As a product leader, have you ever felt torn between seizing an immediate opportunity and sticking to your long-term strategy? If so, you're not alone.

If you've worked long enough in product, you've probably experienced one of the following:

• You just set a product strategy, and an opportunity you "can't say no to" arises

• You keep on delivering but do not really know what needle you are moving

• You can't find an alignment in the organization on what really matters

Many of us have been there, and probably recognize the signs. All of which point to a deeper challenge: finding the sometimes extremely challenging balance between short-term opportunistic development, and long-term strategy.

How can you choose between something that can create an impact here and now and something else that builds a longer-term foundation?

By the book, the answer should lie in a proper product strategy, but here is where expectation meets reality.

In my experience, the strategy often falls short in helping navigate these situations. You find yourself lost in endless discussions, trying to align two different "teams" who have a really different point of view on the timeframe that we are operating within. Should we give up, accept to navigate based on what we see in front of us, and embrace the bumpy ride then?

We could, and that is what I have done for some years when these kinds of challenges arose. Until, analyzing the context and recognizing the patterns, I've created a mental model that I use when I need to navigate the complexity of balancing short-term and long-term.

The whole idea builds on two main elements:

• product maturity (or market fit)

• and the company's financial stability.

I believe that both play a crucial role in choosing what should be prioritized.

"The balance between short-term opportunities and long-term strategy is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It depends on your product's maturity and your company's financial stability."

Let's break it down:

Pre-Market Fit: Optimize for Flexibility and Short-Term

When you're pre-market fit, your focus should be on validating your product hypothesis as quickly as possible. Here's my go-to model:

• No rigid strategy, but clear hypotheses around the value your product should create

• Key indicators to measure progress and success

• Short feedback loops

In this case, I would take all the opportunistic opportunities that align with our hypotheses and create feedback loops as short as possible. Double down or pivot.

In short: short-term for the win - pun intended.

One famous example where flexibility led to success is Dropbox which pivoted from its initial idea of a "study-aid" tool to a file-sharing service based on early user feedback. This flexibility in the pre-market fit stage allowed them to find their true product-market fit. And the rest is history.

Post-Market Fit, Pre-Profitability: Set a Strategy, But Be Flexible

Many products with market fit are not stable companies quite yet. They're not profitable but have potential.

In this case, investors and founders can choose to either follow the path to profitability or double down on growth. Here's what I think about:

• Have a vision about what your product should achieve, based on the inputs you got in the market-fit phase

• Clarify the most important business indicators - i.e., are we focusing on growth or profitability?

• Have clear and shared hypotheses on how to get there. This is where you start to create your strategy

• Define cyclical feedback loops

• Be ready if the opportunity that can push your business goals arises

You might be thinking - what?! I have a product strategy and I should also be opportunistic, isn't this the recipe for only spreading ourselves too thin?

Yes and no.

Think of it like sailing a ship.

You have a destination (long-term strategy), but you need to adjust your sails (short-term decisions) based on the winds (market opportunities) to get there efficiently. This is because you have no fuel and otherwise will never get to your destination.

In this phase, you don't have a solid company quite yet, and therefore it becomes important to always prioritize what helps the business achieve its goals.

You might have a 3-year strategy, but if you don't have the money to back it up, it's hard to push through with it.

What I've learned is that the role of a product leader in this case is to recognize when impactful opportunities arise and dare to diverge from the plan. With a but. These opportunities need to really move the financial needle and not harm the vision.

Post-Market Fit, Profitable: Set a Strategy, and Hold It

If you're post-market fit and your company is profitable, you're in product strategy territory.

Here is when your runway becomes longer as the finances prove that you have a product and a business.

This is where the real scaling begins and where it's vital to avoid constant pivoting to be able to deliver on the company’s promises. As customer, external, and internal expectations arise, it's time to discuss what opportunities can really 10X the business and dare to invest in them. In this case, what I think about is:

• Have a vision of what your product should achieve, based on customer usage

• Clarify the focus for product - acquisition, retention, or expansion.

• Have a clear set of hypotheses on how to get there

• Have the real hard conversations needed to align everyone on those hypotheses

• Define clear feedback loops - I've found that quarterly can be a good cadence

• Dare to hold the strategy despite new opportunities showing up

The main difference between a profitable company and a mature product is that the market expectations are more predictable, which leads to a better understanding of the opportunities to pursue, and a necessity of investing in mid to long-term initiatives to sustain growth.

What if you don’t? You might not be around long enough to tell it.

One famous example is Kodak. Despite inventing the first digital camera, they mainly focused on their short-term profits from film, failing to invest in the long-term digital strategy. The result? A once-dominant company filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

To summarize

Balancing short and long-term is never easy, but I've found that these guardrails helped me understand the mindset I should have as a product leader. And also set expectations for the other parts of the organization.

Shifting focus is always costly, but the times I have seen it working is when there was transparency around it from the beginning.

While saying no is also not easy, the times when it was accepted is when I invested the time to discuss timelines beforehand.

How do you currently balance short-term opportunities with your long-term strategy? Are you considering your product's maturity and financial stability in your decision-making process or which other inputs do you take into consideration?