Coaching – Strategic Context

Marty Cagan argues that empowered product teams can only make good decisions if they understand the broader business context they operate in. He outlines six layers of strategic context that leaders should share and product managers should deeply understand: company mission, company scorecard, company objectives, product vision, product strategy, and product principles. Each layer works at a different time horizon, from a durable purpose to yearly targets to the specific guidance for a team's work. Without this context, product managers cannot weigh trade-offs or connect their daily work to the company's goals. The piece treats strategic context as a core part of onboarding and ongoing coaching.

01Key takeaways

• Make sure every product manager understands the company's mission, scorecard, objectives, vision, strategy, and principles before expecting empowered decisions.
• Keep the mission durable and the vision inspiring but not overly specific, since the team will work out details over time.
• Pick a small set of scorecard metrics that reveal overall business health, not every metric available.
• Use product principles to explain the reasoning behind values so teams can resolve trade-offs consistently.
• Help each product manager articulate how her specific team's work connects to the company's shared goals.

02Key sections

Why strategic context matters

Empowered teams need the context to make decisions, and that context typically comes from company leaders but must be deeply absorbed by product managers. It is usually part of onboarding for new hires.

Mission and scorecard

The mission is a durable statement of purpose, while the scorecard lists the few KPIs that show the company's overall health. Two-sided marketplaces illustrate why balanced metrics matter.

Objectives and key results

Leadership selects a small set of yearly objectives, each with measurable key results that should appear on the scorecard so progress and side effects stay visible.

Vision, strategy and principles

The product vision describes a future 3 to 10 years out and helps recruit talent, the product strategy links vision and objectives to team work, and principles guide trade-off decisions.

Applying context across teams

All six layers apply to every product team, and each product manager should show through statements and decisions how her team contributes to shared goals.

03From the post

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04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.