Make Strategy Your Side Project - Follow Up Story

Follow through where others don't

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are exclusive to premium subscribers of Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about doing strategy a bit at a time:

Make Strategy Your Side Project

What Prompted This Article?

When it comes to strategy, I have a tendency to procrastinate. Usually, there is something of higher priority that keeps me from doing strategic work.

I enjoy doing strategic work. Product managers’ performance depends on strategy and vision. Why do I procrastinate doing something fun and linked to my performance?

I delay strategy work because:

• Feedback - everyone has an opinion about the strategy

• Interruptions - deep thinking gets disrupted by IMs, emails and meetings

• Delays - other urgent work is pre-empted to think about strategy

• No feedback - strategy is too early or doesn’t matter

• Completion - hard to tell when you finish

I decided to trick myself into doing strategy by breaking down the initiative into small parts. Here are the small parts I defined to stop procrastinating:

Would this work in the real world with many competing priorities?

What Happened After This Article?