Most product teams skip strategy entirely. They go straight from customer requests to a feature backlog, treating prioritization as strategy. It is not.
A product without strategy is a team building features and hoping they add up to something. A product with strategy is a team making coordinated bets toward a specific outcome, knowing what they will and will not do.
This guide explains what product strategy actually is, how it connects to vision and roadmaps, the frameworks that work in practice, and how to build one for your product.
Table of Contents
What Product Strategy Is (and Is Not)
Product strategy is a system of choices that defines how your product will create value for users and your business.
Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy Bad Strategy, defines strategy as having three elements:
Applied to product management:
What Strategy Is Not
A vision statement: "Be the leading product analytics platform" is a vision, not a strategy. Strategy explains how you will get there.
A list of features: "Build Slack integration, dark mode, and mobile app" is a backlog, not a strategy. Strategy explains why you are building those things and why not other things.
A growth target: "Grow revenue 40% YoY" is a goal, not a strategy. Strategy explains the approach you will take to hit the goal.
A deck full of buzzwords: "We will use AI-powered analytics to create a seamless omnichannel experience." This says nothing about choices, trade-offs, or priorities. If a strategy statement could apply to any product in your space, it is not a strategy.
Strategy vs Vision vs Roadmap
These three concepts form a hierarchy. Each one operates at a different time horizon and level of specificity.
VISION (3-10 years)
"Every product team has data-driven confidence in what to build next"
│
▼
STRATEGY (1-3 years)
"Win the mid-market analytics segment by being the fastest
time-to-insight platform, then expand to enterprise"
│
▼
ROADMAP (1-12 months)
Q1: Self-serve dashboards for marketing teams
Q2: SQL-free cohort analysis
Q3: Enterprise SSO and permissionsHow They Relate
| Layer | Time Horizon | Changes When | Owned By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vision | 3-10 years | Fundamental market shift | CEO / CPO |
| Strategy | 1-3 years | Annual review or major pivot | VP Product / Director |
| Roadmap | 1-12 months | Quarterly or monthly | PM / Group PM |
The key principle: strategy constrains the roadmap. If your strategy is "win mid-market analytics," then a roadmap item like "build consumer social features" should not appear unless something changed. The roadmap is how you execute the strategy, not an independent document.
For a full guide on translating strategy into a roadmap, see what is a product roadmap and how to build a product roadmap.
The 5 Components of Product Strategy
A complete product strategy answers five questions. If you cannot answer any of them, you have a gap.
1. Vision: Where Are We Going?
Your product vision describes the future state you are trying to create. It should be ambitious enough to inspire and specific enough to guide decisions.
Good vision: "Make financial data accessible to every team in the company, not just finance." (Looker's original vision — specific audience, specific outcome.)
Weak vision: "Be the best data platform." (Too vague to guide any decision.)
The vision should be stable. If you are changing your vision every year, it is not a vision — it is a reaction. See our glossary on product strategy for more on the relationship between vision and strategy.
2. Positioning: Who Are We For and What Makes Us Different?
Positioning defines your target market and how you are different from alternatives. This is where you make your most important trade-off: choosing who you are not for.
Components of positioning:
Example — Linear: Target customer is engineering teams at high-growth startups. Problem: existing issue trackers (Jira) are slow, cluttered, and designed for managers, not makers. Differentiator: speed, keyboard-first design, opinionated workflows. Category: issue tracker for software teams.
3. Goals: What Does Success Look Like?
Goals are the measurable outcomes that tell you whether your strategy is working. They should be specific, time-bound, and tied to business outcomes.
Framework: OKRs
See our guide on how to create OKRs for product teams and our OKR glossary entry for practical advice.
4. Initiatives: What Bets Are We Making?
Initiatives are the major efforts that advance your strategy. They are bigger than features but smaller than the strategy itself. Think of them as strategic bets.
Example initiatives for a "win mid-market" strategy:
Each initiative should have a clear hypothesis: "We believe that [doing this] will [produce this outcome] because [this evidence/logic]."
5. Metrics: How Will We Know?
Your north star metric and supporting metrics tell you whether initiatives are working. The metric framework should connect user value to business value.
Example metric hierarchy:
Use our North Star Finder tool to identify the right north star metric for your product.
Frameworks That Work in Practice
Playing to Win (Lafley & Martin)
Five cascading choices, originally developed at P&G:
When to use it: Best for established products entering new markets or segments. Forces explicit choices about where NOT to compete.
Example: Spotify used this framework (or something like it) when deciding to expand beyond music into podcasts. Where to play: audio content broadly, not just music. How to win: exclusive content deals and algorithmic discovery that no music-only competitor could match.
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy (Rumelt)
Diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions (described above). The simplest and most practical framework.
When to use it: Any time. It works for a product, a feature area, or a team-level strategy. Its strength is that it forces you to identify the core challenge first.
Opportunity Solution Trees (Teresa Torres)
A structured approach to connecting desired outcomes to opportunities to solutions:
When to use it: Best for product teams that have a clear strategic direction but need to figure out what to build. It is a strategy-to-execution bridge. See our full framework guide on Opportunity Solution Trees.
RICE Framework
While RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) is primarily a prioritization tool, it connects to strategy by forcing you to quantify how initiatives map to strategic goals. Use the RICE calculator to score potential initiatives against your strategy.
Building Your Product Strategy Step by Step
Step 1: Assess Your Current Position
Before deciding where to go, understand where you are.
Step 2: Identify the Core Challenge
This is Rumelt's "diagnosis." What is the single biggest obstacle or opportunity facing your product right now?
Examples of core challenges:
Do not try to solve five challenges at once. Pick the one that matters most for the next 6-12 months.
Step 3: Define Your Guiding Policy
How will you address the core challenge? This should be a clear directional statement that eliminates options.
Good guiding policy: "We will prioritize enterprise readiness over new feature development until we achieve feature parity with [competitor] on security and compliance."
Bad guiding policy: "We will balance enterprise needs with continued innovation." (This rules nothing out and therefore guides nothing.)
Step 4: Plan Coherent Actions
What specific initiatives will execute the guiding policy? These should be 3-5 major bets, not a 30-item backlog.
For each initiative:
Step 5: Communicate and Align
A strategy that only lives in the PM's head is not a strategy. Write it down (1-2 pages max), share it with your team and stakeholders, and get explicit buy-in.
The best format for a strategy doc:
Real-World Strategy Examples
Figma (2016-2019)
Notion (2018-2021)
Slack (2014-2016)
Common Strategy Mistakes
Mistake 1: Confusing a Goal with a Strategy
"Grow 40% YoY" is a goal. How will you grow 40%? That is the strategy. Goals without a plan are aspirations. The most common version of this mistake: presenting a set of OKRs and calling it a strategy.
Mistake 2: Trying to Be Everything to Everyone
The hardest part of strategy is choosing what NOT to do. If your strategy does not explicitly exclude some customers, use cases, or feature categories, it is not making real choices.
Mistake 3: Strategy by Consensus
Asking every stakeholder what they want and then building all of it is not strategy — it is feature factory behavior. Strategy requires someone to make unpopular trade-offs and defend them.
Mistake 4: Never Saying No
Related to #3. If you cannot point to things you actively chose not to build, your strategy is not constraining enough. The test: can someone look at your strategy and tell what you are NOT doing?
Mistake 5: Changing Strategy Every Quarter
Strategy should be stable for 2-4 quarters minimum. If you are pivoting your strategic direction every quarter, you either chose wrong (rare) or you are confusing strategy with tactics. Roadmap items change quarterly. Strategy should not.
Mistake 6: Strategy Without Metrics
A strategy with no measurable success criteria is impossible to evaluate. How will you know if it is working? Define the metrics before you start executing.