Dave's Research Co.

When I wrote about field sense at first, I said: To have good field sense, you need to know the other players' games and their scope of awareness.

You can have a reasonable product strategy that is effectively useless, without strategic traction.

If you are a wayward hiker and take a dead-end fork, at some point, you'll recognize you've made a mistake.

A considerable lot of bad product work is perpetrated in the name of grand strategy and executive strategic priority.

When you approach a piece of product work, how do you tell if it's good?

There's only one entry point to strategic play: it's the move you are playing right now.

Grand strategy is alluring: I worked with a VP of Product handing out copies of Roger Martin's Playing to Win even as the team was moving in a poor direction.

As you enter a game inside the organization, trying to make sense of it and figure out where to play next, you need to understand its context (last week: wide angle view) and the structure of the playing field.

To speak about problems and players whose actions seem inscrutable, you need to take the wide angle view.

You play the product game with other players.

If you are a in a product organization and leading a team, a project, a program, or a division, you are playing the product game.

The aim of playing the background is changing others' options for action — and eventually, but indirectly, behavior — by adding, removing, or adapting the structural centers that constitute their view of the situation.

In a prior edition I wrote about those maddening and logic-defying situations where: It’s obvious that the work or the approach to doing it is misguided, untenable, or actively failing.

The more you work with different people and teams and organizations, the more you realize that there is a difficult and less-discussable layer of problems that lie behind the hard parts of the work.

I'm trying to get a handle on the hard and evergreen problems in product work — the ones that will always emerge and grow, so long as there is growth and change.