The best strategy hurts because it forces painful trade-offs

Strategy should hurt. If you're not making trade-offs that are painful, you are not actually helping people prioritize their time.

Facebook's news feed forces direct trade-offs where improving one feature inevitably makes another feature perform worse, unlike typical startup prioritization which is mainly about timing.

If we do this thing really well, it is going to directly trade-off against doing this other thing. It's not even a sequencing thing. When you think about prioritization, sometimes you think, we will do this, and then we'll do this, and then we'll do this. In Facebook's case, sometimes it's, 'Oh, if we do this, we just can't do this.'

The goal of good strategy is not to appease everyone. The goal of good strategy is to dictate how we invest the limited capacities we have or the limited capabilities we have into the problems we care about.

Often good strategy is so boring. It's hard to talk about. For example, on the engineering side of thing, a common strategy that's really good but very boring is we only use the tools we have today.

Choose what to suck at and figure out the trade-offs that you need to make and make sure that your trade-offs map the trade-offs of the customer.

Most products that fail is because they made a trade-off that the customer didn't agree with.

Each time you say yes, you risk turning a nascent good strategy into a bad strategy. Focus is the fundamental source of power and strategy.

Really, strategy always comes down to asking the questions about how can we win, how can we get further to the goal, which is the vision. But it's also keeping into context of where we are now and what we're able to execute on now.