Strategy beats execution every time

A post arguing “Execution beats strategy every time” got a ton of traction last week. I disagree.

You can read the post here ¹ . The author uses her time at Facebook in 2009 as an example² .

The post seems to conflate strategy (our hypotheses about the series of choices we need to make in order to succeed) with product delivery (discovering through iteration the best version of an idea).

Strategy isn’t just “given our current situation, what should we do next”. It’s also “given our long term goal and all of the potential paths to getting there, which combination of choices do we think creates the best path”.

It’s a set of hypotheses, built on assumptions: about how users will behave, about how large a market is, about market dynamics, about risks that we can and can’t control.

That is different than product delivery, which is “go find the best execution of this idea”.

Product delivery — which is what I thought product management was for the first 8 years of my career — is working with design, engineering, and stakeholders to discover the optimal design and execution that fits the brief and has stakeholder buy-in³ .

But all it does is get us to the top of the next hill. It doesn’t help us chart the rest of the way⁴ .

I would take good strategy with bad execution over bad strategy with good execution every time.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

The last few days, I’ve been thinking about product ethics when it comes to externally shared metrics.

For example, before I joined Buoy Health, the sales team signed a contract with a big client who had agreed to purchase Buoy and give it to their constituents, classic B2B2C. But one of the contract terms was that Buoy’s NPS needed to stay above a certain high number (I think it was 65 but I might be misremembering) or else we would be in breach of our performance guarantees and would be required to pay back some of our revenue.

So there was, inevitably, a product discussion about if we should manipulate the NPS survey mechanics so that we biased the population, leading to a higher NPS score. (We did not.)

This is similar with consumer apps who are need App Store ratings. They design the Rate This App prompt to trigger only after the user has completed some valuable JTBD. It skews the population towards people who got value and thus are more likely to give a high rating.

So, is this bad practice? Or is this marketing? I’m trying to work out why I’m totally fine with testimonials, which are obviously cherry picked to be the most favorable, but manipulating who receives a rating survey feels wrong.

I think it has to do with audience expectations. People expect testimonials to be favorable. But star ratings or NPS scores are presented with the air of integrity when they aren’t at all. Or, and I wonder about this particularly in health care, does everyone know it’s a lie and expects everyone else to also be in on the lie, but it’s what needs to happen to get the contracts signed?

1  The author’s primary thesis is that good execution creates learning, and when that learning is folded into the next iteration, you are one step closer to success. Whereas, strategy with bad execution results in no learning, because you aren’t able to attribute the failure to the execution or the strategy, so you’re no better off than when you started.

2  I’m curious how obvious, or not, monetizing via advertising was to Facebook back in 2009 (the year the author references working at Meta in the post). In hindsight, it seems obvious — the news feed had already launched, they already had massive scale (and turned down huge acquisition offers), Google had already shown the world advertising was a premier business model — but if there was any serious strategic debate about other directions (like e-commerce, or marketplace), I’d love to learn more.

3  And yes, all the discover → build → test → learn product development techniques we’ve all learned are valuable here. But, again, that’s not strategy. That’s just being good at execution.

4  Now, it could be that your company doesn’t need or want product to be involved in strategy. Your company is sales-led, or founder dominated. Or you have great PMF with tons of growth ahead of you.