Communicating a product strategy means getting a set of choices out of the heads of the few people who made them. It has to reach everybody whose decisions those choices are supposed to govern. A strategy now exists with a diagnosis, a segment, a way of winning, a sequence of work and a definition of success. All of it currently lives with the small group that built it. A strategy is only doing its job when it settles decisions nobody anticipated, and that happens only if somebody in a meeting the author never attended can apply it correctly. Getting it to that meeting is the product manager's work.
The sections below give the test a written strategy has to pass. They then set out the one page form and what each section of it answers. Two sections explain what goes wrong when a strategy travels without its diagnosis and why prose beats slides. The page ends with why repetition is the actual work, and with who has to be able to retell it.
The test a written strategy has to pass
The usable test is a retelling. Somebody two levels away from the work gets the document and reads it, and a week later has to explain the strategy without looking at it.
Three failure patterns show up. The person recites the guiding policy as a slogan and cannot say what problem it answers. Or the person describes the roadmap and presents it as the strategy. Or the person produces an accurate summary of a document they clearly regard as somebody else's business, which means they have received the strategy and never adopted it.
The passing result is narrower than it sounds. The person states roughly what the diagnosis was, names the segment, gives the reason a buyer chooses this product and can say at least one thing the strategy has ruled out. Wording does not matter. Rebuilding the argument does.
The one page form
A strategy that runs to twenty pages gets read once. The working artefact is a single page, and the six sections below are the minimum that survives contact with people who were not in the room.
| Section | The question it answers | What breaks when it is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnosis | What is actually going on, with evidence | The document reads as ambition with no problem attached |
| Where we compete | Which buyers this is for, and which it is not | Every team assumes its own customer is the target |
| How we win | Why a buyer chooses this over the alternatives | The proposition drifts towards whatever shipped last |
| Non goals | What the organisation is deliberately declining | The declines get reversed in the first difficult meeting |
| What has to be true | The assumptions the whole thing rests on | Nobody notices the day one of them turns out false |
| How we will know | The measures, and when each will read | The strategy gets judged on atmosphere at year end |
The order is deliberate. Diagnosis comes first, because every section beneath it only makes sense against the problem being solved. Non goals sit near the middle, so they read as a consequence of the two choices above them. Placed anywhere else, they read as arbitrary refusal.
What happens when only the guiding policy travels
Compression is what does the damage here, and it does it in one particular direction. The guiding policy is short, quotable and memorable. The diagnosis is long, full of evidence and dull. When a strategy is summarised for a wider audience, the diagnosis is what gets cut.
The result is a sentence such as "we are going to win on parts data" circulating without the finding that two field visits in five end without a repair. The sentence survives. The reasoning does not, and three consequences follow quickly.
Nobody can extend the strategy to a case it did not cover, because extending it requires knowing what problem it was solving. Nobody can challenge it, since there is no evidence on the table to challenge. And nobody can tell when it has expired, because the condition that justified it was never stated, so the policy outlives the situation that produced it and becomes received wisdom.
Writing it as prose
Slides are an unusually poor container for a strategy, for a reason that has nothing to do with design. A bullet can state a conclusion and cannot state the reasoning that leads to it. An argument reduced to bullets arrives as a list of assertions, and the audience has no way to find the weak link.
Amazon settled on the alternative in 2004, when Jeff Bezos banned slide presentations from senior team meetings. He required a narrative memo of around six pages, read in silence at the start of the meeting before any discussion. The point is not the silent reading. Prose forces the author to connect the claims, so a gap in the reasoning that a bullet list conceals becomes visible the moment somebody has to write the sentence joining two points together.
The same discipline applies at one page. The strategy goes down as paragraphs a person can read aloud. If a sentence joining two sections cannot be written, the argument has a hole in it. Finding that hole before the organisation commits is the entire point of writing the strategy down.
Repetition is the work
The announcement is the smallest part of communicating a strategy. Adoption depends on how often the strategy is used in public afterwards.
That means referring to the diagnosis by name when explaining a roadmap decision. It means answering a request with the non goal it falls under, and never with a judgement about priority. It means restating the strategy at the start of a quarterly review, including to the people who were present when it was written. Repetition among the authors is what makes it safe for everybody else to repeat.
Leaders consistently overestimate how widely a strategy is understood, and the reason is simple. They have heard it dozens of times, in the meetings where it was shaped. A person three teams away has seen it twice, both times as a slide in a large meeting, and has no reason to believe it will still be the strategy in six months. Only repetition over time answers that reasonably held doubt.
Who has to be able to retell it
Not everybody needs the whole document. A workable standard names three groups and what each has to be able to do.
Anybody prioritising work needs the diagnosis, the segment and the non goals, and that includes an engineer choosing what to do with an ambiguous ticket. Anybody speaking to customers needs the segment and the way the product wins, so that promises made outside match the strategy inside. Anybody funding the work needs the assumptions and the measures, since those are what will tell them whether the next allocation is justified.
The strategy is now inside the organisation. Somebody still has to make the same argument outside it, to a buyer who owes the company nothing and will only recognise an argument about their own situation.