Everything feels important? That’s a strategy problem
Why focusing your product strategy actually accelerates growth
Hi there,
I’ve been thinking a lot about product strategy lately.
Partly because I’m having more conversations about it.
Partly because product and growth keep getting closer with every passing year.
And partly because I keep seeing the same pattern across app startups and scaleups.
Everyone talks about strategy, but very few teams actually use it.
Which led me to this realisation:
Strategy isn’t vague. It’s politically expensive.
Real strategy forces trade-offs. It narrows focus. And yes, it inevitably creates tension, because not everything can be a priority.
That’s why so many teams end up with roadmaps, OKRs, and experiments… yet still feel stuck.
So how do you know if you actually have a strong product strategy in place?
How do you move from fluffy “we need a strategy” to “this actually helps us focus”?
Here’s how I think about it.
First, what I mean by product strategy
Product strategy isn’t a list of features or a delivery plan.
At its core, product strategy defines the promise you make to a user:
What problem do you exist to solve
For whom
And why your approach is meaningfully better
Growth strategy, on the other hand, is the system that keeps that promise:
Reaching the right people
Reinforcing value
Repeating it clearly and consistently at scale
When these two drift apart, growth starts to feel chaotic and reactive.
A strong product strategy makes optimisation easier, not broader
A strong strategy can feel tough in the short term — lots of internal discussions and tough prioritisation — but in the long term, it adds value by narrowing your focus to what actually drives growth.
When strategy is weak or missing, everything feels important, and nothing gets the clarity it needs.
Here are the five signs I look for that a product strategy is strong enough to drive real value:
1. It creates focus, not 10 projects in parallel
If every team has its own OKRs, metrics, and priorities, but no clear hierarchy, that’s not strategy, it’s a recipe for disaster, or at least silos.
A strong product strategy makes it obvious:
Which problems matter most right now
Which metrics actually indicate progress
Which ideas are explicitly out of scope
If you’re “optimising everything,” you’re not being ambitious. You’re avoiding commitment, most likely because you’re not confident on what truly matters.
2. It’s appropriate for your phase
I often see teams jump straight into monetisation optimisation, pricing tests, and funnel tweaks before they’ve nailed the core value.
Here’s how that usually plays out in practice:
A. Early stage
At this stage, your strategy should prioritise learning over leverage. That means:
Talking to users weekly, not perfecting funnels
Validating the problem and core value before debating pricing nuance
Shipping things that teach you, even if they don’t scale
If your roadmap is full of monetisation tweaks but you’re still unsure why users come back, you’re out of sequence.
B. Product–Market Fit
Here, the strategy shifts from learning to repetition. The goal isn’t to add more, but to:
Make the core value easier to find and experience
Reduce friction in activation
Create consistency in messaging, onboarding, and outcomes
If every experiment introduces a new angle or audience, you’re still behaving like an early-stage company.
C. Scale
Once the value is clear and repeatable, efficiency matters. Strategy should now focus on:
Improving unit economics
Leveraging existing demand
Building systems and loops that compound over time
Be conscious of what will get you to the next phase, rather than acting like you’re already there.
Across all stages, strategy should also be commercially viable, ensuring that what you focus on drives real business value.
3. It’s grounded in real customer behaviour
Maybe the most obvious point, but until more startups do this, I’ll keep saying it: focus on your customer.
Strong product strategies are anchored in:
Deep understanding of the problem being solved
How users behave before, during, and after experiencing value
Where the product naturally pulls people in over time
Focusing on deligning them
This is where product and growth strongly overlap, and you build something that can scale.
4. It defines a competitive commitment
Copying competitors is easy. Commitment is hard.
A strong product strategy is clear on:
The one thing you do unusually well
Why that matters to your users
And how you’ll keep making that better instead of broader
This may evolve over time, as AI, changing PMF, and market shifts will force adjustments. That’s fine, as long as you make a conscious choice to change rather than trying to be good at five different things at once.
A good rule of thumb:
If your strategy could apply to any company in your category, it’s not a strategy yet.
5. It’s operationally real
None of the above matters if your strategy lives in a deck no one uses, or only gets dusted off once a quarter or year.
A strong product strategy:
Makes shipping faster because priorities are clear
Comes with a small number of actionable metrics
Is understood beyond product and leadership
Leads to intentional pivots, not quarterly musical chairs
At the end of the day, strategy only works if people can act on it.
A quick note for e-commerce teams
In e-commerce, product strategy often splits into two parts:
Physical product strategy (what you sell)
Digital product strategy (how people experience, choose, and trust it)
If these two don’t reinforce the same promise, growth teams end up compensating for the gap by using digital to solve problems the product should be addressing.
I know physical products take far more time and effort to adjust than digital ones, but waiting six months or assuming the issues aren’t that bad will come back to bite you when retention drops or bad reviews slow acquisition.
Your product strategy needs to cover both sides and ensure they align.
Recommendation
In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a resource to check out related to the week's topic.
If this topic resonates, I recommend Lenny Rachitsky’s piece on Strategy Blocks.
It’s a great framework for thinking about strategy as constraints and choices, rather than a long list of priorities.
I don’t agree with everything, mainly because strategy isn’t just a thinking exercise. It’s emotionally and politically expensive.
Still, it’s a solid mental model and a useful counterweight to the “optimise everything” trap.
Worth a read if you’re rethinking how decisions actually get made on your team.
If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this:
You don’t know you have a strong product strategy because it sounds smart.
You know it because decisions get easier and growth feels less like guesswork.
Strategy isn’t vague. It’s expensive, because it forces you to choose.
Until next time,
Daphne