<aside> ℹ️ How do we decide which problems to solve? Answering that question is what product strategy is all about. Defining strategy requires choice, thinking, and effort.

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The importance of strategy

The strategy defines how we are planning to go about accomplishing our goals and objectives. It enables us to determine what problems we should be solving to make the product vision a reality while meeting the needs of the company as we go.

Product strategy is notoriously hard because:

• We need to make tough choices on what’s really important and what we should focus on (and therefore on the things we won’t do)
• We need to generate, identify, and leverage insights
• We need to convert these insights into actions

<aside> ℹ️ Please note that strategy doesn’t tell us how we will solve the problems. That’s what product discovery will do, discovery is all about figuring out the tactics that can actually solve the problems we want to solve.

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Focus

The truly great collateral you get when thinking about strategy is focus. Focus comes from realizing that not everything we do is equally important or impactful, and we must choose which objectives are truly critical for the business.

By not picking your battles and focusing on the few truly critical problems, most of the work going on does not make an impact. And for the truly critical priorirties, there is not enough attention to actually move the needle.

• Marty Cagan

Every company building software knows this: the list of objectives, problems, and initiatives you can pursue is almost endless. In fact, there are more things you cannot do compared to the things you can do. Also, many of these initiatives are truly hard problems and just getting a little time slice and no clear ownership has virtually no chance of making a real impact. Making tough decisions is what allows us to truly focus on these initiatives we believe are worth pursuing.

How our strategy ties into our vision

As you can read in our Product Vision, we are trying to build the leading CareOps platform to support the CareOps lifecycle. Product Vision.

• Click to see the stages and product categories

However, it is impossible to build breadth & depth in each of these stages & categories at the same time. And this is what strategy should help us with, defining what stages & categories we want to invest time & resources in.

Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.

Framework

For each of the stages & product categories above, we weigh two considerations: