01:28
product strategy
The most common product strategy mistake is not having a well-thought-through strategy at all — building and shipping features without a defined win condition — while a second common mistake is the opposite failure: staying at a high, theoretical, "MBA approach" level of market analysis without ever translating it into concrete plans, bets, and investments.
The most common mistake is not having a strategy, or not having a well thought through strategy.
Personal example: the speaker started a company called LocalMind about 10-12 years earlier, an app built on top of Foursquare and Gowalla that let users talk to people checked in all over the world (e.g., asking if a bar across town was cool).
Looking back, LocalMind never really had much of a strategy to win.
Winning, in hindsight, should have meant becoming the app people default to whenever they're going out and trying to figure out where to go.
A real strategy would have named that destination and then worked out the steps needed to execute toward it.
Instead, the team just kept building features and shipping things that made the product more useful and more fun, without it heading toward any kind of direction.
The other common mistake with strategy is focusing too much on high-level theory — a kind of MBA approach of discussing market trends and pontificating on emerging things.
That high-level-theory mistake means staying very high level and never getting to actual concrete plans, recommendations, bets, and investments — which happens a lot.
Making a product more useful and more fun is not the same as making strategic progress — feature-shipping can feel productive while the product drifts with no defined direction.
The implicit definition of strategy here has two required parts: a clear picture of what winning looks like, and the concrete steps needed to execute toward it — missing either half collapses into one of the two failure modes described.
The two most common strategy failures sit at opposite poles of the same axis: pure execution with no destination (LocalMind) versus pure destination-talk with no execution (the MBA-style approach) — both skip the middle step of translating ambition into a concrete plan.
«the most common mistake is uh not having a strategy and just have not having a well thought through strategy»
— 00:00
«looking back I realized we never really had much of a strategy to to win»
— 00:23
«we just kept building features shipping things that just made the product more useful to people and more fun but it never really was heading towards any kind of Direction»
— 00:45
«the other common mistake with strategy is focus using too much on just like the high level Theory like kind of like an MBA approach of like market trends and pontificating on emerging things and things like that»
— 00:58
«staying very high level and never getting to actual concrete plans and recommendations and Bets and Investments you're going to make that happens a lot»
— 01:16
Reception
No comments are available, so audience reception cannot be determined.
This is a tight, self-critical anecdote (LocalMind) paired with a named contrasting failure mode (MBA-style theorizing), useful as a memorable cautionary framing of strategy mistakes rather than a step-by-step method for building strategy.
01:28