Assess your choice's pros and cons
Whenever you consider a potential course of action—a new strategy for your group, a new product feature, an initiative to improve a business process—ask yourself what advantages and disadvantages might be associated with that course of action.
The table below represents a strategic framework for thinking about options and shows how this analysis might look if you're considering developing a new product feature:
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Lets us charge a higher price | Might cannibalize sales of previous product version |
| Might attract new customer segments | Could be perceived as unnecessary or annoying by consumers |
| Could improve brand awareness: our company is on the leading edge of technology | Would require expensive redesign of base product |
You can't likely do it all—develop a new product feature that avoids expensive redesign, that doesn't threaten sales of earlier product versions, that can be sold at a sufficiently high price, and so forth. Thus, you need to make trade-offs.
How to do so? Consider your company's and unit's strategic goals. Do these goals emphasize reducing costs? Improving brand awareness? Simplifying product-development processes? Your answers can help guide your decisions about what to trade off.