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Strategy is one of the most overused and least understood words in business. Every roadmap is called strategic. Every initiative is described as aligned with the strategy. Most of them aren’t strategy - they’re plans, or priorities, or wishes dressed up in serious language 🎯

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What strategy actually is

Strategy is a set of integrated choices about where to compete and how to win. The key word is choices - specifically, choices about what you will not do. A strategy that doesn’t say no to anything isn’t a strategy; it’s a list of things you’d like to achieve. Roger Martin’s definition is useful here: strategy is an integrated cascade of choices - a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, what capabilities you need, and what management systems support it. Each choice constrains and informs the others. That integration is what makes it strategy rather than a collection of independent decisions.

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What makes a product strategy

A product strategy answers: who are we building for, what problem are we solving, and what makes our approach defensible over time? It’s not a roadmap. A roadmap is a consequence of strategy - it shows what you’re building given your strategic choices. The strategy explains why those choices and not others 💡 Marty Cagan is direct about this in Inspired - most product teams don’t have a strategy, they have a feature backlog. The two feel similar from the inside, especially when you’re busy.

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The connection to vision

Strategy sits between vision and execution. Vision describes the future you’re trying to create. Strategy describes how you’ll get there. Execution delivers it. A common failure: teams have a vision and a roadmap but no strategy connecting the two. Every quarter’s priorities feel disconnected because there’s no coherent set of choices binding them together 🙌

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Good strategy, bad strategy

Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy is the definitive read on this distinction. Bad strategy is fluffy, aspirational, and avoids hard choices. Good strategy has a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy, and a set of coherent actions. Jim Collins’ Good To Great is also relevant - the hedgehog concept (what you can be best at, what drives your economics, what you’re deeply passionate about) is a practical tool for sharpening strategic focus. Lesson learned: the clearest sign that a team doesn’t have a strategy is when every stakeholder has a different answer to “what are we trying to win at?” If that question doesn’t have a shared answer, everything else is just activity.