Darrell Stephenson is Product Director at Zalando (and previously at SoundCloud). Being a really large corporation, Zalando has strategies at multiple levels that interact and intersect with each other. In this episode, Darrell has been extremely open and generous, explaining how product strategy creation works at Zalando, and how leaders face the challenge of the different interconnected areas and corporate goals.

We talked about:

How Zalando operates with multiple strategies at different levels in the organization and with different time horizons.
How to identify at which level in the organization you should create your strategy (spoiler: at “Value proposition for the user” level)
How high level strategy focuses on principles, and how do teams align to it.
How Zalando focuses on cross-team collaboration to deliver “end to end” great customer experience, and the north-star they use to be aligned.
What strategy is at Zalando, how it is created, and the different artifacts used. The interaction of different people to select the areas of investment, who is responsible for what.
How research is integrated into Zalando’s strategy.
How do they deal with strategy dependencies at such a large scale.
Why Darrell recommends to Product Managers the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared M. Diamond

And many other things!

Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.

If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs

You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)

Your English Five a Day #36.1