A popular product strategy pattern driven by a single metric is the North Star Metric / Framework.
Opportunity Costs in Product Development
In the a product version of the actor-observer we often find short comings in product and product teams that it seems obvious that a given feature or aspect such be built, and therefore the team must be incompetent for not having built it yet. More likely is that the team had other things to work on, prioritize and therefore has not gotten to it yet. The opportunity costs of working on that feature or bug are too high versus the other aspects of their roadmap. This highlights the importance of prioritization within a product a roadmap1.
Tiny Wins
Tiny wins are standalone product improvements that require low effort and have high impact. More specifically, they are high volume actions, and therefore high volume annoyances that when fixed provide user satisfaction. Often, Tiny wins are shortcuts, they save a user’s time by getting rid of existing steps. These help built user loyalty between spells of larger projects. You can’t trust your users to bubble up tiny wins. Ship these wins regularly, and maintain a healthy backlog of them2.
Market selection
Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases exceedingly well.
Prioritization Frameworks
Anti-patterns
Shreyas Doshi wrote an insightful thread 4 on the ways in which logical business moves translates into ineffectiveness. The logical question of how do we move faster is answered with hire more engineers which leads to a sprint to hire, which has cascading effects on productivity (hiring / training), and therefore output. Decreased output leads to corner cutting to hit goals. Goal hitting can miss the mark of effectiveness.