| name | product-strategy |
| description | Develop or critique a product strategy by diagnosing the central obstacle, choosing a guiding policy, and defining coherent actions and non-goals. Use when priorities compete, a roadmap lacks rationale, a team has goals but no choices, or a strategy reads like aspirations or a feature list. |
Product Strategy
Turn evidence about a consequential obstacle into a focused approach and a reinforcing set of product choices.
Required context
- Product, market, and target customer
- Business objective and time horizon
- Current performance and evidence
- Capabilities, constraints, and asymmetric advantages
- Active initiatives and commitments
Workflow
- Define the outcome and identify what currently prevents it.
- Separate symptoms, causes, constraints, and uncertainties.
- Write a diagnosis that explains the situation and narrows the problem.
- Identify leverage: a change, capability, position, or concentration of effort that could multiply impact.
- Choose a guiding policy: the general approach for overcoming the diagnosed obstacle.
- Specify explicit non-goals and trade-offs.
- Define coherent actions whose effects reinforce one another.
- Translate the strategy into near-term product bets and decision rules, not a fixed feature inventory.
- Name evidence that would invalidate the diagnosis or policy and set a review trigger.
Output contract
Return:
- Strategic outcome
- Diagnosis and supporting evidence
- Central obstacle
- Guiding policy
- Coherent actions and owners
- Non-goals and trade-offs
- Advantages or leverage used
- Risks, measures, invalidation evidence, and review date
Bad-strategy audit
Reject or revise strategies dominated by:
- Fluff or undefined language
- Goals mistaken for strategy
- Failure to face the central obstacle
- A long list of unrelated priorities
- Actions that compete for the same scarce resource
- Claims of advantage without a mechanism
Quality gate
- The diagnosis could be wrong and can be tested.
- The policy makes a real choice.
- Actions implement the policy and reinforce one another.
- Non-goals protect focus.
- Measures indicate whether the obstacle is changing.
Source grounding
Operational synthesis informed by Rumelt's strategy kernel, leverage, and proximate-objective concepts in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, plus product-strategy and outcome principles from Inspired and Escaping the Build Trap.
