Product Strategy
Vision, roadmaps, prioritization, and tying product work to business outcomes.
Product Strategy: Deliver business impact via product innovation.
This is the third of the four competency areas in The PM Competency Model, and in my experience it's the one most PMs believe they're already doing when they're really doing something else. Strategy is where execution stops being enough on its own. At the APM and PM levels you're judged on whether you can ship. Somewhere around Senior PM the question quietly changes to whether what you ship matters to the business. That shift trips up a lot of good people, because the skills that got you here (specs and delivery and quality) are necessary but no longer sufficient. This is the transition I coach hardest, and it's worth slowing down on.
#My point of view: strategy is deciding what NOT to do
If I could get one sentence to stick with every PM, it's this: strategy is a set of choices about what you will not do. A strategy that doesn't kill anything isn't a strategy. It's a wish list with quarters attached.
Most of what gets called "strategy" in our industry is a prioritized list of features with a theme slide, an OKR or two stapled on, and a roadmap underneath. It looks like strategy. It isn't. A real strategy makes a bet: we believe this market is moving here, our right to win is this, so we are pouring resources into A and B and deliberately starving C, D, and E. The features fall out of the bet. The bet does not fall out of the features. Richard Rumelt calls the feature-list version "bad strategy," and I think he's right, because it's a way to avoid the discomfort of choosing.
"We have a strategy" almost always means "we have a roadmap." A roadmap is the output of a strategy, not the strategy itself. If you can't say, in one breath, what you're choosing not to pursue and why, you have a backlog with ambitions rather than a strategy. See Crafting a Product Vision and Building and Managing a Roadmap for how the three layers (vision, then strategy, then roadmap) actually differ.
The second thing I believe: strategy is only real if it survives contact with delivery. A beautiful deck that doesn't change what the team builds on Monday is theater. That's why my model fuses strategy and outcomes. You don't get credit for the idea, you get credit for the number that moved. As Shreyas Doshi puts it, most execution problems are actually strategy problems in disguise.
#The three competencies
This area breaks into three competencies, each with its own note and named behaviors drawn from my model. Read them as a progression: own the outcome, shape the strategy, point at the horizon.
| Competency | What it covers | The behaviors |
|---|---|---|
| Business Outcome Ownership | Connecting what you ship to numbers that matter | Product Delivery Impact · Outcome Analysis & Actions |
| Strategic Impact | Understanding and shaping the business strategy | Business Understanding & Clarity · Product Strategy Definition · Product Strategy Identification |
| Product Vision and Roadmapping | Setting direction and sequencing the bets | Product Prioritization · Roadmap Creation & Management · Long-Term Vision Definition & Evangelism |
#The supporting notes: the craft underneath
The competencies are what you're measured on. The rest of this domain is how I actually do the work, the frameworks and beliefs I reach for.
| Note | Why it's here |
|---|---|
| Crafting a Product Vision | Writing a vision that aligns people; vision vs strategy vs roadmap |
| Building and Managing a Roadmap | Now/Next/Later, outcome-based roadmaps, saying no to dates |
| Prioritization Frameworks | The major methods and when each one fits |
| RICE and Scoring Models | RICE in detail, and where scoring quietly lies to you |
| OKRs and Goal-Setting | OKRs done right vs cargo-culted; outcomes not output |
| The North Star Framework | Amplitude/Cutler: one value metric plus its inputs |
| Business Acumen and Models | Unit economics, reading a P&L, tying product to the bottom line |
| The DHM Model | Gibson Biddle: Delight, Hard-to-copy, Margin-enhancing |
| The Initiative Pyramid | Curtis Stanier: matching senior involvement to risk |
#Where strategy connects
Strategy doesn't start with a blank page. The raw material comes from Customer Insight, because you can't bet on a market you don't understand, and the sharpest strategic gaps surface through Continuous Discovery and Competitive Landscape Analysis. Your bets only become real through Product Execution, which is why Outcomes Over Outputs sits at the seam between the two domains. And no strategy ships without Influencing People. A strategy nobody's bought into is a private opinion, so Managing Up and Executive Communication are load-bearing here.
#Continue Reading
- Strategic Impact is the core competency: understanding and shaping the business strategy itself.
- Crafting a Product Vision for how I write a vision that actually aligns people instead of decorating a wall.
- Prioritization Frameworks for the discipline of saying no, and the tools that make it defensible.
- The PM Competency Model for how this area fits with the other three and the full ladder.
- The Master Competency Matrix is the full area × competency × level grid in one table.