Why Products Without Strategy Fail
product performance is about more than just product build
Hi folks! This week’s post is a quick read, but something I’ve been exploring quite a bit in my own journey as a product manager. Hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think.
Most product failures don’t look like failures at first. They look like momentum.
Roadmaps packed months in advance.
Teams shipping every sprint. Dashboards lighting up with activity.
Stakeholders reassured by motion.
And yet, underneath all that progress, something critical is missing.
The product isn’t getting meaningfully better for a specific customer. The business isn’t building an advantage that compounds. Each quarter resets the conversation instead of building on the last.
This is what it looks like when teams are building a product, but not the right product.
The difference isn’t talent, execution, or effort. It’s strategy.
Product strategy is the invisible architecture that turns shipping into progress. Without it, even excellent teams end up solving the wrong problems with impressive consistency.
What is product strategy?
At its core, product strategy is a high-level plan that connects a company’s vision to how a specific product will create value over time.
A strong product strategy answers a small set of hard questions:
Who is this product really for?
What problem are we uniquely positioned to solve?
Why will we win in this market?
What does success look like, and how will we know?
Importantly, strategy is not a roadmap. It’s not a list of features, epics, or deadlines. And it’s definitely not a static slide deck that gets dusted off once a year.
Strategy comes before the roadmap. It gives the roadmap meaning.
Without strategy, roadmaps become activity trackers. With strategy, they become intentional sequences of bets.
Why ideas are never the real problem
Most product teams don’t suffer from a lack of ideas. They suffer from a lack of focus.
Ideas come from everywhere (customers, sales, leadership, competitors, internal brainstorming sessions.) In high-performing organizations, the idea backlog is effectively infinite.
The failure mode isn’t ideation. It’s prioritization.
Without a clear strategy, teams default to reactive decision-making:
The loudest stakeholder wins.
The most recent customer escalation jumps the queue.
A competitor’s launch triggers a rushed response.
The result is a bloated backlog and a product that looks busy but feels incoherent.
Strategy disciplines the idea funnel. It turns “this could be cool” into “this is worth betting on now.” It forces teams to articulate why an initiative matters and how it ladders up to a defined outcome.
Strategy as a decision-making framework
One of the most underappreciated roles of product strategy is decision hygiene.
In complex organizations, decisions rarely fail because teams lack intelligence. They fail because teams lack alignment.
A good product strategy creates a shared language across product, design, engineering, marketing, sales, and leadership. It defines the target user, the value proposition, and the metrics that matter.
Instead of negotiating from personal preferences or power dynamics, teams can evaluate options against agreed strategic principles. This reduces decision thrash, escalation cycles, and the slow erosion of trust that comes from constantly changing direction.
Strategy as a living system
A common misconception is that strategy must be fixed to be useful.
In reality, the strongest product strategies are stable in direction and flexible in execution.
Markets change. Users surprise you. Assumptions break.
A modern product strategy behaves like a living system. Discovery, research, experiments, and data continuously feed back into it. The team actively tests its most critical assumptions and updates course when reality disagrees.
This is not indecision. It’s disciplined learning.
The goal isn’t to rigidly defend the original plan. It’s to protect the long-term intent while adapting the path.
Anchoring strategy in the customer and the market
Effective product strategy starts outside the building.
It requires a deep understanding of the problem space, customer segments, and competitive landscape. Not surface-level personas, but real insight into who is struggling, why they care, and what alternatives they already have.
Strategy forces focus.
Instead of trying to serve everyone, teams choose a specific segment and problem where they can win. This sharpens positioning, clarifies messaging, and leads to features that resonate because they solve real, validated pains.
Differentiation isn’t created by adding more. It’s created by choosing better.
Bringing it all together
In the end, the role of strategy in product building is simple but profound.
It ensures that every sprint, every feature, and every line of code contributes to a coherent, compounding story of value. Strategy protects teams from randomness. It elevates execution from reactive to deliberate.
Great teams don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they lack direction.
Product strategy is how direction becomes durable impact.
Thanks Esha, very solid approach.
I believe that the best strategy framework that I have seen work multiple times is the one set by Roger Martin.
I believe that most companies fail when it comes to clarity on both the how to win and management systems.
They either overestimate or underestimate what they need to win or target something completely dependable on external factors while management system is the biggest of all as companies at least big ones, rarely create new process to adapt for single product. That’s why the spin of of new business division for new products and innovation in some cases is the only way forward to what we call elephant organizations
Winning Aspiration: Define purpose and ambitious goals.
Where to Play: Select markets, customers, channels, geographies.
•How to Win: Establish competitive advantage via differentiation or cost.
•Required Capabilities: Build unique skills, assets, resources needed
•Management Systems: Create processes, metrics, structures for execution.
Thanks Esha, great post. I think so many people start creating something, making something, and shipping something without this product strategy. If they take the time to do it, ultimately this is going to result in a much better product and with it a much more enhanced reputation as well.