Are you in product strategy? Join Reforge.


Reforge is a unique opportunity for you to learn the tools and techniques of product strategy leaders and the lessons they’ve learned. The fun part of product strategy is the thought and the potential impacts of your products. The hard part is shaping this thought into communicable frameworks that display your decision-making to your team. Everyone needs to be on the same page with the grand vision for the future. I recommend Reforge as a resource to help your career. I can see they will only continue to make future cohorts even better.

My Personal Experience so Far

The best experience of Reforge so far has been working with my study group. They come from marketing, finance, and e-commerce from Vancouver, Brooklyn, Dublin, and even India. We are a different group than everyone else that attends Reforge. We are focused on making the best internal tools money cannot buy (monetization is hard unless we figure out how to commercialize ala Amazon). Each week we meet for an hour and talk through recent events. We discuss what we are thinking about the content concerning our products. This group has helped me revisit and rethink material that I glossed over and did not engage with during the reading. I joined a separate group created to support the creation of the ‘action plan.’ I love to hear the different perspectives and challenges of these individuals. Their expertise and focus are broader than the narrow internal tools focus.

Applying the content to my product

Each week of the Reforge program, you will apply different techniques based on the focus of the class. The fifth and sixth weeks are for the action plan creation.

  • Week 1 Product Strategy
    • TARS Framework
    • Qualitative Feature Map
    • Feature Survey Satisfaction
  • Week 2 Growth Strategy
    • Growth Loops
    • Optimizing Loops, increasing throughput
    • Acquisition and Retention
  • Week 3 Product Market Fit Expansion Strategy
    • Commercializing your internal application
    • Unbundling
    • Geographic Expansion
  • Week 4 Scaling & Product Workplan
    • Technical Debt
    • Process / User scaling
    • Build versus Buy + Technical Debt Prioritization

I plan to write a few more blogs and videos on the course as I work through the ideas and concepts. I linked a couple of the blogs, look forward to future blogs where I will cover weeks three and four.

Sharing the knowledge with my team

One thing I noticed about the course is that many of the attendees are not directly applying the content immediately to their work. I understand that everyone wants to reflect and consider where it fits. This content applies to any product, some topics more than others. Incorporating the CODE  process(Collect, Organize, Distill, Express) from Tiago Forte helps me learn the material better. Much of the content of the Reforge course are slides and audio. I can refine my knowledge and recast it and mold it into different shapes. I teach the content I learned to other product strategists in my organization to learn it better. Each week I write a blog, record a video, or make the content into another form. Reshaping and molding these ideas into new shapes to inspire insight is fun!

Conclusion

If you are in a product strategy role, I recommend you join a Reforge program. The next live cohort is in the Fall of 2021. The power of networking and applying the learning is incredible for your career. Do you want to grow? Do you want to be influential? You can learn and apply the product strategy techniques immediately. The learning and application is still the hard part. Join with a group of coworkers because you can build the same language and apply the content in new ways related to your product.

  • Join Reforge to become an influential product strategist and get a head start on your career.
  • Your organization benefits when you apply the content making you influential.
  • Find a study group to work with to cover the journey together and support each other.