Product Strategy: Deciding What to Build
Stop building random features and start making deliberate product choices. Learn how to define a clear target audience, make tough trade-offs, and build an advantage competitors cannot easily copy.
Like Duolingo, but for Product Strategy: Deciding What to Build. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Making Hard Trade-Offs and Creating an Unfair Advantage. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Product Strategy: Deciding What to Build
- A roadmap that says yes to every good idea spreads team focus too thin across unrelated goals
- Strategy requires defining clear boundaries on what the product will deliberately not pursue
- A collection of valuable features does not automatically equal a coherent, focused product direction
- True strategic trade-offs require accepting an intentional weakness to protect a primary strength
- Trying to satisfy every user preference dilutes the product's main competitive edge
- Being unbeatable at one dimension means deliberately giving up being good at other dimensions
- Shipping faster is operational efficiency, which competitors can match and copy
- Strategy dictates which direction the product heads, not just how quickly it delivers code
- Speeding up execution without strategic differentiation just builds the wrong things faster
- A valid strategy statement has an opposite that a sensible competitor could choose to adopt
- Statements like 'build the highest-quality, easiest-to-use tool' are platitudes because no competitor would intentionally choose poor quality or confusing UX
- Non-goals explicitly define relevant features that the team agrees NOT to build for this release
- Defining non-goals upfront stops engineers and designers from debating and architecting edge cases they don't yet need
- Clear non-goals protect scope by pre-answering common feature requests before development starts
- Broad audiences have scattered, conflicting needs that make product positioning vague
- A specific underserved group has shared, intense complaints you can solve completely
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Product Strategy: Deciding What to Build the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
What is essential for giving a product real strategic focus?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where Product Strategy: Deciding What to Build takes you
- 1
Making Hard Trade-Offs
- Strategy as Saying No
- Choosing Your Playing Field
- 2
Creating an Unfair Advantage
- Asymmetric Differentiation
- Defending What You Build
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Product Strategy: Deciding What to Build is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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