Stop Waiting for Permission: How to Be Strategic at Any Level

Let's talk about the elephant in every product team's room: your roadmap is probably a glorified wishlist, and deep down, you know it.

You're drowning in ideas from stakeholders. You're spending more time negotiating feature requests than building actual value. And when you ask about strategy, you get vague hand-waving or worse – silence.

Here's the thing: you don't need permission to be strategic. Whether you're a product manager, designer, or engineer, you have more power than you think to drive strategic thinking from exactly where you sit.

The Problem: When Roadmaps Become Wishlists

Most roadmaps are filled with great ideas from your team and stakeholders, but without a strategic lens, we can't make good decisions on prioritising those ideas. We end up spending more time negotiating with stakeholders than focusing on building value.

I get it. Strategy seems hard. It's a complex topic that means different things to different people. We don't feel like we're "allowed" to talk strategy. "Strategy is my boss's job," we tell ourselves. "I just do what I'm told."

But here's the bottom line: the lack of strategic thinking means too many roadmaps end up being a never-ending wishlist of ideas instead of being focused on what is actually the most important, high-impact work for the business. As Matt LeMay points out in his brilliant new book Impact First Product Teams, “the biggest challenge facing many product teams today is not that their high-impact efforts are falling short, but that they are prioritising work that has no chance of delivering meaningful business impact in the first place.”

How to Be More Strategic, No Matter Who You Are

Learn About Strategy

First things first: learn. This isn’t some secret, elite, MBA-only skill. Almost everyone gets it wrong, as I wrote about in "Your Strategy Probably Sucks". So arm yourself with knowledge. Read the books. Watch the talks. Listen to the podcasts. Start with the classics:

• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt – this will fundamentally change how you think about strategy
• Playing to Win by AG Lafley and Roger Martin – practical frameworks you can apply immediately
• For ongoing learning, dive into Lenny's Podcast and Acquired for real-world strategic thinking in action
• Shameless plug: Join one of my workshops on Strategy!

Learn the Tools

There are hundreds of tools and frameworks that help you look at strategy. Play with them. See which work for you and your context. I've compiled many of my favourites in my Strategy Toolkit, but the key is to experiment and find what resonates with your situation.

Strategy is not One Thing

One of the most important things to learn about strategy is that there is no one right way to do it. There’s no template, it’s not a document, it’s not one-and-done. Strategy is an approach. Strategy is a mindset. This might seem scary, but it should actually be liberating - any way you can make a strategic decision and provide focus for your organisation is good!

Strategy is a Muscle, Not a Skill

Here's what most people miss: strategy isn't an innate skill or something you learn once and master. It's a muscle. The more reps you take, the stronger you'll be.

Take the theories and tools and stress test them by walking through case studies. Pick your favourite product and work through what you think their strategy might be. What choices would you make given that strategy? Then look at your own product with this strategic lens. Look backwards with a more strategic view: what would you have done differently? How would a different, more strategic view have changed a previous decision? How would that have affected the impact and outcome?

How to Make Your Roadmap More Strategic

Strategy is about focus - saying no more than saying yes. If the company strategy isn't clear enough or isn't making tough choices for you, you have options. You can challenge your leaders (constructively) or build strategy from the bottom up.

Bottom Up: Use Principles

This is where the Decision Stack becomes empowering – we can use Principles to drive these decisions from the bottom up. As I explored in "Why Your Values are Useless", real principles make hard choices easier. All those decisions you’ve already made, endless debates you’ve had, trade-offs you’ve made - they can be articulated into principles that reflect your strategy and help shape future decisions.

Top Down: Seek Clarity

Here's the toughest problem: challenging strategy is often perceived as challenging leadership. If you aren't at a direct leadership level, telling leadership you want clarity on the strategy or that the strategy isn't strong enough can be seen as criticism or perceived as an admission that you don't "get" strategy.

So instead of asking "what's our strategy?" try these approaches:

Be empathetic: if the strategy is not clear to you, it might not be clear to your boss either!

• ”What is your understanding of our strategy?”
• “What is the most important thing for us right now? This or That?”

Be more diplomatic:

• "I understand the vision – I'm trying to see how it applies to my product"
• "I know we said this is our strategy – can you help me understand how that plays out in this scenario?"
• "I'm trying to tie our product plans to my understanding of the vision and strategy—I know your input would make it stronger"

Request clarity on what strategy means in your org:

• "I'd love to understand a bit more about how this org thinks about strategy – how do we define strategy?"

Sometimes, don't call it 'strategy' at all:

• You might just want to refer to it as "an approach to this challenge" or "our focus for this opportunity"

Play the "This or That" game my friend Adam Warburton devised. Simply walk your leaders through the trade-offs you think are important and have them choose which is more important. New user acquisition or existing user retention? Growth or profitability? Speed or quality? These forced choices reveal strategic priorities.

Think Differently

Ask Why? This allows you to move up the Decision Stack to understand how an idea (solution) might help (or not!) deliver an opportunity, which can help hit your objectives, which support your strategy, which delivers your vision. The classic 5 Whys technique isn't just for root cause analysis – it's a strategic thinking tool.

Focus on the problem, not the solution. We all know this, but forget it – by focusing on the problem, you open up to all sorts of new and differentiated solutions. Use Teresa Torres' Opportunity Solution Tree to always make sure you're taking new ideas (solutions) and tying them back to the opportunity. This opens up other solutions that might have a bigger impact.

Think 10x, not 10%. As Ken Norton brilliantly explains in "10x Not 10 Per Cent", incremental thinking leads to incremental results. What would have to be true to achieve 10x the impact?

Think next year, not next quarter. Related to 10x thinking, what would you do differently if you were thinking about your product a year from now, not just next quarter? This temporal shift forces strategic thinking.

Leverage everyone's insights and creativity. As Marty Cagan said, "If you're only using your engineers to code, you're only getting half their value." This is true of everyone on the product team. Strategy isn't just a leadership exercise, and it isn't just a product manager exercise. Work with design, engineering, data, and customer success – leverage all their insights.

Stop talking about features. Instead, prioritise customer problems, strategic opportunities, and objectives. Making these decisions first gives you a strategic lens that makes it much easier to make good decisions at the detail level.

De-Risk Making Choices

One of the biggest reasons organisations shy away from making the choices we need to have a clear strategy is that it reduces optionality. Leaders love optionality, and taking away options is scary. As a product person, you have an exceptional toolkit to manage this, though - we all know good decision-making in product doesn’t mean making a choice and sticking with it come hell or high water. We derisk it by breaking it down to assumptions, coming up with hypotheses, figuring out how to test those as cheaply and quickly as possible, and course-correcting as we learn new things. The same is true in strategy - so use your experience and toolkit to address the same risks at this higher level. If making choices seems too scary - dig in to my post on finding the courage to make strategic choices.

The Bottom Line: Challenge Everything

How to be more strategic? Always challenge the status quo. As product people, we're used to leveraging all our experience, skills, and tools to understand and think differently about our product and how we solve user problems. We can use those same tools internally on our strategy.

Admiral Grace Hopper said it best: "The most dangerous phrase in the English language is 'We've always done it this way.'"

You don't need anyone's permission to think strategically. You don't need a fancy title. You don't need to wait for the perfect strategy to be handed down from above.

What you need is the courage to ask better questions, the discipline to make tough choices, and the persistence to keep pushing for clarity and focus.

Your roadmap doesn't have to be a wishlist. Your work doesn't have to be reactive. You have more power than you think.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

The strategic revolution starts with you.