# How to Apply Product Thinking to Strategic Bets and Portfolio-Level Work: transcript

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Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/how-to-apply-product-thinking-to-strategic-bets-and-portfolio-level-work/
Source RSS GUID: substack:post:176412234
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Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English

## Transcript

[00:00:00] One other type of work that will happen in most organizations eventually as they scale is we might have worked at cuts across multiple product groups, what you might call a portfolio level.

[00:00:11] Organizations often have synergies across the product line or initiative that require a collaboration between the product organization and other parts of the organization.

[00:00:23] Those are the strategic bets of the organization. Even these we want to apply product thinking to and I would say, especially these we want to consider as bets.

[00:00:35] We want to consider as hypothesis and discover if there's value and use some tracer bullets to see if we're heading in the right direction and develop them as product, even though in some cases those aren't really products.

[00:00:53] Think of a move from on-prem to the cloud or adopting generative AI in the organization or even adopting products led growth.

[00:01:06] We might need the premium. We might need some features in the product that encourage you to use it and to share it with others and make it viral within the organization.

[00:01:17] But there are also other aspects to it like how do you change your sales motion to complement a PLG approach? It's not just a product thing, but it is an initiative bet that we want to develop like a product.

[00:01:33] We want to try some things, see how it's working, double down or change direction.

[00:01:38] And we want to make sure that we are working on the right amount of these bets and not try too many of them at the same time.

[00:01:46] As a healthy product organization, we still would have work that cuts across the entire organization.

[00:01:54] We won't be able to move all of the work into discrete and powered product teams, especially if we're an organization with some history in our product and complexity in our product.

[00:02:07] And not everything is clean, cut, greenfield anymore.

[00:02:11] And whether we're a scale up that has more and more complexity as we're adding product lines and maybe doing M&As or partnerships or supporting different customer niches at this point as part of our growth and whether we're a more traditional technology organization that supports a technology enabled product

[00:02:32] or whether we're an enterprise product company.

[00:02:35] All of these environments have product complexity that leads to the reality where we would have some balance between empowered product teams and powered product groups and some product oriented initiatives that cut across the organization.