Strategic Narrative: Your Company's Source Code for Story
A strategic narrative is the source code for your company's story, defining its unique value. It's the blueprint for marketing, sales, and internal decisions, ensuring everyone tells the same story.
Platform Strategy: Solving the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
A platform isn't a product; it's an environment where groups create value for each other. This strategy is key for marketplaces (Uber) or ecosystems (iOS) where value grows with users.
Partner Enablement: Getting External Partners to Sell Your Product
Partner enablement removes friction for your external sales channels. It equips resellers and distributors with the training, tools, and content they need to sell your product effectively, especially when they also represent competitors.
Product-Led Growth (PLG): When the Product Sells Itself
Product-Led Growth (PLG) makes the product its own salesperson. Instead of a sales team, the product's features and user experience drive acquisition and expansion.
Rules of Engagement: API Contracts for Teams
Rules of Engagement (RoE) are an API contract for human teams, defining how they interact to prevent chaos. They clarify who owns a customer conversation or how feature requests are handled.
Customer Success Playbooks: Standardize Your Team's Responses
A Customer Success playbook is a recipe for handling key customer moments. It defines a standard workflow for events like onboarding or a drop in usage, ensuring every CSM follows the same proven process. Without them, customer experience is inconsistent.
Sales Enablement: Mission Control for Your Sales Team
Sales Enablement is a central nervous system for your sales team, connecting them with the right content, training, and coaching. It's crucial for complex sales cycles, ensuring consistent messaging. The footgun is treating it as just a content library.
Launch Readiness Checklist: Your Launch's Single Source of Truth
A launch checklist is a flight plan, not just a to-do list, coordinating every team from engineering to sales. It ensures marketing, sales, and support are aligned for a release.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Stop Selling to Everyone
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a data-driven portrait of the perfect customer for your business. It helps focus marketing and sales on high-value leads, reducing acquisition costs.
Buy vs. Build: A Strategic Choice, Not a Cost Problem
The Buy vs. Build decision is a strategic choice, not just a cost problem. Buy commodity functions to gain speed and stability; build core features to create a unique competitive advantage. The footgun is ignoring total cost of ownership and strategic control.
ICE Scoring: Prioritize Features with a Quick Gut Check
ICE scoring is a gut-check for prioritizing features by multiplying Impact, Confidence, and Ease. It helps teams rapidly sort experiments or backlog items. The main footgun is its bias towards easy wins, potentially ignoring high-effort strategic projects.
Value vs. Effort Matrix: Prioritize What to Build Next
A Value vs. Effort matrix is a 2x2 grid for deciding what to build, plotting features by their potential value against implementation complexity. Product teams use it to prioritize roadmaps and justify resource allocation.
Roadmap Commitment Levels: Now, Next, Later
Agile roadmaps replace fixed timelines with commitment levels: 'Now' (in progress), 'Next' (planned), and 'Later' (potential ideas). This structure communicates decreasing certainty, allowing teams to adapt without breaking promises.
Continuous Discovery: Talk to Users Weekly, Not Yearly
Continuous discovery means small, weekly chats with customers, not a big upfront research phase. It's for teams building products that are never 'done,' like Netflix or your SaaS app. The footgun is treating discovery as a project, leading to stale insights.
Outcome-Based Roadmaps: Solve Problems, Not Ship Features
An outcome-based roadmap frames work around problems to solve, not a checklist of features to build. It gives teams autonomy to find the best solution for goals like increasing user engagement or improving conversion.
Thematic Roadmaps: Focus on 'Why,' Not 'What'
A thematic roadmap organizes work around strategic goals ("themes") like "Improve User Onboarding," not just a feature list. It's used to align teams on high-level objectives and persuade executives. The footgun is mistaking a feature list for a strategy.
Product Roadmap vs. Backlog: Strategy vs. Tactics
A roadmap is your strategic travel plan showing major destinations (product goals), while the backlog is the turn-by-turn navigation for the current leg of the journey (development tasks). The footgun is cluttering the roadmap with backlog details.
AARRR 'Pirate' Metrics: A Funnel for What Really Matters
The AARRR framework is a five-stage funnel (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) that tracks the user journey. It helps product teams focus on metrics that directly impact business health, not vanity metrics like social media likes.
Vanity vs. Actionable Metrics: Measure What Matters
Vanity metrics look impressive but don't inform decisions (e.g., total downloads). Actionable metrics tie to business goals and guide your next move (e.g., conversion rate). This helps product teams focus on real growth, not just impressive-looking charts.
The Feature-Benefit-Value Ladder: Selling Outcomes, Not Specs
The Feature-Benefit-Value Ladder connects product specs to the outcomes customers truly want. It's used to prioritize features and craft messaging that links to core values.