5 ms·

The Product Strategy Stack

59 points by freddier 6y ago

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I don't think I understood any of this. I mean I get the idea. But there were just words and metaphors and ... the examples were not illustrative they were just ... there. I was hoping for some useful insight (I am doing roadmapping at work now) but nothing meaningful came out here. Sorry.
- libertine 6y ago
  I thought it was pretty straight forward, nothing groundbreaking for anyone who already had a good understanding of this "stack", which I don't see as a stack, more of a organization/management framework that has been used for many years, and lectured in many degrees. The thing is that a lot of people always thought much of this business "fluff" was there just to justify some obsolete positions and tasks, like: vision and mission statements... that's not for the cool cats - those are wandering and then make a blog post like they made some amazing finding and try to give it a catchy name, but when you squeeze it you find out it's just something some dude in the 60's already defined/coined that thing, that you learned about 10 years ago. And then they try to mash everything into product strategy...which is also the business strategy...which is not even a strategy when you peal it off. So the article serves it's purpose, for people who never learned any of this, or for those who took it for granted/overvalued, or those who simply got it wrong from the start. No shame in any of this.
rl3 6y ago
>... the CPO at Tinder, ... Tinder is really good at having a lot of users, and making money for itself. Very little of that success has to do with the quality or strategy of the product, beyond perhaps the implemention of dark patterns. I could probably write an entire thesis exploring how product thinking bullshit like this enables half-baked visions—and all the dynamics that encourage them—to rot society from within. Speaking of vision, the article provides a definition of the term alongside that of mission, then proceeds to quote a 2017 letter from Zuckerberg: "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Yes, I'm sure that really rang true after a bunch of mentally ill people trashed his own country's capitol, brought together in part by his technology.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  I really feel like the vast majority of "product strategy" is outright harmful to the actual customerbase. The classic example is when someone brings up gamification... for a B2B SaaS app. For the love of god - vertical SaaS users want a product that helps them do their actual job. They don't want to be treated like CandyCrush players. Re Facebook, I'm sure you'll disagree, but I think you're being overly harsh. It's easy to focus on one bad event and think that it defines the entire platform (and yes I know, there are more examples). But think about how much good does happen on Facebook - planning social events, communication across oceans and countries, etc. Facebook doesn't _cause_ anything. I think what you're mad at is human nature. There were plenty of riots and extreme political views before Facebook.
  - rl3 6y ago
    >Facebook doesn't _cause_ anything. I think what you're mad at is human nature. There were plenty of riots and extreme political views before Facebook. Failing to account for human nature at this point on a platform that now has billions of users is tantamount to gross negligence on a global scale. It's a business that fundamentally modifies how humans connect and relate. The platform is optimized for wasting people's time and attention on anything it can, so long as that translates to ad dollars. That's shameful at best. Those ad dollars then drive what is now a behemoth publicly-traded company. Because of that, no one's going to fuck with the golden goose in any significant way—it's too profitable and the organization's structure is solidified via way of supporting it, because it's proven to be extremely profitable. This is how product strategy rots society at a basal level. It becomes entrenched and serves only to reinforce itself at the behest of external market factors, combined with a certain moral apathy that starts at the top. It's no wonder really, Zuck started out with a silver spoon and succeeded at a young age. His life experience was never congruent with robust character development, nor empathy in any true sense.
- shalmanese 6y ago
  > Tinder is really good at having a lot of users, and making money for itself. Very little of that success has to do with the quality or strategy of the product, beyond perhaps the implemention of dark patterns. I find this kind of thinking a lot which is "I hate the goals of this group of people, therefore everyone involved must be idiots" and I find it deplorable. Tinder is full of many smart people who have put out some thoughtful design decisions that are real innovations. In particular, there's an awful lot of ML that goes on behind the scenes that is showing you matches that are most likely to match with you. They're worth learning from, as is every other broadly successful business as the problems they're solving have applicability into domains extending outside of dating, regardless of what you think of the morality of their day to day operations.
gloryless 6y ago
This was so bizarre. It was like... Describing the basics of strategy, and saying what strategy should be, but then never actually discussing anything but mission orientation. The whole "stack" thing was meaningless, ripped from tech discussions with actual dependencies and rehashed without understanding. Like the rest of this bullshit MBA consulting If you would like to read about actual product strategy methods, there are a ton of good books available. Check out Richard Rumelt for the source of where these basics are ripped. Simon Wardley has some really deep knowledge if you want to go down the tech strategy rabbit hole.

59 points by freddier 6y ago

I don't think I understood any of this. I mean I get the idea. But there were just words and metaphors and ... the examples were not illustrative they were just ... there. I was hoping for some useful insight (I am doing roadmapping at work now) but nothing meaningful came out here. Sorry.

libertine 6y ago
I thought it was pretty straight forward, nothing groundbreaking for anyone who already had a good understanding of this "stack", which I don't see as a stack, more of a organization/management framework that has been used for many years, and lectured in many degrees. The thing is that a lot of people always thought much of this business "fluff" was there just to justify some obsolete positions and tasks, like: vision and mission statements... that's not for the cool cats - those are wandering and then make a blog post like they made some amazing finding and try to give it a catchy name, but when you squeeze it you find out it's just something some dude in the 60's already defined/coined that thing, that you learned about 10 years ago. And then they try to mash everything into product strategy...which is also the business strategy...which is not even a strategy when you peal it off. So the article serves it's purpose, for people who never learned any of this, or for those who took it for granted/overvalued, or those who simply got it wrong from the start. No shame in any of this.

rl3 6y ago

>... the CPO at Tinder, ... Tinder is really good at having a lot of users, and making money for itself. Very little of that success has to do with the quality or strategy of the product, beyond perhaps the implemention of dark patterns. I could probably write an entire thesis exploring how product thinking bullshit like this enables half-baked visions—and all the dynamics that encourage them—to rot society from within. Speaking of vision, the article provides a definition of the term alongside that of mission, then proceeds to quote a 2017 letter from Zuckerberg: "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." Yes, I'm sure that really rang true after a bunch of mentally ill people trashed his own country's capitol, brought together in part by his technology.

amw-zero 6y ago
I really feel like the vast majority of "product strategy" is outright harmful to the actual customerbase. The classic example is when someone brings up gamification... for a B2B SaaS app. For the love of god - vertical SaaS users want a product that helps them do their actual job. They don't want to be treated like CandyCrush players. Re Facebook, I'm sure you'll disagree, but I think you're being overly harsh. It's easy to focus on one bad event and think that it defines the entire platform (and yes I know, there are more examples). But think about how much good does happen on Facebook - planning social events, communication across oceans and countries, etc. Facebook doesn't _cause_ anything. I think what you're mad at is human nature. There were plenty of riots and extreme political views before Facebook.
- rl3 6y ago
  >Facebook doesn't _cause_ anything. I think what you're mad at is human nature. There were plenty of riots and extreme political views before Facebook. Failing to account for human nature at this point on a platform that now has billions of users is tantamount to gross negligence on a global scale. It's a business that fundamentally modifies how humans connect and relate. The platform is optimized for wasting people's time and attention on anything it can, so long as that translates to ad dollars. That's shameful at best. Those ad dollars then drive what is now a behemoth publicly-traded company. Because of that, no one's going to fuck with the golden goose in any significant way—it's too profitable and the organization's structure is solidified via way of supporting it, because it's proven to be extremely profitable. This is how product strategy rots society at a basal level. It becomes entrenched and serves only to reinforce itself at the behest of external market factors, combined with a certain moral apathy that starts at the top. It's no wonder really, Zuck started out with a silver spoon and succeeded at a young age. His life experience was never congruent with robust character development, nor empathy in any true sense.
shalmanese 6y ago
> Tinder is really good at having a lot of users, and making money for itself. Very little of that success has to do with the quality or strategy of the product, beyond perhaps the implemention of dark patterns. I find this kind of thinking a lot which is "I hate the goals of this group of people, therefore everyone involved must be idiots" and I find it deplorable. Tinder is full of many smart people who have put out some thoughtful design decisions that are real innovations. In particular, there's an awful lot of ML that goes on behind the scenes that is showing you matches that are most likely to match with you. They're worth learning from, as is every other broadly successful business as the problems they're solving have applicability into domains extending outside of dating, regardless of what you think of the morality of their day to day operations.

gloryless 6y ago

This was so bizarre. It was like... Describing the basics of strategy, and saying what strategy should be, but then never actually discussing anything but mission orientation. The whole "stack" thing was meaningless, ripped from tech discussions with actual dependencies and rehashed without understanding. Like the rest of this bullshit MBA consulting If you would like to read about actual product strategy methods, there are a ton of good books available. Check out Richard Rumelt for the source of where these basics are ripped. Simon Wardley has some really deep knowledge if you want to go down the tech strategy rabbit hole.