Strategy

Short definition

The work of understanding and arbitration that consists in seeing where a market is going, identifying the problems worth attacking, choosing a position to defend and concentrating the company's energy on a small number of battles.

Full definition

The term circulates in two incompatible uses, and that is what makes it ambiguous in a product meeting.

In ordinary corporate usage, "strategy" often designates an artifact: a deck, an annual document, a list of axes. The word names a format and a moment in the calendar — which explains how a strategy can be said to be "done", in the sense that the document exists.

In the articles on this blog, the word designates exclusively the activity of judgment, and not its rendering: reading market signals, understanding what customers say without being able to phrase it, arbitrating which problems to take on, and deciding what not to work on. It is recognizable in that it demands time, depth and mental availability — and in that it doesn't necessarily leave a trace.

The artifact usage isn't the term's only substitute. Three market-analysis activities are commonly presented as strategy without being it: comparing visible elements across products, interpreting movements, stating the defensible position against alternatives. Strategy is distinguished from all three by the nature of its output — a commitment on where you play, for whom, at what level of risk and with what logic of differentiation. No quantity of comparison or interpretation produces that commitment.

Layer added by "Competitive intelligence: copying your competitors is not a strategy" (2026-06-02).

Usage in the field

The term comes into play whenever the distribution of a Product Manager's time is discussed, along with what is worth automating and the criteria the role is evaluated on. It also serves to settle what you protect when time frees up.

Synonyms and variants

"Strategic clarity", "holding the course", "choosing your battles". By contrast, the artifact usage announces itself through its companions: "the strategy in PowerPoint", "the strategy document".

Not to be confused with

• Roadmap — Roadmap — a short view of the major subjects retained over a horizon, ordered by degree of commitment; it expresses strategic choices, it doesn't produce them.
• Prioritization — the ordering of a set of already identified items; strategy decides what enters that set.
• Vision — a desired future state, stated to be shared; strategy is the arbitrated path, not the displayed destination.
• Judgment — Judgment — the faculty mobilized in the exercise; strategy is one of its fields of application among others.
• Benchmark — Benchmark — a comparison of visible elements across products, whose output is a table.
• Competitive intelligence — Competitive intelligence — the continuous interpretation of a market's movements; it feeds the arbitration without making it.
• Positioning — Positioning — a statement of the defensible place against alternatives; strategy decides to commit to it.

Examples

"Understanding where the market is going, what customers say without always being able to phrase it, which problems really deserve to be attacked, which trade-offs will create a real advantage." — the usage in the sense retained here.

"Not strategy in PowerPoint. Not strategy as a catch-all word you pull out in meetings." — the explicit rejection of the artifact usage.

Ambiguities / debates

The artifact usage isn't illegitimate: a strategy document is a real object of coordination, and a company needs to make its choices legible. What the sense retained here refuses is the substitution — the existence of the document standing in for the activity.