The 10 Questions of Strategy

Get to the bottom of the strategy with this question-based approach and avoid all other frameworks. Strategy is about understanding where you're headed, why it matters and how to get there.

Mar 23, 2024

If you’re a Product Manager / Product Leader reading this, you may at-least think, do or secretly hope that it is your responsibility to write the strategy for your area of scope. But if you’re a founder/entrepreneur/business leader, it may not be wrong if you’re thinking that OFCOURSE! It is “I who should be writing down the strategy”. None of these schools of thought are wrong.

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Writing Strategy comes with liability. The liability of delivering on it and eventually driving success of your company. You may write something meaningfully sharp, that it may piss off many others (where is “this thing” in the strategy?), or you may write something so verbose that it almost looks like a best practices document - it makes everyone in the company happy.

While the strategy document may be great, good or bad, be rest assured you can never know it unless you execute on it. You could make battle strategies all decade, but the efficacy of strategy is only known when you actually go to the battle. So, when it comes to down who should write down the strategy in the company - I often ask - Who is going to go into the battle?

So whoever it is that goes to the battle often, this post is for that person (and the team). You may have suffered the wrath of thousand strategy frameworks being dropped down onto you from the world of internet and product content creators - but I want to apologize on their behalf and give you the only strategy framework you need.

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But before that, let us spend 5 mins on understand who is responsible for writing down the strategy?

Marty Cagan has often mentioned that the job of a true Product Manager is one of the most difficult because the role needs to check for both business viability and customer value. To be good at both, a true PM would need to know the market ins and outs, customer insights and behaviors, business fundamentals of the company and then decide which product idea makes sense to pursue - an incredibly difficult skill to possess.

In reality, this skillset of value and viability has often been attributed to many other roles in the company as well - could be the founder, business leader, product line managers and so on, and in such organizations a typical Product Manager may not have a lot of personal skin in the value/viability aspect. Even to an extent that in some organizations, you don’t need a typical Marty Cagan Product Manager at all.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly wasn’t a bad thing before INSPIRED (the book) came out. In many companies, ability to understand viability and value could lie with different roles.

Exhibit 1: At Apple, top-down decisions are common, not because of the hierarchy thing- but because Apple has groomed its leadership talent to an extend that it is better at understanding value and viability than an average product role hired freshly into the company. Hence, it is possible for leadership to be the one that informs and writes the strategy. This means experts can quickly approve/disapprove/challenge product decisions, saving a lot of time. Also, sometimes decisions are guided top down to save on time. This in no way demeans product roles, but is a good example of value/viability understand could also lie in some other parts of the company, but this is a dangerous learning to take away into other companies if your leadership talent is not at-least close to as good as Apple has.

Exhibit 2: Few months back, I visited one of my friends who is a Software Engineer with Meta in the Silicon Valley, and he mentioned that PM on his team hardly works with engineering team on day to day basis. Engineering team was the one figuring out experiments, managing sprints and also checking if the right metrics were being hit. So, I asked - then what do the PMs do? He said “PMs figure out the strategy, deal with organizational complexity such as legal, compliance and more. We meet the PM as a team to know if we are moving in right direction w.r.t roadmap (ideas and metrics), eventually hitting the strategy or the roadmap needs to be changed. But once roadmap was aligned, it was left to engineering team to figure out the execution and metrics. PM did not even open the JIRA or any other ticket handling system.

Exhibit 3: During the same trip, I met a Product Leader at Atlassian as well (has no connection to the JIRA comment by Meta’s Software Engineer above ). He clearly mentioned that PMs at Atlassian were expected to inspire and influence others, demonstrate craft mastery by being customer-focused and continuously learning, deliver outcomes by focusing on customer and business goals, and communicate effectively by being strong storytellers. Engineers are responsible for the "how" - the technical execution of features, providing estimates of time and effort required, and ensuring agile development practices are followed.

Exhibit 4: Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky has been vocal about the fact that he loves to be in the battle and review every move himself:

“I started reviewing all the work. I reviewed the work every week, every two weeks, every four weeks. Before, people thought that was meddling. And I said ‘You know what, screw it. We’re going to review everything, I’m going to be the chief editor, and I didn’t push decision-making down. I decided to pull decision-making in like an orchestra conductor and what we created was a shared conscious of the top 30 to 40 people at the company , and it was like one neural network—one brain.”

Thus, the case in point being that strategy is not Product Manager or Product Leader’s responsibility and accountability only, but owing to company’s culture and what has worked for them for years, it can be the job that many layers / or certain layers in the organization do together.

Now let us go back to the original intent of this post - the point I was trying to make on strategy frameworks.

While there are many strategy frameworks out there - but most of them are also guilty of being either too gimmicky or under-represent the complexity of writing a good strategy.

Some of them are at a very high level - broadly positioning strategy as a dreamer’s exercise but some others are too granular - even including the product backlog management into the strategy writing process.

What I would highly recommend is to first clarify that Strategy is:

❌NOT Vision or Mission

❌NOT a template to fill by teams

❌NOT a presentation or slide deck preferably

❌NOT a Product Roadmap

❌NOT a Inspirational Document

❌NOT written in stone

❌NOT following the latest trends

❌NOT about making money

❌NOT about beating the competition

❌NOT tactics

But in fact,

A strategy document serves as a comprehensive but sharp-like-knife narrative that effectively communicates the directions necessary to succeed in the targeted market.

It goes beyond merely informing leadership, but extending to all levels of the organization, such that team members at every level understand their role in contributing to the strategy.

But we all know how tough it is, to address all of above.

That is why, the best way to write such a strategy document that does all of above is to answer the list a set of questions comprehensively and clearly. The format of how you answer the questions does not matter.

(can be in a word document, slide deck, video, audio, theater show...err you get the point, the medium does not matter)

But what would be such list of questions? A set of questions that you could give to an individual, to a small team or even to your CEO - so that they can effectively write strategy, evaluate it or find gaps in the quality of it.

Here are those questions.