I used to think getting better at product strategy meant writing better strategy documents. I'd obsess over frameworks and polish my writing. Then I realized I was focusing on interior decoration when I hadn't even laid the foundation. Here's what I've learned: Most PMs who say they want to "get better at product strategy" actually mean they want to write strategy documents that get approved. They want the artifact, not the insight. They want the document that makes them look strategic, not the understanding that makes them be strategic.
Building The Foundation
Writing a compelling strategy document is the last thing you should worry about. It's like spending hours choosing paint colors when you don't even know where/how to build. Real product strategy emerges from three unglamorous activities that most PMs skip:
1. Living in your users' reality
Not reading about them. Not surveying them. Actually experiencing their world. I spent a week trying to integrate our own SDK into a hobby project. A seemingly "simple" setup took me four hours. A competitor's took ten minutes. That week taught me more than six months of user research reports. When I truly understood why developers were abandoning our integration process- not intellectually, but viscerally- the strategic path became obvious.
2. Mapping the competitive terrain
Not just feature comparisons, but understanding the physics of the space. Why do certain approaches work? What constraints shape everyone's choices? I remember discovering that our main competitor's "innovative" approach was actually just accepting a security trade-off we'd never consider. Suddenly their speed made sense. And so did our opportunity. This deeper understanding changes everything. Once you understand the trade-offs others are making, you realize every strength has a shadow. The strategic question becomes: which shadows can you live with, and which ones will your customers never accept?
3. Developing domain expertise
You can't strategize without understanding your domain. Last year, I forced myself to deep dive into authentication protocols- really learn them, not just skim the RFC docs. It was mind-numbing. But buried in the OAuth 2.1 spec changes was a shift that would obsolete half our patterns. Most PMs don't get into the weeds but that's where real strategic insight lives. If you're a PM building developer tools, these insights often hide in boring places. In RFCs. In deprecation notices. In migration docs. In release notes. In the technical debt everyone's ignoring.
When you have genuine insights from these three areas, strategy documents almost write themselves. The differentiated play emerges naturally. You stop trying to be everything to everyone because you finally understand why that's impossible. The irony? The best strategy document I ever wrote took two hours to draft. But the six months of customer conversations, competitive analysis and technical deep-dives that preceded it? That's what mattered. The strategy doc was proof of understanding, not the understanding itself.
Product Strategy Theatre
Here's the thing that nobody wants to admit: you can't develop these foundations while writing your strategy document. It doesn't work that way. Strategy documents reveal what you already understand- they don't create understanding. It's like trying to become physically fit during a marathon. The race just exposes your existing fitness level.
This is why I've grown to hate "strategy sprints" and those two-day strategy offsites. We lock ourselves in a conference room, thinking we can speedrun our way to strategic clarity. But you can't compress six months of customer and domain understanding into a brainstorm meeting.
These strategy theater events create an illusion of progress. Everyone leaves feeling productive because we generated outputs- documents, frameworks, action items. But we didn't generate insights. We just decorated our existing ignorance with process.
Closing Thoughts
I think about all the time I wasted making pretty documents when I should have been getting my hands dirty. So if you're a PM like me trying to get better at product strategy, stop polishing your documents. Start building your foundation. The decorations can come later- and honestly, once you have real insights, you might find you barely need them at all.
That's what I'm focusing on now. Less decoration, more foundation. It's messier, slower, and nobody applauds you for it. But it's the only way to build something that actually stands.