In other words, strategy represents the set of guiding principles for your roadmapping and execution tasks to ensure they align with your mission and vision.
The Framework
Before we talk about strategy, it needs to be contextualized within a few other concepts primarily because strategy never exists (or shouldn’t exist) in isolation. Here are the high-level definitions of the different components from a product-centric view:
- Mission: This is a statement that describes the problem you are setting out to solve, typically including who you are solving it for. This is often set at the company level, but can also be defined for a product or product line.
- Vision: This is the idealized solution that addresses the problem you’ve articulated in your mission. A product vision typically has just enough viability to be relatable, but is still devoid of the details that may hamper your imagination. Product vision is also the goal post and rallying point for your product — it paints the picture of how your product will make an impact.
- Strategy: This is a set of principles and decisions — informed by reality (e.g. market forces, laws of physics, data) and caveated with assumptions — that you commit to ahead of development to ensure the greatest likelihood of success in achieving your vision. Your strategy may evolve with the introduction of new data. If there’s a big shift in strategy while the mission and vision remain constant, it’s called a pivot.
- Roadmap: This is the manifestation of your strategy in concrete steps towards your product vision, inclusive of rough milestones and timelines. This, too, often changes given new data. (As I like to say, a roadmap is defunct as soon as it’s published.)
- Execution: This is the day-to-day activities along the path of the roadmap. This is where you do the hard work to build, launch, and iterate, all the while collecting the necessary data to inform any changes in your roadmap and strategy.
As the gradient and size of the diagram above suggests, the mission, by design, is both vague and broad. The further down you go in the stack, the more concrete and narrow these concepts become.
Strategy within this framework bridges the gap between what you aspire to be and what you are doing.