Strategy is your compass

For a long time I had the same complaint about my team’s responsibilities: we cover too many areas. It was true. I said it often - but it didn’t change.

A complaint is just a description of a problem. It might be accurate, but saying it doesn’t do much. People agree, and then everyone carries on exactly as before.

What changed things was turning that observation into a strategy. Not “we do too much,” but a clear decision about what we own and what we don’t - and why. The moment the complaint became a decision, it stopped being something people could ignore. It became something they had to actually respond to.

As product managers, we have to resist jumping to solutions until the problem is fully understood. Strategy is the exception. Strategy is where you’re meant to commit - a strategy that won’t decide anything isn’t one.

In my team, the vision is straightforward: best-in-class journeys for back-office users. The strategy is what makes that real - and the hard part of it was defining scope. Which domains we look after, and which we don’t.

We had a lot of domains to look after, so we split them in two. Primary domains, where we go deep and fully own the experience. Secondary domains, where the goal is actually to move them out of the team over time.

It’s a dual focus, but intentionally. Focus deeply where we should, stay tactical where we shouldn’t.

Take a domain like debt. It doesn’t differ enough in our world to justify a satellite team owning it. So we don’t. We help where it’s useful, but we’re not the owners - we defer to the upstream teams who own that space, instead of trying to solve it ourselves.

Before having a strategy that named this outright, when work in that area came our way, all I had was the complaint: “we’re stretched too thin.” Now I have a decision I can point to: “that’s a secondary domain, it belongs upstream, here’s why.” One is a complaint. The other is a direction. It’s a lot harder to argue with the direction.

Once you have a strategy like this, you don’t present it once and put it away. You reach for it constantly, because it keeps doing the work.

Every new request is another chance to apply the same clear line. Someone asks the team to pick up something in a secondary domain, and I go back to the strategy to give the answer. Like a compass, you check it often - not because you doubt it, but because it keeps you pointed the right way.

That’s what “living” a strategy means. Not that it takes over your life, or that you’re evangelising it in every conversation. Just that it shows up, steadily doing its job, in a hundred small decisions.

When the strategy is solid, repetition is the easy part. You say it again because it keeps being the right answer, not because you’re forcing yourself to stay on message - it just comes up naturally.

The clearest proof of all this, for me, has been the times I had no strategy at all.

Several of my side projects never went the distance - because they never had a single, clear reason to exist. When a decision came up, I had nothing to defer to but my mood that week, so they drifted. In time, I lost interest.

Protribe is one of mine. In the early days, it had no single, clear direction - just a collection of features looking for a purpose. Recently I’ve zeroed in on the events side, and it finally has a real reason to exist. Decisions that used to stall now have something to point to.

You feel a missing strategy long before you can name it.

People will only buy into a strategy if you back it with conviction, and conviction is one of those things you can’t fake. But that doesn’t mean forcing yourself to believe it.

If a strategy is sound - if it turns the complaint into a defensible decision - the conviction comes naturally. You can sell it because you believe it, and you believe it because it holds up every time you test it against a real situation.

The repetition is the road test. Say it enough, in enough rooms, against enough awkward requests, and you find out whether it stands.

And if you can’t get behind it? That’s not a reason to fake enthusiasm. That’s the signal the strategy is missing, or wrong. Don’t paper over it with volume. Go back and fix the decision underneath.

• If you keep making the same complaint, turn it into a decision. A complaint might get agreement, but a decision forges a path.

• Judge a strategy by whether you come back to it, instead of struggling to remember it.

• Say it more than feels necessary - not to perform belief, but because a sound strategy keeps being the right answer.

• If you can’t muster conviction, don’t force it. Treat it as evidence the strategy needs work.

A strategy isn’t a slide you present once. It’s the compass you keep coming back to - and if it’s a good one, you’ll find yourself reaching for it every day without even trying.

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