50 Resources to Grow Your Strategic Thinking

Shared by the community. Curated by me.

Jul 13, 2023

Hello! I’m Pat and Better by Design is my newsletter sharing pragmatic insights for creative innovation through the lens of design. If you’re new here, join our growing tribe of design innovators!

View on Twitter

Hello friends!

I recently asked senior designers on Twitter to share their favorite resources for leveling up strategic thinking.

Many folks were kind enough to provide useful suggestions, so today I’m passing along the community wisdom with a bit of my own curation on top to make this a resource you can return to whenever you need an idea of where to go next.

Strategy is a perplexing combination of hard skills, experience, and intuition. No matter if you’re a designer, engineer, or product manager, you’ll have to step outside your comfort zone to build the strongest product sense. Being able to connect the dots across disciplines is a hard-earned but extraordinarily valuable skill.

The resources below are eclectic and not a comprehensive curriculum, but hopefully, they’ll be useful to you as a jumping-off point to explore.

Along with the resources, the community gave some growth advice which I think holds up well for anyone.

Always be creating
Ship often
Learn the business aspects of the industry (marketing, sales, etc…)
Learn how your engineers work and what they need in order to do their best work
Develop your presentation skills
Build your capacity for active listening
Study the history of the field
Deconstruct and recreate things that inspire you
Read and write more
Lead an interesting life

My goal with Better by Design is to help you on your path to achieving those.

You still have to do the work, but I’ll do everything in my power to support you.

So there ya go.

Bookmark this post and you officially have no excuse for not leveling up your strategic thinking 😇.

Until next time,

Pat 💚

PS. Follow me on Twitter, which I’m actively using as a companion to this blog.

PPS. Share your suggestions and I’ll keep building the list!

Books

Inspired by Marty Cagan
Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Product Management for UX People by Christian Crumlish
Great by Choice by Jim Collins
Shape Up by Ryan Singer
UX Strategy by Jaime Levy
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley
Gamestorming by Gray, Brown & Macanufo
This is Marketing by Seth Godin
Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim & Mauborgne
The Hero and the Outlaw by Mark & Pearson
Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
But What if We’re Wrong by Chuck Klosterman
The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
The Tao of Leadership by John Heider
How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert
North Star Playbook by Amplitude
Company of One by Paul Jarvis

Newsletters / Blogs

Articles

How to Develop Product Sense by
Jules Walter
The Power of Product Thinking by
Julie Zhuo
WTF is Strategy by
Adam Fishman
You Must Live an Interesting Life by Ryan Holiday
The Modern Curriculum by Seth Godin
Up and Down the Ladders of Abstraction by Bret Victor

Resources

Growth Design - Detailed UX breakdowns (with comics!)
Mobbin - Extensive UI screen library
Start with Why - Simon Sinek’s famous TED talk
Blinkist - Like Sparknotes for non-fiction books
Laws of UX - Best practices for building user interfaces
PeerSignal.org - Market data
Pip Decks - A system of prompts, methods, and exercises that guide you through the messy process of bringing new ideas to market.
IDEO Designkit - Design method toolkit
This is Service Design Doing - Design method toolkit
Nielsen Norman Group - Tons of articles on design methods

Workshops / Courses

Product Strategy for Designers by Femke
Mastering Product Strategy by
Department of Product
Influencing the Product Strategy and Roadmap by Julie Xu

If you got a little value from this post, consider subscribing, sharing, or following me on Twitter. If you got a lot of value, consider pledging to support my work with a paid subscription in the future.