Deciding what not to build is most of product strategy

For years I was very comfortable taking a well-formed problem and working with a team to solve it. I'm much less comfortable now accepting the problem at face value.

That change came slowly and mostly from being in rooms where the framing of the problem had already decided the answer. By the time it reached a team, the interesting choice had been made.

So I try to spend proper time on the framing before anything gets estimated. It's slower at the start and it usually saves a quarter later.

In product teams it's very easy to become absorbed by what's directly in front of you. There's a roadmap, a set of objectives, customer problems, technical constraints, and usually more work than there are people available to do it.

The roadmap then becomes a queue rather than a strategy. Everything on it's defensible individually and the whole thing doesn't add up to a direction.

The most useful thing I've done about this is to force a conversation about what we're deliberately not doing this quarter, and to write that list down where people can see it. Half the time that list is more informative than the roadmap.

At Selfridges I introduced product and agile ways of working, moving the team from ad-hoc projects to sprint-based delivery. On paper that's a process change and in practice it was a change in who could ask for what.

Ad-hoc project work concentrates power with whoever asks loudest. A sprint cadence with visible commitments makes that harder, which is genuinely unpopular for a while.

I underestimated how much of that transition was emotional rather than procedural. If I did it again I'd spend far more time with the people whose influence the new system reduced, and rather less on the ceremony design.

Product decisions get taken more seriously when the person making them can explain the commercial consequence. That was one of the more practical results of studying finance and organisational performance on the Level 7 programme.

Establishing financial tracking and resource planning in my team at Selfridges was partly about control and mostly about credibility. Once I could show what a piece of work cost and what it was expected to return, the conversation about priorities changed.

I still find forecasting the return uncomfortable, because a lot of the honest answer is a range with wide edges. Saying so openly has worked better for me than pretending to precision I don't have.