The goal of strategy is to move from «build whatever anyone asks for» to a deliberate position aimed at creating a better future for both users and the business.
As much as we’d like one to exist, there’s no universal product strategy template — honestly, no template at all. The format depends on company and team maturity, team structure, business model, business strategy, and a whole host of other factors.
That’s exactly why there are so many definitions of product strategy, each more abstract than the last. Authors of well-known books articulate elegant principles, but there’s a chasm between those principles and actual day-to-day work. Take «Good Strategy, Bad Strategy» — the ideas sound compelling, but try grounding them in a real product process. If you’ve managed it, reach out — I’d love to discuss.
Read any article about building a product strategy — even ones written by leaders from Avito (I mention them because of their exceptionally well-developed product processes) — and you’ll find a common comment in the replies: «Great article. Really enjoyed it, but it feels like a horse in a vacuum.»
Product strategy is an ongoing process. Depending on where you are in a product’s lifecycle and what context you’re operating in, strategy can take very different forms.
Here are some genuinely workable examples.
1/ Strategy as a person. A leader who accumulates knowledge across business, marketing, finance, and product — and channels it to the team through decisions and priorities. It works, but «strategy as tribal knowledge» stops scaling as the team grows.
2/ Or «strategy as manifesto» — an internal team artifact containing a set of principles and answers to the questions «what do we do» and «why.» This kind of strategy can be written in an evening, but it can lose touch with reality just as quickly.
Strategy isn’t a template document you write once and file away. It’s a system that lives and evolves alongside the product.