Strategy isn't roadmaps, it's coherent action

Don't call it strategy, call it an action agenda. Begin to try to identify the one or two key challenges that can actually be addressed and what are we going to do about it? What are the coherent actions we're going to do to take these on?

The goal of the product strategy stack is to help people take a set of terms that are normally conflated together, like goals, roadmap, strategy, and separate them into really clearly defined parts.

It's critical to disconnect strategy discussions from OKR discussions. And it sounds really obvious, but it's I think a very common mistake. And I think a really simple question to ask yourself is do we have a separate strategy process or strategy ritual that is distinct from OKR setting and metric setting and goal setting?

It's important not to include a roadmap as part of a strategy doc, because a strategy doc is meant to be separate from the roadmap. It's meant to be a companion to your roadmap.

If you have a real product strategy, a real one that everybody is aligned with, that you have got pre-alignment on, then a lot of this nonsense we tend to do with annual planning actually goes away.

I think what happens too often when people start with goals and then create the roadmap is that the goal takes precedence and there's no context, there's no principles that are ultimately driving that.