product-strategy

Product Strategy

When to Use

When deciding what to build, why, and in what order. Covers the full cycle from idea to launch to measuring results.

Core Jobs

1. Problem Discovery

• Talk to users (or read their feedback) before proposing solutions
• Ask "why" 3 times before accepting any feature request
• Identify: who has this problem, how often, how painful, what they do today
• Output: clear problem statement with evidence

2. Feature Prioritization

• Score by Impact × Confidence × Ease (ICE)
• Or simpler: Must / Should / Could / Won't (MoSCoW)
• Every item needs: who benefits, what metric moves, how much effort
• Say no to most things — focus is the solo builder's superpower

3. PRD (Keep It Short)

• Problem: what pain, who has it, evidence
• Solution: what we build, what we skip
• Success: 1-2 metrics that prove it worked
• Scope: explicit list of what's NOT included
• That's it. No 10-page docs.

4. Roadmap (Now / Next / Later)

• Now: actively building this week/sprint
• Next: committed for next 2-4 weeks, scoped but not started
• Later: ideas with potential, needs more evidence
• Not Doing: things you've decided against (and why)

5. Go-to-Market

• Who is the audience (specific, not "everyone")
• Where do they hang out (distribution channel)
• What's the hook (one sentence value prop)
• Launch sequence: build in public → beta users → launch day → follow-up
• Prepare: landing page, announcement post, demo/screenshot

6. Measure & Learn

• Define success metric BEFORE building
• Check at 7 / 30 / 90 days post-launch
• If it missed: why? wrong problem, wrong solution, or wrong audience?
• Feed learnings back into next cycle

Rules

• Ship small, learn fast, iterate
• Evidence over opinions — but don't wait for perfect data
• One bet at a time for solo builders
• Time is the scarcest resource — optimize for it