Melissa Perri

Tactical work for a product manager focuses on the shorter-term actions of building features and getting them out the door. It includes the daily activities of breaking down and scoping out work with the developers and designers, in addition to crunching the data to determine what to do next.
Strategic work is about positioning the product and the company to win in the market and achieve goals. It looks at the future state of the product and the company and what it will take to get there.
Operational work is about tying the strategy back to the tactical work. Here is where product managers create a roadmap that connects the current state of the product to the future state and that aligns the teams around the work.

We create the senior people we need by giving junior people a chance.

dictionary defines strategy as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” This definition seems to be the common interpreta-tion of good strategy across businesses.

Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.

Think of the major pieces of work you do that are actually bets. Henrik Kniberg, a former consultant at Spotify, explains that this is how Spotify thinks.1 The company operates using something called DIBBs, which stands for Data, Insights, Beliefs, and Bets. The first three things, data, insight, and beliefs, inform a piece of work called a bet. The concept of thinking of initiatives as bets is powerful because it sets up a different type of expectation.

Figure 12-2. “The Four Steps to the Improvement Kata” from Toyota Kata Practice Guide, by Mike Rother (reprinted by permission of Mike Rother)

After we have set the goal, we begin walking through the Product Kata. We ask ourselves the following:
1. What is the goal?
2. Where are we now in relation to that goal?
3. What is the biggest problem or obstacle standing in the way of me reaching that goal?
4. How do I try to solve that problem?
5. What do I expect to happen (hypothesis)?
6. What actually happened, and what did we learn?

HEART metrics measure happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success.