How I personally define strategy now
My definition of strategy has changed over time, partly because I got tired of the word being used to mean everything and nothing.
Earlier in my career, I thought strategy was about vision, setting direction, painting a compelling future, and aligning people behind it. Those things still matter, but they’re incomplete.
What I’ve learned is that strategy is less about what you want to do, and more about what you’re prepared to not do.
Today, I think of strategy as a set of deliberate constraints.
A strategy is doing its job when it:
Makes trade-offs explicit
Narrows the set of reasonable options
Helps people make decisions without needing permission
If everything remains possible, there is no strategy, just aspiration.
This shift changed how I approach product work. Instead of asking, “Is this a good idea?”, I now ask, “Is this consistent with the bets we’ve already made?”
Strategy becomes most visible in the moments where it’s inconvenient:
When a good idea doesn’t fit
When short-term wins conflict with long-term intent
When saying no is harder than saying yes
Another change is how I think about time.
Good strategy creates asymmetric outcomes over time. It accepts near-term discomfort in exchange for longer-term leverage. If a decision only looks good in the next quarter, it’s probably operational, not strategic.
For me, strategy now lives in:
The constraints we honour
The bets we double down on
The things we consistently walk away from
Everything else is execution.
The hardest part of strategy isn’t coming up with ideas. It’s creating impact while saying no, to good ideas, to reasonable requests, and to multiple people in different ways.
The hardest strategies are the ones that close doors.