Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

Diagnose the one hard thing, choose a guiding policy, then act on it coherently.

Three takeaways for AI PMs

• Diagnose before you prescribe
• A list of priorities is not a policy: Rumelt describes a client with seventeen priorities and calls that the opposite of a policy.
• Actions must cohere, and there must be some

Do this Monday

• Before your next roadmap review, write the diagnosis for your area in three sentences that each start with because, and read it aloud to one engineer.
• In your next prioritisation call, ask which item is first rather than which items are priorities; if nobody can answer, settle that before ranking anything else.
• Take this quarter's action list and strike every item that is a goal rather than something a named person will do; if fewer than half survive, rewrite the list.