In Ami Vora’s recent interview on Lenny’s podcast, she put words to an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head. Namely, the ol’ “execution eats strategy for breakfast,” but there’s more to it than that:

if you have great strategy, perfect strategy but poor execution, you don’t win because your strategy never makes it to the market. And what’s even worse is that you have learned nothing…Whereas when you have a pretty good strategy, a good enough strategy, you’re in the right direction and you have perfect execution, you still don’t win immediately, but you know your execution was great. So then you learn, what do you need to do to improve your strategy? You’ve got the execution machine, you go back, you update your strategy, you relaunch, and you keep on doing it until your strategy is perfect and then you do win.

More and more, I’ve been thinking of strategy as a background task that’s constantly running, not a glamorous whiteboard session you run quarterly.

This concept came to mind after reading Tom Critchlow’s post where he describes consulting and advising as “scams”:

…there’s only so much strategy work that needs doing before you need to start getting your hands dirty (and the best strategy emerges from doing the work).

This aligns with another adage – strategy is generally emergent. It evolves and grows over time. Great strategy requires action.

What does it mean for product strategy to run as a background task? Here’s how I approach it in my day-to-day work now.

At my team level, we have a loose strategy that sets the intention for the next six to nine+ months of work. It’s not incredibly granular, nor is it written in stone. It distills what we know about our business, the market, prospective customers, and challenges. Then, outlines three high-level focus areas we feel are critical for reaching the next step in the business. It also defines explicitly what we’re not going to do.

This document took less than a day to write. With comments from the team and leadership, we published it within three days. We didn’t agonize over the details.

The vast majority of my focus is on the three big buckets:

• (30%) Understanding – What opportunities should we be prioritizing right now given the strategy we’ve set? How can I talk to customers to make sure I truly understand their challenges?
• (40%) Execution – How can I make sure we’re delivering on time or ahead of schedule and everyone is aligned?
• (30%) Analysis – Are people using the things we built? Does the outcome match my expectations? Why or why not? How does this change what we build next?

These three buckets represent the learning machine. The faster it moves, the faster we learn.

Every two weeks, I publish a reflection for our team. The intent is to summarize what we’re learning and bounce it off of our strategy. What’s surprising? What doesn’t make sense?

This doesn’t mean we change our strategy every two weeks. The strategy doc is not meant to be perfect. The purpose of a strategy is to set the high-level intention and to focus action. Each additional insight is a note that we’ll choose to either incorporate directly or leave in a comment for next time. We’ll reevaluate in 9-12 months when the current doc doesn’t serve us any longer, and we’ll use all of the insights from our learning machine.

My general takeaway: Strategy isn’t this sacred thing you do every quarter. It’s not some special skill that some have and others don’t. It’s a quick exercise in distilling what you know now into a cohesive narrative everyone can get behind. The real magic sauce is building your learning machine to move quickly and find out whether you’re on the right track. Not in having the perfect strategy document.