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Strategy as a Plan for How You Will Win (Olsen's Five-Part Definition)

Dan Olsen's five-part definition of product strategy, given at Google:

1. Strategy is a plan for how you will win — not just a statement of goals.
2. It requires actual decisions about how to reach those goals, not just naming them.
3. It balances customer-centricity with competitive awareness — Olsen's Product Strategy Grid is built explicitly to hold both at once.
4. It has an appropriate, explicitly chosen time horizon (1 vs. 3 vs. 5 years yield different strategies).
5. Above all, it names what you will say no to. Olsen invokes Steve Jobs's framing of focus here: 'People think focus means saying yes to the thing you're focusing on... it means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are... for me, strategy means saying no.'

A strategy document that fails one of these checks — especially #5, naming an explicit rejection — probably isn't a finished strategy yet. Compare Strategy as a Route to Continuing Power in a Significant Market (Helmer) (Helmer's definition) as another named formal definition of strategy.

Из тем: Strategy, Vision, and the Decision Stack