Building a product strategy is not so difficult in theory. It is mostly about the Why, What, How. In practice there are so many important topics to be included in a strategy, that it is easy to lose track of what is really important.

Building a strategy in a team does not make it much easier as the view points may vary significantly. When there is no good enough notion about the story line, wild discussions start and in every meeting a new topic or idea on what is important pops up. Probably a necessary phase. But it should not last too long, not longer until you have a good gut feeling on how the story has to look like.

Cutting short on the wild, explorative phase is needed when the incremental value of new topics or ideas is too low. Then it helps to have clear story line of maybe 10 to 15 slides with one message per slide. Build it and then the team discussion becomes more focused and effective.

And the slides (PowerPoint rules) have to be easily understood. Which costs time.

I am in a hurry and I need content for the portal. Product owners do not have time either to provide the right input. At least there is a clear, predefined structure for the content.

So I try to speed up with ChatGPT. The content structure helps to shape the prompts. And yes it helps to get the right terms to focus on. I do not like the long sentences ChatGPT provides, so I only take elements, add my own wisdom and have more than a text prototype. It can be reviewed and improved at any time.

My conclusion: ChatGPT delivers very quickly a starting point. Not more, not less.

I have been inspired by Giles Turnbull's "Doing week notes" to produce my own weekly newsletter (e-mail) about the project of developing a portal for digital services.

My intention was two-fold:

• Be conscious as a team to understand what we achieved during the week as it provides a bit of pride and confidence
• Provide transparency and awareness to any stakeholder in our organization for a topic which is not top of mind

One of the aspects was not only to have words in the newsletter but also screenshots, graphics and similar to show what has been achieved - show & tell. Links to standard documents, specifications and presentations are always included. In general I would say that the length of the newsletter including screenshots etc. is about one to two pages

What received most attention were the memes at the top of the newsletter. This is were we got most feedback for.

My observations so far:

• Many recipients are aware of the newsletter, but not all
• Memes are important to make people open the newsletter (e-mail)
• We do not know what people read and if they read
• One manager uses the newsletter content to report back to his managers
• Some people request access to mentioned internal documents, so they must have read it

Bases on the (non) feedback the newsletter evolves. The newest addition:

• TDLR with the most important things in 2 to 3 bullet points - Inspiration via Why You Should Send a Weekly Summary Email
• Soon: short videos on the functionalities of the portal, especially those which need first a login