Managing a Bad Product Strategy

How to Identify and Navigate Chaos in your Product Strategy

Imagine if the above didn’t have to happen…

We’ve all been there: the feeling of dread when nothing you’re doing seems to work, clients are angry, sales is furious, and you are swimming in a sea of feedback while being pulled in a million different directions. Although we don’t talk about it, most product managers will be handed a bad strategy at some point in their career and be expected to succeed.

Having worked across companies of different industries/sizes/goals, I wanted to distill a general framework for evaluating product strategy across industries and company sizes. So by way of an illustrative analogy, here are the ways to both diagnose the symptoms of a bad strategy, and the tools I’ve used to help fix them.

Framing the Product Maze

Let’s start by looking at this maze, which represents the constant state any PM finds themselves in at a given point in time. Much like a maze, there are countless potential paths to choose from, but most of those paths lead to dead-ends rather than exits. But what exactly is at the end of a maze for a…