearly as possible. For example, if you are running out of money, and must start working on the next round yesterday, that’s a hard constraint with little to no flexibility, so everything else has to work around it.

Stating the boundaries of the box as clearly as possible is an important step on your way to foster out-of-the-box thinking. With everything stated explicitly in front of you it is easier for everyone to debate your real situation and dwell in it for a while. This also reinforces the gap stated in the first step and brings people closer to understanding which compromises they are and aren’t willing to make.

Take a Trip Into the Future

To make the actual decision you need to start considering the options. Here is a method that can help you make the decision more holistically:

List down the potential next steps you can take as a company. But instead of deciding between the steps themselves, develop each and every one of them to a full path into the future, and decide between the paths.

This exercise isn’t easy, because it requires you to imagine possible futures that could be way ahead of you, with so many things that would change until you actually get there. To make it easier, choose the best and worst path for each first step. Ask yourself (and the leadership team you are working with) what is the best-case scenario if we take that step? 

For example, if we decide to start with SMBs while we know that the real money is in enterprises, what would be the happiest path? It can be something like that: we start with SMBs, we succeed there and we have happy customers. Some of these grow into larger companies and we grow with them. People who have worked with us in smaller companies and were super happy now move to work for much bigger companies, so they open the door for us there. We are able to scale and mature our product so that it fits what enterprises need (that as you know is very different from what SMBs typically need). The first few enterprise customers love us too, and now other enterprises are interested in working with us since they heard that this wouldn’t be the first time we are doing this. This, of course, is a very generic description that could fit almost any company dealing with the question of where to start, you should make yours more specific. Do the same for the worst-case scenario too. 

This allows you to better understand each of the options you have, and also create boundaries that would allow you to manage the risk. Sometimes the worst-case scenario isn’t that bad or is worth the risk. You might find out that there is no real harm in trying something that has a great potential for success, as long as you have some fallback that you make sure to keep. In many cases, after you have thought things through, there is an inevitable next step that makes sense regardless of which path you take. This is often a good resolution in case the best solution didn’t reveal itself naturally. Remember that in many cases, the real decision is simply what to do next. Every journey begins with a single step. What’s yours?