Lore

Three Ingredients of Good Strategy: Focus, Transparency, Bet

Overview

A real product strategy (as opposed to wishful thinking) has three ingredients:

1. Focus — explicit choices about what to do and what not to do. A strategy that doesn't name its exclusions isn't a strategy.
2. Transparency — the underlying data and reasoning are shown, not just the conclusion. This is what separates a real strategy from an assertion of belief.
3. Placing a bet — committing to a direction without a guarantee it will pay off. Strategy is a wager, not a certainty.

The wishful-thinking anti-pattern

A strategy missing ingredient 2 (transparency) collapses into "wishful thinking": a stated belief about what will work with no real analysis of how or why it will happen. This is one of the most common failure modes teams present as a "strategy."

Best-practice artifact

See written-narrative-strategy-artifact for the concrete document format (Amazon's six-pager) used to force all three ingredients into the open.

Quote

"a lot of product strategies are just wishful thinking. They're just wishful thinking. There is no real analysis about how and why that's going to happen."