Many companies operate for years without a formal strategy. Roadmaps look detailed, meetings run efficiently, and dashboards show progress. From the outside, everything seems on track. Inside, people feel productive but not always purposeful. The problem doesn’t appear overnight, it emerges when growth stops teaching the organisation anything new.
The strategy paradox
Early success often hides the absence of strategy: teams rely on instinct, copy competitors, or follow customer requests. When the market is young, almost any action creates impact. However, as competition intensifies and systems expand, instinct becomes a liability.
A scale-up we worked with once raised a significant Series A, expanded its team, and tripled its product group, but a year later, revenue had barely moved. Nothing was “wrong” operationally, the issue was that the market had shifted while the company kept executing an outdated playbook. The product was still good, but it was no longer different.
This is the strategy paradox. You can grow for a while without strategy, but you cannot learn without it. Without learning, every decision becomes a bet made in the dark.
What strategy really is
Strategy is not a roadmap, a backlog, or a revenue target. It is a set of explicit choices that connect your vision to measurable impact. These choices explain what problems you will solve, where you will play, and how you intend to win.
A useful way to think about it: diagnose the challenge, define the policy guiding your response, and design coherent actions that reinforce one another. The level of detail should match your context. A national infrastructure operator may document hundreds of pages; a fast-moving start-up can capture the same logic in two slides. What matters is that the organisation shares the same language for direction and trade-offs.
Treating strategy as a system of choices reduces waste and accelerates learning. When choices are visible, teams can test them, measure results, and adapt. When choices are vague, any initiative can sound strategic, which leads to activity without progress.
The illusion of alignment
In many organisations, alignment feels like agreement. People nod in meetings, say “we’re aligned,” and then leave with different interpretations. This loose consensus eventually shows up in duplicated projects, inconsistent messaging, and a growing list of “priorities.”
Leaders then respond with more governance, more steering committees, or more check-ins. Each addition aims to recover clarity but usually adds friction instead. The result is a familiar cascade: when outcomes are unclear, leaders control outputs; when outputs slip, they control timelines. The behaviour looks disciplined but signals confusion.
Alignment is not the absence of disagreement. It’s the presence of shared understanding, and that comes from conversation, not templates.
Roadmaps are not strategy
Roadmaps coordinate execution. They are useful but insufficient. A list of initiatives says what will be built, not why those things matter. When roadmaps replace strategy, teams measure success by delivery speed instead of business or customer impact.
The distinction matters because a team can deliver flawlessly on the wrong things. A healthy strategy turns effort into compounding value; a roadmap alone turns effort into motion.
When markets move, assumptions break
The moment of truth usually arrives when the environment changes. New entrants reshape expectations, incumbents bundle categories, or platforms offer “good enough” substitutes. Companies that relied on execution speed find that efficiency cannot fix irrelevance.
In the earlier example, Notion and Microsoft transformed the knowledge-sharing market, eroding the startup’s differentiation overnight. The company hadn’t failed to ship; it had failed to notice. Without strategic learning, its plans became disconnected from reality.
The product manager’s role
When clarity fades, many product managers wait for leadership to fix it. That’s a mistake. You don’t need permission to create understanding. The first step is to move closer to the source of decisions and document what is known, unknown, and should be known before committing resources.
Ask three questions before any build:
- What problem are we solving?
- What outcome will prove it worked?
- How will we measure that outcome?
Then, instrument everything. Nobody stops you from tracking the impact of what you ship. Add the metrics, observe results, and bring evidence back to the table. This turns conversation from opinion to learning, and learning is what makes you valuable in uncertainty.
Building clarity from the ground up
Start with your immediate manager. Write down your understanding of the current goals and confirm them. Repeat the exercise with peers in sales, customer success, engineering, and design. Compare perspectives privately, identify contradictions, and consolidate them in a short summary you can circulate. Within weeks, you’ll have enough shared language to stabilise short-term priorities and protect focus.
This simple discipline (asking for context, writing it down, sharing it back) creates local alignment even when strategy above you is unclear. It also builds trust. Leaders start inviting you earlier into discussions because you help reduce ambiguity rather than amplify it.
From activity to learning
Mature product organisations treat learning as their operating system. They shorten the loop between insight and decision and make it normal to change plans when evidence shifts. They replace the illusion of control with genuine understanding.
Alignment becomes everyone’s responsibility. Product managers clarify intent, designers test assumptions early, engineers surface feasibility risks quickly, and leaders remove obstacles so decisions can evolve. The result is not perfect stability but continuous coherence.
Conclusion: strategy is how organisations learn
You can grow without a strategy, but you can’t learn without one. Strategy is not paperwork, it’s the discipline of making choices, testing them, and adjusting with evidence.
When strategy is weak, the product manager’s job is to create clarity where none exists: by moving upstream for context, measuring what matters, and connecting people who hold different pieces of the truth. Those behaviours turn uncertainty into learning and learning into progress.
In the long run, the only true advantage is the ability to learn faster than the market changes, and strategy is how you do that.
