Strategy requires Context

A good strategy shares the context of why behind the decisions that have been made. People will invent a rationale if you don’t explain it. Sometimes they’ll be right, but other times they won’t. This will lead to ineffective decision making at a product level that can leave leadership confused.

I like the DIBBs model that Spotify created which is really just an adaptation of the process outlined in the book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy.

Data - what does the data tell us?
Insights - what can we infer from this data?
Belief - given these insights what is our view of the market and our customers?
Bets - what markets, geographies, problems and solutions should we chase based on these beliefs?

This model ends up with a set of bets that is similar to many strategies, but the other elements share the context of why the bet has been chosen. And the bets are high level enough to leave a lot of the implementation to teams.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

How To Build A High-Performance Culture Without Culling The Herd by Jeff Gothelf
In cut-throat companies mediocre people remain as they keep a low profile doing just enough and not drawing attention. This leads to poor outcomes.

Salary Models: How Self-Managing Organizations Handle Compensations by Emma de Blok
Emma explored 10 radical salary models that prove there's a way to break free from traditional, hierarchy-based pay systems.

Product Direction

Crafting an Effective Product Strategy by Rory Madden
Using a case study, Rory documents common strategy mistakes as well as highlighting how to make data-informed decisions.

A Culture of Good Decision-Making by Itamar Gilad
Founder mode is popularising centralised decision making. But it doesn't scale well. Itamar discusses how to enable effective decentralised decision-making.

Continuous Research

Why Ramsey Solutions Rotates Engineers in Their Product Trios by Melissa Suzuno
Engineers initially resisted participating in the product trio because they had a flat structure without "leads". But rotating people helped solve this challenge.

4 Common Product Discovery Mistakes (and how to avoid them) by Ant Murphy
Not testing assumptions, spending too long in discovery, only interviewing existing customers and not gathering multiple inputs.

Continuous Design

The Startup Designer by Paul Stamatiou
There's nothing glamorous about being a designer at a startup. Paul outlines the characteristics that make a great startup designer.

The Rise of the Design Engineer by Lee Munroe
Having a Design Engineer (aka UX Engineer) on your team is a game changer. Attention to detail, product quality, velocity, all benefit from this hybrid role.

Continuous Delivery

Building a SaaS product with HTMX by Chatterpulse
An example of building a modern product using "old" technology - Django, Postgres, HTMX and Bootstrap.

You Can't Build Interactive Web Apps Except as Single Page Applications... And Other Myths by Tony Alaribe
The web platform has improved so much that a lot of the drivers for SPAs no longer exist.

UXDX EMEA:
Back to the Origin: Navigating the Pivot from Retail to Curated Marketplace for Scalable Success

Dan will share the story of Not On The High Street strategically pivoting back to their origin as a curated marketplace and how their founding purpose is shaping their future. The talk will detail the tactical decisions that underpin this transition and their broader implications for scaling technology and product strategy.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Check out more upcoming community events 

Video of the Week:
Design Driven Leadership

Chris Avore, Head of Design at Northwestern Mutual, explores the challenges of implementing product process change in mature organizations. He discusses how to shift from a rigid, predictability-focused approach to one that embraces emergence and adaptability using practical strategies including the use of product and design briefs, structured Figma boards, and standardized file organization. Check it out now👇👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: What type of vision do you have for your product?

The majority of people have a business focused one-liner, in fact 54.5% of people have a one-liner product vision. I think that that is a missed opportunity. The product vision is an opportunity for customers and employees to get excited about where you’re going.

Although that does mean that 45% of people do have more detailed product visions. As one person commented “We have an entire presentation plus a short video”. Having that level of detail will reduce misunderstandings and remove those unnecessary conversations where people debate the simplest of details.

It is not that hard to create a draft, Day-in-the-life vision for your product. If you don’t have one in place, try to create it and socialise it to see if everyone is on the same page. Worst case scenario you learn that you completely misunderstood and you will be better aligned going forward.