The 5 Product Strategy Mistakes I See Most Often

Most "Product Strategies" Are Not Strategies

I review 20-30 product strategies a year — from startups, growth-stage companies, and enterprise teams. About 80% of them are not strategies. They are feature lists, OKR decks, or vague mission statements dressed up with the word "strategy."

A real product strategy answers a specific question: given our current position, our resources, and the market reality, where will we focus to win? It requires choices. It requires saying no to plausible alternatives. If your "strategy" does not make you uncomfortable with what it excludes, it is not a strategy.

Here are the five mistakes I see most often, with examples of what good looks like.

Mistake 1: No Strategy at All (Just a Feature List)

What it looks like: The product team has a roadmap full of features. Each feature has a business case. The roadmap is prioritized. But there is no connective tissue — no explanation of why these specific features, in this specific order, will produce a specific outcome.

The roadmap answers "what are we building?" It does not answer "why will this win?"

Real example: A Series B project management tool I advised had a roadmap with 40 items across 4 quarters. I asked the VP of Product: "If you could only ship 5 things this year, which 5 would matter most?" She could not answer without consulting the roadmap. The features had been prioritized individually but there was no overarching thesis about what the product needed to become.

What good looks like: Superhuman's early strategy was not "build a fast email client." It was "target power users who spend 3+ hours a day in email and deliver an experience that is measurably faster than Gmail for every core action." That thesis determined what they built (keyboard shortcuts, split inbox, snooze), what they did not build (calendar, contacts, chat), and how they measured success (speed of common actions vs. Gmail).

The strategy is the reasoning behind the feature list, not the feature list itself.

Mistake 2: Confusing Strategy with Goals

What it looks like: "Our product strategy is to increase retention by 15% and grow ARR to $20M." Those are goals, not strategy. Goals describe where you want to go. Strategy describes how you will get there.

Real example: A fintech company's "product strategy" document contained three OKRs and a table of metrics. When I asked how they planned to increase activation by 20%, the answer was "we're going to improve the onboarding flow." That is a tactic, not a strategy. A strategy would explain why the onboarding flow is the highest-leverage intervention, what specific user segment they are targeting, and what about their approach will succeed where others have failed.

What good looks like: A strategy connects diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action (Richard Rumelt's framework).

Diagnosis: "Our activation rate for SMB users is 23%, vs. 67% for enterprise users. The gap is caused by SMB users hitting a complexity wall during setup — they need a simpler path to value."

Guiding policy: "We will build a streamlined SMB onboarding experience that gets users to their first successful workflow within 10 minutes, without requiring admin setup."

Coherent action: "This means building templates for common SMB use cases, a guided setup wizard, and removing 4 configuration steps that only enterprise customers need."

The product vision says where you are going. The goals say how you will measure progress. The strategy says how you will get there.

Mistake 3: Changing Strategy Every Quarter

What it looks like: Q1 strategy: "Focus on enterprise." Q2 strategy: "Actually, let's go after SMBs." Q3 strategy: "We need to build a platform." Each quarter, the team pivots to a new direction before the previous one has had time to produce results.

Real example: A collaboration tool I worked with changed their target audience three times in 18 months — from marketing teams to engineering teams to "all knowledge workers." Each pivot involved rebuilding parts of the product, retraining the sales team, and rewriting marketing materials. By the time they settled on a direction, they had burned 12 months of engineering time on features that did not compound.

Why this happens: Usually, impatience. A strategy needs 2-3 quarters to show results. If leadership evaluates the strategy after 6 weeks and pivots because metrics have not moved yet, no strategy ever gets a fair test.

What good looks like: Set a strategy with a 12-month horizon. Review it quarterly. Adjust tactics (how you execute) every quarter. Change the strategy itself only if the underlying assumptions have been invalidated — not because results are slow.

Figma committed to "design tool for teams" for years before the collaboration bet paid off. They did not pivot to "design tool for individuals" when early adoption was slow. They doubled down, built multiplayer editing, and waited for the market to catch up with their thesis.

Mistake 4: Strategy by Committee

What it looks like: The product strategy is the output of a two-day offsite where 15 people contributed ideas, voted on priorities, and compromised on a direction. The result is a strategy that includes something for everyone and commits to nothing in particular.

Real example: An enterprise SaaS company ran a product strategy offsite with PMs, engineering leads, designers, and executives. The output was a strategy with 7 "strategic pillars." Seven. Each pillar corresponded to a senior stakeholder's top priority. Nobody was told no. The result was a strategy that distributed resources so thinly across 7 initiatives that none of them had enough investment to succeed.

Why this happens: Consensus feels safe. Nobody is upset. Nobody is excluded. But consensus-driven strategy optimizes for organizational harmony, not for market success.

What good looks like: One person (the CPO, VP Product, or in smaller companies the CEO) owns the strategy. They gather input broadly — from customers, data, the team, the market. But the final decision is theirs. They take accountability for the focus areas and, critically, for what is excluded.

Amazon's leadership principle "Disagree and Commit" exists precisely for this reason. Strategy requires conviction. Committees produce compromises, not convictions.

Mistake 5: Ignoring Competitive Reality

What it looks like: The product strategy is entirely inward-focused. It describes what the team will build based on customer feedback and internal priorities. There is no mention of competitors, market dynamics, or competitive positioning.

Real example: A CRM startup built their strategy around customer interview findings: better contact management, easier email integration, cleaner UI. All valid improvements. But they never addressed the elephant in the room: HubSpot offered a free CRM that was "good enough" for their target segment. No amount of polish would overcome a free competitor unless the strategy included a differentiation angle that HubSpot could not or would not replicate.

Why this happens: PMs are trained to be customer-obsessed, which is correct. But customer obsession without market awareness leads to building a better mousetrap that nobody buys because the existing mousetrap is free (or cheap enough, or embedded enough).

What good looks like: Include a competitive diagnosis in your strategy. Not a 50-page competitive analysis — a clear-eyed assessment of:

Where competitors are ahead and whether you can close the gap

Where competitors are structurally weak and whether you can exploit that weakness

What your unfair advantage is and whether your strategy amplifies it

Linear's strategy was not just "build a better project tracker." It was "Jira is slow, complex, and hated by engineers. We will build the fastest, simplest project tracker for engineering teams and win on speed and developer experience." The competitive diagnosis (Jira is slow and complex) directly informed the product strategy (speed and simplicity as core differentiators).

The Pattern Behind All Five Mistakes

If you look at these five mistakes together, they share a common root: avoiding hard choices.

A feature list avoids choosing a direction.

Goals without strategy avoid choosing a method.

Quarterly pivots avoid committing to a bet.

Committee strategy avoids choosing whose priorities matter most.

Ignoring competitors avoids confronting uncomfortable market truths.

Strategy is, at its core, a theory of how you will win given the reality you face. Theories require assertions. Assertions can be wrong. And that is what makes strategy uncomfortable — it forces you to be specific enough to be wrong.

The PMs and leaders who produce the best strategies are not the ones with the most data or the best frameworks. They are the ones willing to stake a claim, defend it with evidence, and accept accountability for the outcome.

How to Pressure-Test Your Strategy

Here are five questions to ask about any product strategy:

What are we not doing? If the strategy does not explicitly exclude plausible alternatives, it is not making hard enough choices.

What has to be true for this to work? List the assumptions. If any of them are wrong, does the strategy still hold?

How would a smart competitor respond? If a well-funded competitor could easily copy your approach, you need a deeper moat.

Can you explain it in 2 sentences? If the strategy requires a 30-slide deck to communicate, it is too complex to execute.

Does this make some people uncomfortable? Good strategy is opinionated. If everyone enthusiastically agrees, you have probably described something too vague to disagree with.

A Quick Exercise to Test Your Current Strategy

Take 10 minutes and try this:

Write your current product strategy in two sentences. No jargon. No hedge words. If you cannot do this, you might not have a strategy.

Below that, write three things your team is explicitly not building this year because of the strategy. If you cannot name three things you are saying no to, your strategy is not specific enough.

Below that, write the one assumption that, if proven wrong, would invalidate the strategy entirely. This is your biggest risk. If you do not know what it is, you have not thought deeply enough about why the strategy might fail.

Share all three with a skeptical colleague. Ask them to poke holes. The holes they find are the places your strategy needs strengthening.

This exercise takes 10 minutes and tells you more about your strategy's quality than a two-day offsite ever will.

Building the Strategy Muscle

Product strategy is a skill, not a talent. It improves with practice. The PMs who get good at it are the ones who:

Write strategies down. Unwritten strategies are unexamined strategies. The act of writing forces clarity.

Review past strategies honestly. What did you predict? What actually happened? Where were you right? Where were you wrong?

Study other companies' strategies. Not the press releases — the actual choices they made. Why did Notion target personal users before teams? Why did Slack give away the free tier so generously? Why did Figma build a browser-based tool when everyone else was native?

Read Rumelt. "Good Strategy Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt is the single best book on the topic. It will permanently change how you think about strategy, product or otherwise.

The irony of product strategy is that the teams who need it most — those with limited resources and uncertain markets — are the teams most likely to skip it in favor of "just building." But building without strategy is activity without direction. It feels productive. It rarely is.