Product Strategy Foundations

Empowered Product Teams and Strategy

Empowered product teams are about giving teams hard problems to solve and the space to solve them. The critical question then becomes: which problems should they solve? Answering this question is the essence of product strategy.

Remarkably, many product organizations operate without a real product strategy. They are busy building features and running projects for valid reasons, yet lack a coherent strategy guiding which problems matter most and why. This often results in feature teams working tirelessly without moving meaningfully toward desired outcomes.

The consequences are significant:

• Large amounts of wasted effort, often driven by rigid product roadmaps
• Insufficient focus on the most important problems
• Diluted impact due to spreading teams too thin

As Richard Rumelt explains in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, bad strategy often stems from avoiding the hard choices required to create a good one.

What Is Product Strategy?

Strategy exists at many levels—business, growth, sales, delivery, and more. At its core, a strategy explains how you plan to achieve a goal, including the rationale behind that approach. It does not define tactics; tactics are the specific actions used to execute the strategy.

Product strategy, specifically, answers the question:

How do we turn the product vision into reality while meeting the needs of the business?

Many companies have ambitious goals (e.g., doubling revenue) and detailed product roadmaps (tactics), but no clear product strategy connecting the two.

In practice:

• Product strategy decides which problems to solve
• Product discovery determines which solutions can solve those problems
• Product delivery builds and ships those solutions

Why Product Strategy Is Hard

Effective product strategy requires four difficult capabilities:

1. Making tough choices about what truly matters
2. Generating and leveraging insights
3. Converting insights into action
4. Actively managing execution without micromanaging

Focus Through Choice

Strategy demands focus—deciding what not to do. Many organizations pursue dozens of major initiatives simultaneously, leaving product teams overcommitted and unable to make meaningful progress. Spreading ownership across many teams and objectives dramatically reduces impact, especially when problems are complex.

True focus comes from recognizing that not all initiatives are equally important and choosing the few that are critical to business success.

Insights Before Action

Once focus is established, strategy depends on insights gained through analysis and learning. These insights may come from:

• Customer research
• Business and operational data
• Competitive and market analysis
• New technologies and internal capabilities

Insights reveal the levers that matter most and inform where teams should concentrate their efforts.

Turning Insights Into Action

In organizations with empowered product teams, insights are translated into clear objectives, owned by specific teams and supported by sufficient strategic context. Teams are then trusted to solve these problems effectively.

Continuous Management

Product strategy is never static. As teams work toward objectives, new challenges emerge—dependencies, missing capabilities, uneven progress, and unexpected obstacles. Managing this requires engaged leaders practicing servant leadership, not micromanagement.

The Bottom Line

Product strategy is difficult because it demands choice, thinking, and sustained effort. While product discovery may be the most visible and enjoyable work, product strategy is often the more important—and more challenging—skill.

Future discussions will explore the four elements of product strategy in depth: focus, insights, actions, and management. For now, the key takeaway is clear: empowered product teams succeed only when guided by a thoughtful, actively managed product strategy.