Why Most Product Strategies Fail, and How Not To
In most companies, “product strategy” is a polite fiction. It’s a roadmap dressed up as a strategy, or a feature list with a slogan stapled on top.
[Download the Product Strategy Development Framework]
But product strategy isn’t that tidy. It’s decisive. It’s specific. And above all, it’s about creating a competitive advantage that lasts—not for a quarter, not for a release cycle, but long enough to matter.
Business strategy defines the game you want to win, but product strategy defines the product moves that make winning possible.
In the framework published today, I lay out a practical structure for building product strategies that actually function as strategy, not placeholder. At its heart:
Product Strategy Answers One Critical Question:
How will we profitably establish a lasting competitive advantage with our product?
Not “How will we achieve feature parity?”
Not “How do we make that big customer happy next quarter?”
Not “What can we get done in the next 3 sprints?”
A real product strategy rejects all of that. It picks a place to win, commits to it, and aligns the company’s resources to make that win inevitable.
Seven Elements of Product Strategy
To get there, I break product strategy formation into seven elements—each necessary, none sufficient on its own.
1. Objective – What business outcome must the product materially deliver? Revenue growth? Retention? Cost reduction? Without a concrete objective, everything else becomes wandering.
2. Opportunity Domain – Where, exactly, will we create advantage? Market segments, workflows, unmet needs, competitor blind spots. Strategy is impossible without focus, and focus is impossible without boundaries.
3. Differentiated Value – What value will we deliver that is unlike and superior to alternatives? This is the heart of strategy. It is also where good intentions typically collapse into generic claims. Differentiated value must be real, defensible, and difficult for others to duplicate. And yes, a strategy must include a “No List”—what we will not build and whom we will not serve.
4. Strategic Sequencing – Great strategy is not just about what to do but what to do first. What must be built early to validate our assumptions? What comes later to scale the advantage? Dependencies across product, tech, operations, and GTM determine whether a strategy unfolds coherently or dies on the launchpad.
5. Adoption Approach – Value not adopted is value unrealized. Product teams don’t own GTM execution, but they must define how customers will reach, try, commit to, and expand within the product. Sometimes, the adoption model itself becomes the moat.
6. Assumptions & Risks – Every strategy rests on beliefs about customer behavior, competitive response, feasibility, and organizational capacity. Expose them. Validate them. Mitigate them. Strategy without acknowledged risk is fantasy.
7. Outcomes – Finally, define how success will be measured in both the near and long term. This is where North Star Metrics come in—metrics tied not to vanity but to actual customer value delivered and the economic engine it fuels.
Grounded Strategy
And all of this must be grounded in Continuous Discovery—deep, current, real-world understanding of customers, competitors, and market shifts. Strategy doesn’t emerge from internal imagination; it emerges from connecting insights that others have missed.
This framework is not meant to decorate a PowerPoint. It is meant to force clarity. To compel tradeoffs. To expose lazy thinking. To replace “roadmap optimism” with genuine strategic intent.
If that resonates, I invite you to download the full document (click the button below). It’s long enough to be useful and short enough to be usable—a combination we see far too rarely in product strategy work.