🚀 EVO20: Strategic Thinking for your Product career
Product Evolution: Level up your Product craft.
Strategic thinking is the mental ability that helps you make better decisions about what to do next in various contexts.
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Since I've played in this area a lot, probably since I discovered Age of Empires 1 back in 1999, I've noticed that there are seven mental motions that can help you level up your strategic thinking:
Zoom out - mentally go towards a more macro/general level of detail
Zoom in - mentally go towards a more micro/specific level of detail
Overview - understand state of a specific level of detail (micro to macro)
Extrapolate - mentally project based on what’s not probable to change
Anticipate - mentally project based on what’s probable to change
Imagine - mentally create what isn’t
Connect the dots - mentally connect things in/across contexts
Practicing each one is valuable in itself. Practicing all of them together is, in my experience, a powerful way to develop strategic thinking and apply it to any specific context.
In this post, I’m exploring strategic thinking applied to better career navigation. Let’s see a practical example next 💡
Here’s a series of mental motions that could help a Product Manager navigate their career better:
1. Zoom out + overview: understand the business (e.g. current employer) as it works now (e.g. based on the business model).
2. Extrapolate + anticipate: mentally project what’s probable to happen to the business based on what’s not probably gonna change and what’s probably gonna change (e.g. based on probable evolutions of the business model elements).
3. Zoom out + overview + extrapolate + anticipate: similarly, at a more macro level, understand the present and project what’s next for the industry in which the current business operates (e.g. based on industry trends, announcements from CEOs in the industry, investor relations materials etc).
4. Zoom out + overview: understand the Product Management field as it works now (e.g. based on communications from professional associations, popular authors, exchanges in the local community of practice, informal interactions with peers from similar roles in other companies etc).
5. Extrapolate + anticipate: mentally project what’s probable to happen to the Product Management field (e.g. coworking with tools based on GPT-like technologies, merge with the UX Design field, increased need of standardization due to lots of new entrants in the field etc).
6. Zoom out + imagine: looking at these macro levels without attachment to how things are now and might be next, envision a future that is qualitatively different (e.g. everybody becomes a product manager or portfolio manager).
7. Connect the dots: looking at these macro levels, are things that are connecting - making sense together? Are there any adjacent businesses or industries or professions that show potential going forward?
8. Zoom in + overview: understand your current skill set (as a specific level of detail that might help or hinder your career evolution).
9. Extrapolate + anticipate: mentally project how your current skill set will probably evolve based on your current work and investment in learning.
10. Imagine: envision a future in which your skill set is qualitatively different (e.g. on various skill areas illustrated on the Product Career Map and adjacent skill areas like Data Science, for example)
11. Connect the dots: based on your previous insights - what skills, learning investments, actions make sense together?
12. Zoom in + overview + extrapolate + anticipate + imagine + connect the dots: similarly, zoom into your professional network (as a specific level of detail that might help or hinder your career evolution), understand how it works now, project how it might evolve, envision and connect (e.g. networking only with people from your current company might not be so beneficial to your long-term career evolution, so you might decide to start investing in smartly networking with people outside your company in the limited bandwidth you have now or might have next).
13. Zoom out + overview + connect the dots: Zoom out again at the level of your career as a Product Manager and connect insights about macro and micro levels, about the present and the futures - to decide in which areas you will invest next (career strategic directions) or what career moves (strategic or tactical) you’ll want to make going forward.
Think of this example as a series of mental exercises done on a Saturday afternoon, solo or with a few people around you that you trust, using only pen and paper or digital tools like Miro that might help you visualize better all the insights and connections.
Now imagine using the 7 mental motions to get clarity about navigating and evolving in other personal contexts like: where you live, interacting with the loved ones, spending free time, being a citizen, a community contributor and/or other specific roles that each of us has in their lives.
Keep on navigating,
Bülent
The Product Evolution newsletter is my endeavour to inspire Product people to level up their craft and careers, by sharing food for thought, examples and fresh perspectives from other fields.
I’m leading the 🇷🇴 Product community and creating opportunities for Product professionals to level up (via mentoring programs, real life examples from various companies etc.)
Happy to connect: LinkedIn / our community on Slack (🇷🇴)