We begin with a simple but consequential premise; whatever an organizational unit actually achieves at a meaningful level—meaning; surviving, scaling or winning, is the output of its defacto strategy. Not its stated strategy. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Product strategy serves two recipients: users who need value delivered, and a business that must remain viable. Ignoring either isn't strategy:

Strategy must operate entirely within actual constraints, not projected ones open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Government digital product organizations that master strategic positioning across competing constituencies don’t just survive budget cuts and reorganizations—they become essential strategic assets that transform how government serves its citizens. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Government internal product organizations cannot and should not operate as “product-led” in the Silicon Valley sense because they exist in a fundamentally different strategic context. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Most organizations treat strategy as a document to produce. They should treat it as a product to use. The difference isn’t semantic, it’s the difference between product strategy as theater and product strategy as a tool. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Can your team clearly articulate what you’ve deliberately chosen not to do — and why those trade-offs strengthen your position? If not, no framework will save you. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Goals, assumptions, and insights form a continuous validation loop, not a linear sequence. substack.com/@theedproduc...

Goals are only useful when solving the right problem. Organizations must: articulate clear vision, develop strategy specifying how they’ll achieve it, set goals measuring progress. Skipping to goals without this foundation creates “busy work” to hit targets without moving the business forward.

The research suggests a diagnostic heuristic: if prioritization debates last more than 30 minutes or require complex scoring with more than three variables, you have a strategy problem, not a prioritization problem. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Playbooks and best practices change, but these truths don’t. A winning product strategy ensures the product is available where customers are, consistently trustworthy, and genuinely complementary to their lives or work. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/t...

The most successful companies follow principles, not practices. They demonstrate mastery across levels and adapt continuously and recognize principles are provisional, requiring continuous updating as patterns emerge, effect sizes decline, and paradigms shift. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

The constraint isn’t talent supply—it’s organizational capability to leverage talent effectively. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

The Foundation: Competitive Context Where are we competing, and why should we win?

How to build the PM-engineering relationships that actually ship great products open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Focus on the “silent parts” of a product to build customer confidence, and scale trust across your base. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/h...

Most enterprises fail at orchestration because they optimize individual components—better tools, clearer processes, stronger teams—without understanding how these elements reinforce or undermine each other. 1/

Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon consistently rank among the most desirable tech employers partly because their internal development experience rivals or exceeds what developers experience at smaller, supposedly more agile companies. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/p...

The Performance Paradox: Your best intentions are sabotaging breakthrough results. You need to innovate faster, but you're trapped in systems that demand certainty for breakthrough decisions. What performance trap is quietly killing your breakthroughs?

Most organizations think they have strategy when they actually have tactics. They have goals, initiatives, and roadmaps—but no integrated logic connecting where to compete with how to win.

The most honest words ever spoken in a boardroom—and the beginning of real strategic thinking. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/w...

Strategy is a coherent system of choices that reinforce each other, not a roadmap or feature list. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Becoming a true product company requires three fundamental changes: 1. Change how you build. 2. Change how you solve problems. 3. Change how you choose which problems to solve. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/19/t...

“We’re customer-obsessed, data-driven, and agile.”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this trinity of modern business virtue-signaling, I could fund my own unicorn. But here’s what makes this particularly tragic: every single one of your competitors is saying the exact same thing. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Horizontal alignment in product organizations requires deliberate architecture decisions that prevent Conway’s Law pitfalls while enabling team autonomy. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/18/s...

The most successful product organizations—Amazon, Google, Netflix—have mastered a sophisticated alignment framework that enables both team autonomy and strategic coherence through four interconnected dimensions: open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Amazon’s evolution from two-pizza teams to Single-Threaded Leaders (STLs) demonstrates how dedicated leaders with “appropriate skills, authority, and experience” matter more than team size limits. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/14/b...

Your transformation isn’t about becoming “product-led.” It’s about making better strategic choices about where to compete and how to win, then organizing empowered teams to execute those choices effectively. Everything else is just organizational theater. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

Fundamental truth is that users don’t want more apps; they want their problems solved. They seek a single, seamless digital service that understands their context & helps them achieve their goals, regardless of which “app” they are technically using. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/14/b...

Product strategy is not a roadmap—it is the discipline of deliberate choice. It is the bridge between vision and execution, ensuring every decision strengthens competitive position. In order to Win. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

For years, the dominant model for software has been the application. We built product organizations around discrete, empowered teams, each owning an app or a feature set. This model fueled incredible innovation and agility. However 👇 open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...

So, traditional empowered product teams face insurmountable coordination complexity at scale, creating decision bottlenecks, architectural constraints, and competence misalignment that cannot be solved through team restructuring alone productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/14/b...

The tension between platform investment and product development represents one of the most consequential strategic choices facing modern organizations. 1/

Platform-product resource allocation is a strategic choice problem, not a technical architecture decision. Orgs that treat it as the latter consistently under-perform because they optimize for operational efficiency rather than competitive advantage. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/13/t..

The ultimate test of good product management isn’t shipping features on time or hitting metrics—it’s building products that create lasting competitive advantage while serving customer needs better than any alternative.

Reinertsen represents a fascinating case study in the tension between operational sophistication and strategic clarity. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/10/w...

My analysis points out that founder mode, properly understood, is not anti-strategic but rather represents a more integrated approach to strategic choice-making. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/07/f...

When teams chase “the one feature,” they typically make three critical errors:

The most successful products serve a narrow audience exceptionally well, not a broad audience adequately. When teams believe they’re “one feature away,” they’re often trying to serve everyone—a strategy that leads inevitably to serving no one particularly well.

When product teams believe they’re “one feature away,” they’re operating from a flawed mental model. They’ve confused activity with progress, tactical enhancement with strategic positioning, and feature parity with competitive advantage. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/09/t...

The most important “feature” any product can have is strategic clarity: a clear understanding of what problems it solves, for whom, and how this creates defensible value in the competitive landscape. productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/09/t...

The framework enables organizations to significantly reduce custom report requests and improve customer satisfaction by empowering users with real-time, self-service reporting capabilities. www.mindtheproduct.com/building-dat...