Vision to Value: Strategy in Action

If there’s one word that causes a lot of confusion in the product world, it’s strategy. Everyone agrees that it’s important. Most people say they have one. But if you scratch the surface, you find that not everyone can agree on what it actually means. And if you question a few PMs in your company, you might quickly realize that not everyone can clearly articulate what your specific product strategy is—or how their everyday work connects to it.

For the Vision to Value themed sessions, our goal was to bring some clarity to the topic of strategy. How can you make sure that vision and strategy are not detached artifacts, but values that drive teams to action?

In case you missed it, this year’s Product at Heart lineup featured four themed sessions:

• From Metrics to Meaning: Data Driven Product Decisions

• Vision to Value: Strategy in Action

• True Change: Case Studies in Product Transformation 

• AI in Practice: Insights for the Road Ahead

The Vision to Value themed sessions were designed to help make the concept of strategy more tangible and less abstract. The speakers drew on their lived experiences, sharing their insights and lessons they’ve learned from developing and transforming product strategies.

This themed session featured three 20-minute talks. We heard from:

• Yi-Wei Ang, CPO at talabat

• Stephanie Leue, CPO at Ringier Medien Schweiz

• Andrew Skotzko, Product Leadership Coach & Strategy Advisor

In this post, we’ll share some highlights from each talk. If you’d like to explore any of the content in more detail, make sure you check out the recordings from each session.

• Yi-Wei’s talk: Strategic Tempo: When to Slow Down, and When to Speed Up

• Stephanie’s talk: The Strategy Trap: Untold Realities of Strategy in a Complex Organization

• Andrew’s talk: Living in Bets: Get Out of the Control Trap and Into the Strategy Cycle

Yi-Wei Ang: Strategic Tempo: When to Slow Down, and When to Speed Up

When you think about strategy, your first instinct might be to focus on what it is (especially given the fact that no one seems to agree on this definition!). But, according to Yi-Wei Ang, Chief Product Officer at talabat, one of the questions many product leaders neglect is the question of when to implement it.

When Yi-Wei joined talabat—a food delivery service with aspirations of owning the instant delivery space—he quickly realized there was a mismatch between the rhythm of the business.

When Yi-Wei joined talabat, he noticed a mismatch in the rhythm of how commercial teams and product teams were operating.

Commercial teams were dealing with intense competition and wrestling with tight unit economics in the high-volume, low-margin world of food delivery. They were making critical decisions that impacted the business every day.

But the product teams, on the other hand, were working on a slower cadence. Driven by the idea of implementing “the right” product practices, they did their building and planning by the quarter.

This mismatch led to an erosion of trust, where the commercial teams felt like product teams didn’t care about them.

Yi-Wei recognized that his job as CPO was to align these two worlds. And one of the ways to achieve that was rethinking the tempo of how they approached strategy. Thinking more commercially meant they couldn’t take a full quarter to solve every problem.

One of Yi-Wei’s biggest learnings was that it’s possible to adjust your speed depending on the particular problem you’re solving and its context.

The slide below offers his takeaways: You should move slower when you’re looking at the big picture of unified company and product strategy or when you’re designing compounding initiatives that layer on top of each other. But you can move fast once the strategy has been defined and you know the next action you need to take, you’ve broken work down into a deliverable “slice” that progresses your strategy, or when additional time won’t give you more insights that guide your decision.

Yi-Wei’s takeaways on when to move slow and when to move fast when it comes to your product strategy.

Check out the rest of Yi-Wei’s talk to discover even more of his practical tips on setting the right tempo for your product strategy, including making use of one-way and two-way-door decisions, running high-contrast experiments, and bringing discovery and delivery together.

Stephanie Leue: The Strategy Trap: Untold Realities of Strategy in a Complex Organization

We often believe that strategy is clear-cut—that templates provide the answers; that crafting it is quick, easy, and universally understood; and that once defined, it remains fixed. But reality tells a different story, especially when joining a company already in full swing.

Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Ringier Medien Schweiz, uncovered the uncomfortable truths about strategy we rarely discuss, including:

• The struggle of shaping strategy while still onboarding

• The illusion of plug-and-play frameworks

• The challenge of balancing immediate fires with long-term direction

• The fact that strategy is never truly “done”

When arriving as a product leader in a new organization, Stephanie has observed what she calls “the evil build trap loop.” It starts with a lack of clear strategy, which means everything feels like a priority, which leads to not having enough time for research and gathering data, which leads to releases that don’t have the desired impact, which erodes trust and leads to even more ideas. And the cycle goes on and on.

Many product leaders find themselves caught in an “evil build trap loop” when they join or inherit an existing product organization.

It’s clear that coming up with a clear and coherent strategy is the key to breaking this cycle. But you can’t simply come up with a strategy and expect things to miraculously improve.

In order for your strategy to be effective, you need to first account for all of the things that are not part of your strategic pillars but that the product team will need to address, including bugs and incidents, tech debt, urgent requests from other teams, and regulatory changes.

And, Stephanie added, there’s so much work that needs to be done before and after coming up with your strategy. “It’s never just the strategy,” says Stephanie.

As a product leader, you can’t think of strategy as a one-time occurrence. There’s a lot of work around, before, and after you come up with your strategy.

Watch Stephanie’s full presentation for more of her learnings on navigating uncertainty, adapting on the go, and embracing the messiness of real-world strategy.

Andrew Skotzko: Living in Bets: Get Out of the Control Trap and Into the Strategy Cycle

There’s a popular saying: If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. But this is not the whole truth, says Product Leadership Coach & Strategy Advisor Andrew Skotzko.

Take a look at any product that failed and you’re unlikely to find people who were planning for that outcome. When failure occurs, it’s usually despite hard work, good intentions, and the best-laid plans—not because of them. And the reason for this is simple: We do not control our customers.

This means there’s a gap between what we’re accountable for and what we can control. And naturally, we try to overcompensate for this gap by planning, because this is an activity that gives us comfort and a sense of control.

“It’s what psychologists call a safety behavior,” says Andrew.  “You do something that makes you feel better in the short term, but it doesn’t actually solve your problem.”

This leads to what Andrew refers to as the “control trap.” The control trap revolves around anxiety-driven behaviors like planning, pushing, chasing, and hedging that don’t solve the real problem.

The gap between what we’re accountable for and what we have control over can often lead us to the “control trap”—a set of behaviors that make us feel better but don’t actually solve our problem.

The reason why this is a trap is that no matter how well we do these things, we still can’t guarantee success. And we might feel like the only thing that will get us out of the trap is more and better planning, but what got us into the trap won’t help us escape it.

What we need to do instead is to shift our thinking. We need to learn to tell the difference between planning and strategy.

Andrew defines strategy as a portfolio of bets, guided by a theory of winning, while plans involve translating those bets into action through artifacts like project plans, roadmaps, goals, and dependencies.

There’s a difference between plans and strategy. While strategy is based on a portfolio of bets and a theory of winning, plans involve translating those bets into specific actions.

How exactly do you make this shift from planning to strategy and start thinking in terms of bets? Check out Andrew’s full talk for his guidance on how to integrate this way of thinking into your work, how to assess where you are today, and a blueprint for how to close the gap.

Want to dive deeper into any of the topics from Product at Heart? Make sure you check out the other posts on our blog and dig into the video archive!