The Ed (Product Stratagems)
@theedstratagems.bsky.social
Write about Product Strategy over at
https://substack.com/@theedproductdude?r=6hmhw0&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile
productstratagem.wordpress.com.
Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/share/17GRyfRidp/?mibextid=wwXIfr
https://substack.com/@theedproductdude?r=6hmhw0&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile
productstratagem.wordpress.com.
Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/share/17GRyfRidp/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Government digital product organizations that master strategic positioning across competing constituencies don’t just survive budget cuts and reorganizations—they become essential strategic assets that transform how government serves its citizens.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
The Strategic Trap: Why Government Digital Product Organizations Fail Despite Perfect Agile Execution
Government digital product organizations that master strategic positioning across competing constituencies don’t just survive budget cuts and reorganizations—they become essential strategic assets.
open.substack.com
November 20, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Government digital product organizations that master strategic positioning across competing constituencies don’t just survive budget cuts and reorganizations—they become essential strategic assets that transform how government serves its citizens.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Government internal product organizations cannot and should not operate as “product-led” in the Silicon Valley sense because they exist in a fundamentally different strategic context.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
The Product-Led Government Paradox: Ambitions Meet Institutional Reality
Success lies not in importing Silicon Valley wholesale but in developing government-specific frameworks that balance user needs, legal requirements, political sustainability, and operational capacity
open.substack.com
November 15, 2025 at 3:57 PM
Government internal product organizations cannot and should not operate as “product-led” in the Silicon Valley sense because they exist in a fundamentally different strategic context.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Most organizations treat strategy as a document to produce. They should treat it as a product to use. The difference isn’t semantic, it’s the difference between product strategy as theater and product strategy as a tool.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Your Product Strategy Is a Product
Here’s a question that should make you uncomfortable: If you wouldn’t ship a product this poorly designed, why are you shipping strategy documents that nobody can use?
open.substack.com
November 15, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Most organizations treat strategy as a document to produce. They should treat it as a product to use. The difference isn’t semantic, it’s the difference between product strategy as theater and product strategy as a tool.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Can your team clearly articulate what you’ve deliberately chosen not to do — and why those trade-offs strengthen your position? If not, no framework will save you.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
October 25, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Can your team clearly articulate what you’ve deliberately chosen not to do — and why those trade-offs strengthen your position? If not, no framework will save you.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Goals, assumptions, and insights form a continuous validation loop, not a linear sequence.
substack.com/@theedproduc...
substack.com/@theedproduc...
The Ed (@theedproductdude)
Goals, assumptions, and insights form a continuous validation loop, not a linear sequence.
Leading frameworks from Marty Cagan, Teresa Torres, Melissa Perri, and others all emphasize that assumption...
substack.com
October 15, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Goals, assumptions, and insights form a continuous validation loop, not a linear sequence.
substack.com/@theedproduc...
substack.com/@theedproduc...
Goals are only useful when solving the right problem.
Organizations must: articulate clear vision, develop strategy specifying how they’ll achieve it, set goals measuring progress.
Skipping to goals without this foundation creates “busy work” to hit targets without moving the business forward.
Organizations must: articulate clear vision, develop strategy specifying how they’ll achieve it, set goals measuring progress.
Skipping to goals without this foundation creates “busy work” to hit targets without moving the business forward.
October 12, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Goals are only useful when solving the right problem.
Organizations must: articulate clear vision, develop strategy specifying how they’ll achieve it, set goals measuring progress.
Skipping to goals without this foundation creates “busy work” to hit targets without moving the business forward.
Organizations must: articulate clear vision, develop strategy specifying how they’ll achieve it, set goals measuring progress.
Skipping to goals without this foundation creates “busy work” to hit targets without moving the business forward.
The research suggests a diagnostic heuristic: if prioritization debates last more than 30 minutes or require complex scoring with more than three variables, you have a strategy problem, not a prioritization problem.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
When prioritization feels impossible, your strategy is broken
If prioritization debates last more than 30 minutes or require complex scoring with more than three variables, you have a strategy problem, not a prioritization problem.
open.substack.com
October 10, 2025 at 7:07 PM
The research suggests a diagnostic heuristic: if prioritization debates last more than 30 minutes or require complex scoring with more than three variables, you have a strategy problem, not a prioritization problem.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Playbooks and best practices change, but these truths don’t. A winning product strategy ensures the product is available where customers are, consistently trustworthy, and genuinely complementary to their lives or work.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/t...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/t...
The First Principles of Product: How to Succeed via Product Strategy
Available — people can find and access it easily. Consistent — it delivers reliable quality every time. Complementary — it meets an unmet need, desire, or job-to-be-done in a way nothing else does.…
productstratagem.wordpress.com
September 30, 2025 at 2:33 PM
Playbooks and best practices change, but these truths don’t. A winning product strategy ensures the product is available where customers are, consistently trustworthy, and genuinely complementary to their lives or work.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/t...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/t...
The most successful companies follow principles, not practices. They demonstrate mastery across levels and adapt continuously and recognize principles are provisional, requiring continuous updating as patterns emerge, effect sizes decline, and paradigms shift. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Universal First Principles of Product Success: A Comprehensive Evidence-Based Framework
The fundamental truth revealed
open.substack.com
September 30, 2025 at 10:50 AM
The most successful companies follow principles, not practices. They demonstrate mastery across levels and adapt continuously and recognize principles are provisional, requiring continuous updating as patterns emerge, effect sizes decline, and paradigms shift. open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
The constraint isn’t talent supply—it’s organizational capability to leverage talent effectively.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Why Your Best Teams Keep Leaving (It’s Not the Snacks)
They left because they were slowly suffocated by an organization that demanded their intelligence while systematically preventing them using it
open.substack.com
September 30, 2025 at 7:26 AM
The constraint isn’t talent supply—it’s organizational capability to leverage talent effectively.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
The Foundation: Competitive Context
Where are we competing, and why should we win?
Where are we competing, and why should we win?
The right questions transform strategy from academic exercise into decisive action
Most product teams ask tactical questions disguised as strategic ones—“What features should we build?” instead of “What problems deserve our complete focus?” Here are the questions that actually matte...
open.substack.com
September 28, 2025 at 9:23 PM
The Foundation: Competitive Context
Where are we competing, and why should we win?
Where are we competing, and why should we win?
How to build the PM-engineering relationships that actually ship great products
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
You’re Not the Manager of Engineers
How to build the PM-engineering relationships that actually ship great products
open.substack.com
September 28, 2025 at 8:33 PM
How to build the PM-engineering relationships that actually ship great products
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
Focus on the “silent parts” of a product to build customer confidence, and scale trust across your base.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/h...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/h...
How Leading Product Organizations Balance Feature Requests with Product Discovery: Lessons from Stripe
Stripe is often cited as one of the most disciplined product companies in Silicon Valley. Their success is not just about building a great payments API—it’s about how they run product leadership an…
productstratagem.wordpress.com
September 26, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Focus on the “silent parts” of a product to build customer confidence, and scale trust across your base.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/h...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/h...
Most enterprises fail at orchestration because they optimize individual components—better tools, clearer processes, stronger teams—without understanding how these elements reinforce or undermine each other.
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September 25, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Most enterprises fail at orchestration because they optimize individual components—better tools, clearer processes, stronger teams—without understanding how these elements reinforce or undermine each other.
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1/
Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon consistently rank among the most desirable tech employers partly because their internal development experience rivals or exceeds what developers experience at smaller, supposedly more agile companies.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/p...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/p...
Platform Engineering as Competitive Moat: The Strategic Advantage Hidden in Plain Sight
The Overlooked Strategic Weapon Most product leaders obsess over customer-facing features while ignoring the infrastructure that determines how fast they can build them. This represents a fundament…
productstratagem.wordpress.com
September 25, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon consistently rank among the most desirable tech employers partly because their internal development experience rivals or exceeds what developers experience at smaller, supposedly more agile companies.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/p...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/p...
Reposted by The Ed (Product Stratagems)
The Performance Paradox:
Your best intentions are sabotaging breakthrough results.
You need to innovate faster, but you're trapped in systems that demand certainty for breakthrough decisions.
What performance trap is quietly killing your breakthroughs?
Your best intentions are sabotaging breakthrough results.
You need to innovate faster, but you're trapped in systems that demand certainty for breakthrough decisions.
What performance trap is quietly killing your breakthroughs?
September 23, 2025 at 12:20 PM
The Performance Paradox:
Your best intentions are sabotaging breakthrough results.
You need to innovate faster, but you're trapped in systems that demand certainty for breakthrough decisions.
What performance trap is quietly killing your breakthroughs?
Your best intentions are sabotaging breakthrough results.
You need to innovate faster, but you're trapped in systems that demand certainty for breakthrough decisions.
What performance trap is quietly killing your breakthroughs?
Most organizations think they have strategy when they actually have tactics. They have goals, initiatives, and roadmaps—but no integrated logic connecting where to compete with how to win.
September 22, 2025 at 9:36 PM
Most organizations think they have strategy when they actually have tactics. They have goals, initiatives, and roadmaps—but no integrated logic connecting where to compete with how to win.
The most honest words ever spoken in a boardroom—and the beginning of real strategic thinking.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/w...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/w...
“We Need a Strategy, But Don’t Know How and Where to Start”
The most honest words ever spoken in a boardroom—and the beginning of real strategic thinking. Every week, leadership teams across thousands of organizations reach the same uncomfortable realizatio…
productstratagem.wordpress.com
September 22, 2025 at 9:10 PM
The most honest words ever spoken in a boardroom—and the beginning of real strategic thinking.
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/w...
productstratagem.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/w...
Strategy is a coherent system of choices that reinforce each other, not a roadmap or feature list.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
The Coherent Chain: Strategic Framework Cheat Sheet
Core Principle
open.substack.com
September 22, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Strategy is a coherent system of choices that reinforce each other, not a roadmap or feature list.
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...
open.substack.com/pub/theedpro...