 Hi, I'm Omar from AGM Smart and today I'm going to be showing you a ton of resources to help you get better at product strategy. So at AGM Smart we believe that part of being a good designer is actually being good at product strategy because then you can give so much more value to your customers. So here's what we're going to do. I've prepared a bunch of tabs that contain podcasts, books, blogs, basically everything that we use to level up our product strategy skills. So we're going to dive in and I'm going to show you all the resources one by one, each tab on its own and tell you why we think it's a great resource. So what I would love is that if you could share your product strategy resources with us in the comments along with any questions you have about product strategy. All right so first up is a blog post called WTF is strategy. This is a great place to start if you're not even sure what product strategy is. So I'm not going to cover this thing right now but as you can see it's kind of a long read but it's super well written. It basically takes you through everything you need to know about basically product strategy on a high level though. So this is just reading this won't make you good at product strategy but now you understand what that term actually means and why it's so important that you actually get good at it. All right so I've organized these tabs in terms of categories so now we're going to look at some books and then we're going to have some Twitter, some YouTube and then podcasts and blogs. Let's look at the first book which is Blue Ocean Strategy by W Chan Kim and Renee I'm not going to try to pronounce the last name. This is a great book it's just basically a must read it has a framework that makes it super easy for people who don't have a lot of experience in product strategy. It gives you kind of a template that you can start experimenting with to get better at product strategy. All right let's go to the next book. This one is called Playing to Win How Strategy Really Works. I mean everything is in the title there so like none of these books are going to immediately make you an expert but now you'll have the language, you'll know how strategy generally works, you'll find out a ton of stuff that you didn't know and this will just serve as the template for you experimenting with strategy and getting better at it. So the third book that we have is called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, The Difference and Why It Matters. This book is filled with a ton of kind of examples and case studies showing you you know a story basically and how good of a strategy it was or how bad it was and maybe sometimes a little bit of both so this is also a great book by Richard Rumelt and maybe I'm pronouncing that wrong sorry Richard. Those are the three books that we think will give you a great start into product strategy. Now let's move on to Twitter and the first we want to show is Ben Thompson. So Ben Thompson is someone that we really love at AJN Smart. We think this guy is a genius, we're big fanboys and fangirls of his. He's just one of the smartest people working in tech strategy like that's his niche it's not general business strategy he's focused on technology companies he writes about Apple, about Amazon, Facebook and his analysis is very very smart so you should definitely be following him on Twitter. By the way Ben Thompson worked at both Apple and Microsoft before going independent and becoming a full-time writer writes about strategy so you can trust that this guy knows what he's talking about. All right next up is Steven Sinovsky. Steven Sinovsky also used to work at Microsoft. He was the head of Windows for a very long time you know he also knows what he's talking about. He does this brilliant tweet storm sometimes it's like 30 tweets long and like you see here this one let me zoom in for you here this is literally almost like a blog post that he has written inside of a Twitter thread so super insightful very thoughtful his thinking is very clear and you will learn a ton by just following him on Twitter and reading his thoughts reading his analysis so for example here he's talking about Mac OSN moving to ARM and what that could mean is it a good strategic move is it bad what are the implications of it the good and the bad he's brilliant you should definitely be following him. Next up is MG Siegler. MG Siegler is now part of Google Ventures so these guys invested in other companies Google Ventures if you don't know them they're a venture capital firm under Google who invests in startups and companies and give them advice and guidance so MG Siegler is also a great resource on Twitter he's very smart and we're also going to check out his blog later on as well because he he does great writing on Medium but you should definitely be following him on Twitter as well to see what he's talking about. Next up is Benedict Evans. Benedict Evans is part of Andreessen Horowitz or A16Z which is another venture capitalist firm filled with a ton of smart people. Benedict Evans is also kind of like Ben Thompson he's a full-time analyst and he does great writing and his Twitter profile is also great so you should definitely be following him. Next up is Connie Chan. Connie Chan is also at A16Z so I would almost recommend just going to the A16Z account and just seeing everyone who works there and follow them on Twitter but I picked out the top two from them. Alright as an example of how following people like this on Twitter will help you you can see here that Connie Chan has written about multimodal business models and how you can do way more than just for example advertising. This is actually a series of tweets that is brilliant that basically shows you other types of business models that are popular in China and how we can use those to bring them back to kind of the Western companies in Europe and the US because they're doing so much less on that front and that's an example of you know modeling your business model strategy based on something that was taken from China as inspiration. Alright next up is A16Z's YouTube channel and specifically this playlist is called Company Building 101 so the reason this is relevant is because it tells you a lot of business basics in the tech world and really gives you the language to be able to talk with product strategy people with at your clients company and be able to speak the same language as them show them that you understand their business and help them achieve their business goals with the product that you're designing for them. Right so when you learn about going to market the go-to-market strategy finance as a strategy you'll you'll just learn so much by hearing smart people in the tech world talk about this and this playlist is a great place to start. Okay so the next resource we're going to be looking at from YouTube is actually a channel called Getting Real. This is made by the people who make Basecamp which is a piece of like a project management tool that we use at Asian Smart and that we love so much and they have a series about called How We Work in which they talk about basically how they structure the companies and they basically lay out their strategy all on kind of a diagram and walk you through it and it's super informative and super insightful to see how basically this is your inside view at the strategy of a company and you could definitely get inspired from that to take some parts of their process if they make sense for you and use them as a template because they're their successful company they've been running for 13 years and they know what they're doing and they're very smart people working there and they actually shared how they think about strategy in their own company and so you can take a look at these videos they're actually compiled into a playlist called How We Work and this is how they approach decision-making and strategy and it's it's a great resource as well. Alright so next up we're going to talk about some podcasts and first up is Exponent and that's also by Ben Thompson who we saw earlier in one of the Twitter's over here so Ben Thompson has Exponent podcast he does with James Alworth who currently works at Cloudflare I believe and who's a Harvard Business Review author so they're both very smart and every week they release a podcast talking about what's happening in the tech world and discussing the strategy of each move so basically when Spotify purchased Gimlet Media they discussed the strategy of that and what it means for Spotify what it means for Gimlet what it means for podcasting and Ben Thompson also talks about his aggregation theory often on the podcast I'm not going to go into it now but it's a great framework for strategy as well and you get to hear him talk about it on his podcast so this is definitely one that you want to subscribe to. So this next one is called the Product Breakfast Club and this might be familiar to some of you who are who follow AJ and SMART on other channels this is made by Jake Knapp who's the author of the sprint book and Jonathan Courtney who's the CEO of AJ and SMART and they also talk about kind of the industry news and they see what big companies are doing and talk about these decisions so if Apple is deciding to get into you know competing with Netflix with their own content service you will hear them talk about it on the podcast and analyze it and see what they think about it based on their expertise in the industry and it's also a very fun podcast this is actually one of the few podcasts that doesn't take itself so seriously and it's really really funny and fun to listen to. The next podcast is the A16Z podcast which comes from Andreessen Horowitz who we've already seen these are the same guys that I showed you Benedict Evans works there, Connie Chan works there and these guys just put out amazing contents on every channel basically so they have a podcast called the A16Z podcast in which they interview people from you know different industries and they talk about different topics autonomous vehicles gaming and but they're super super informative discussions the reason I'm telling you to listen to this podcast related to product strategy is because you need to know like the landscape in which you're designing the products and this is a super good resource for that because you're going to get to listen to very smart people talking for an extended period of time listen to what they have to say about where each industry is going and what's next for that and you can use that in your own strategy thinking to get ahead of the competition. The next podcast is actually more of a storytelling podcast that comes from NPR it's kind of a mix of entrepreneurship and storytelling but the reason I think you should listen to this from a product strategy perspective is that what basically happens on this podcast is they interview people who have built very successful businesses and you get to listen to one hour of this founder's story and how they navigated the most difficult parts of their company building and that always includes discussions of strategies that they implemented in order to stand out from the competition and you can take great inspiration from that. Okay and now we're going to move to some writing and blogs so the first up is Stratecary from Ben Thompson who we've already seen on Twitter I've already looked at his podcast Exponent and this is the blog where he writes he puts out most of his content basically because he has one weekly article every week that covers basically the biggest news that happened that week and provides an analysis for it and it's always very clever and very well thought out and by reading Stratecary you'll be able to understand why big companies make the moves that they're making and over time you'll start to use those as inspiration for your own product strategy and by the way Ben Thompson also has a premium newsletter that you can subscribe to and that we at AJ and Smarter subscribe to and we definitely recommend but for starters you could just check out his weekly article and then subscribe when you feel like you need more. So next up is Benedict Evans blog which we also saw Benedict Evans already on Twitter similarly to Ben Thompson also writes a very thoughtful blog this is not the whole blog post by the way this is just a preview and he writes really really good articles that analyze the industry analyze products released by companies basically Ben shares whether he thinks this is a good strategy or not and by reading this you'll also start to be able to use the same method of thinking to analyze your own products and your client's products and be able to design good strategies for them. So the penultimate blog that I want to show you is called 500 Ish Words by MG Siegler who I already showed you on Twitter MG Siegler works at Google Ventures now called GV and he also does brilliant strategic writing on his medium blog where again he talks about the strategy of big companies and analyzes them and basically gives his opinion about them and it's always very very informative and as with all of these resources when you are exposed to this level of strategic thinking you will naturally start absorbing it and being able to implement it in your own work and the last blog I want to show you which is not a surprise is the blog of Andres and Horowitz because they put out great content on their on YouTube on Twitter in a podcast and of course in a blog and here I picked out one by Connie Chan that's called Outgrowing Advertising Multimodal Business Models as a Product Strategy and it's this article just blew us away when we read it at AT&T Smart because it talks about so many ways in which businesses work in China that no one is experimenting with in Europe or the US or anywhere else in the world for that matter and there's so much strategic inspiration to be taken from here and experimented with and there are opportunities for innovation like you wouldn't believe you should definitely definitely check out this article and subscribe to the blog the newsletter basically anything that Andres and Horowitz does or A16Z sometimes they call themselves they call themselves A16Z or sometimes Andres and Horowitz so just google either one and you'll find their resources and you should definitely be reading watching listening to everything that they have to say because they're they're smart and they know what they're talking about so this brings us to the end of the resources that we wanted to show you today and these were put together by everyone who works here at AJ and Smart and this is how we get better at product strategy we hope these are going to be helpful for you and so I'm going to leave you with three takeaways from this video number one is that to get a good at product strategy you need to develop a good intuition or gut and you do that by absorbing lessons from successes and failures of others number two is develop an analytical mindset and you do that by examining company decisions so let's see you hear about the news from Spotify buying another company and saying that they want to get into podcasting you shouldn't just read that as a piece of news you should analyze it think why they did it and kind of set down a prediction as to how successful it's going to be and then track your predictions over time so by developing this analytical mindset you'll be able to track how well your thinking and your analysis is doing over time and get better by learning from your mistakes and the third and last thing I want to leave you with is now that you have all of these resources you're ready to start participating in strategy talks when you're talking to your clients when you're working in your company to start an experiment and get your own experience designing product strategy decisions and learning from your own experience so now you're ready to go out into the world and get better at strategy thank you so much for watching I hope this was useful to you let us know in the comments what you thought any questions that you have and the resources that you use to learn more about product strategy if you like this video you know the routine the like and subscribe and the bell and all of that we have new content coming to you every week so make sure to keep checking back thank you so much for watching see you in future videos sorry develop your product so what I'd love is that I'm a little biased because Jonathan is my boss but he's I mean I started working here because I think Jonathan is very smart he's not very pretty though so because I'm looking at I'm looking at this photo that you may have about product strategy well I forgot like that I'm sitting in your ears