Strategic Thinking for Product Managers
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Integrating strategic thinking into your product development cycle
Long-term thinking is not only the province of product leadership. The contingencies are many, and product managers who can anticipate them are in a key position to contribute to the success of the product throughout its lifecycle. Enhancing their strategic thinking skills will help them bridge the gap between their organization’s vision and product execution.
Join expert Bandan Jot Singh to learn how to maximize your effectiveness over the long haul by integrating strategic thinking into your product development cycle. Through real-world examples and simple frameworks, you’ll explore the important elements of product strategy: thinking in bets, hypothesis building, understanding market needs and creating opportunities, product positioning, measuring success, prioritization, and iterative execution. You’ll discover how to set goals, how to align your teams within a framework for success, how to pivot if and when it becomes necessary, and more.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:
- How to develop hypothesis-based strategic thinking
- How to assess success for various hypotheses and value propositions
- How to iterate on your strategy
- How to bridge the strategy and execution gap
And you’ll be able to:
- Utilize frameworks to come up with strategy narratives
- Iterate your approaches and become flexible in your strategic planning
This live event is for you because...
- You aspire to be a product manager.
- You’re a product manager who wants to improve your strategic thinking skills.
Prerequisites
- Up to seven years of experience in product management
Recommended preparation:
- Take Fundamentals of Product Management (video course)
- Take Product Management in 90 Minutes (live online course with Matt LeMay)
- Read Product Management For Dummies (book)
Recommended follow-up:
- Read Experiment-Driven Product Development (book)
- Read Empowered (book)
- Read _Escaping the Build Trap _(book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Coming up with product strategies (65 minutes)
- Presentation: The significance of product strategy and various methods for developing them; recognizing the value of hypothesis-driven thinking
- Hands-on exercise: Complete a strategy template for your organization or a hypothetical instance
- Break
Iterating on product strategy (45 minutes)
- Presentation: The significance of setting measurable goals; how to monitor your strategy using success metrics; changing or reinforcing your product strategy; case study of a company that pivoted its strategy
Bridging the gap between strategy and execution (30 minutes)
- Presentation: Common reasons for the disconnect between strategy and execution; objectives and key results (OKR) framework for team alignment; other approaches to ensure that the whole organization is aligned with strategic goals
Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)
Your Instructor
Bandan Jot Singh
Bandan Jot Singh is a product leader with global reach, working with leading technology firms, such as Booking.com and Gojek, across Europe, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and India. He has led product teams (product managers, designers, and researchers) for both technology startups and regulated financial institutions. Bandan also writes product case studies on Productify.substack.com and shares product knowledge @bandanjot.