Archives for January 2022

Late 2024 Update to this post: Before I get into this extensive and rather long article, I have to share this book with you. It’s called “No Bullsh*t Strategy: A Founder’s Guide to Gaining Competitive Advantage with a Strategy That Actually Works” by Alex M.H. Smith. Awesome. The whole book is shorter than my article and likely more valuable, though you still need to study at least some of the classics. (Including”On Competition” by Michael Porter, “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters” by Richard Rumelt, and “Blue Ocean Strategy” by Kim and Mauborgne.)

Anyway… to our story…

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Warning. This is about to be a long article. So instead, here’s the tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) version: Here is your vision/mission/strategy all in one sentence… There’s something you want to do in the world because you think it has value and you have a better way of doing it than anyone or better yet, a different way to satisfy some need.

Next, here’s your one sentence goals/objectives/tactics: You have some specific means to accomplish these things.

There. You’re done. You don’t have to go further.

So you really want the full version? OK then…

Why anyone would want to re-hash this topic is a fair question. It came out of a discussion I had with some relatively junior product managers who came to Product, as is often the case, from other specialties. So many management books and courses… So many definitions of the same things. So many years of struggle. And yet… we still have differing definitions, suggestions, and apparently confusion about what seem to be the basics for high level strategy and associated concepts. You can easily search for some of these key words and find other authors with completely opposite viewpoints of each other. But not always explanations as to why. I, perhaps foolishly, think I might understand where some of the confusion has come into play. And since I’ve got what I think might be a path through this, I’m going to give it a shot…

There’s a really long writeup coming, but here’s a summary…

[Read more…]

Several of my past articles have dealt with “When to Work with Software Development Companies” and “How to Work with Software Development Companies.” I’ve been asked to come up with some thoughts about When NOT to work with an outsourced software development company. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve worked for a fairly large software development company in the past. I’m a big fan of using such services for all manner of reasons ranging from cost to flexibility, and so on. In other words, I’m biased towards the value of outsourced software development; at least for some purposes. Still, after some recent conversations and friendly debate with colleagues and others, it’s clear that I haven’t given proper consideration to the other side of that coin. There may be some situations where you may be better off creating or keeping development capabilities in house. So I’m going to go over some of these considerations here. At the same time, I’ll try to inject a few ideas for how to mitigate them where or if possible.

So. What might these issues be? [Read more…]