Product Strategy
Decide what should exist, then prove it.
Deciding what to build, for whom and in what order, then testing it against a prototype.
We do product strategy as the start of building a product: what it is, who it’s for, what the first version does and what it deliberately leaves out. Ideas often arrive half-formed, and that’s a good time to start. Then we test those decisions against a working prototype, often within weeks.
If you want the thinking before committing to a build, it can be its own first step.
The early decisions
Settled before the build starts
We’re direct about trade-offs. If a feature won’t pay for itself, or buying beats building, we’ll say so.
The first version
The right level of software
Build, buy or connect
Strategy and AI
Building fast makes the strategy matter more
AI-assisted building does exactly what it’s pointed at, so the expensive mistake now is building the wrong thing well. The upside is that a strategy can be put in front of real people before much money is spent. For products that use AI, we also decide what the AI does, what happens when it’s wrong, and where a person reviews its output.
Product Definition is the full page on this work, and Opportunity Mapping covers where AI and software fit across an organization.