Product strategy ownership is the question of who drafts a product strategy, who approves it and who lives with the choices it makes.
The question comes straight out of the stack, since a product strategy takes its terms from the company strategy above it and passes terms down to the roadmap below. Melissa Perri set out one answer in Escaping the Build Trap, published in 2018. In her version executives set the strategic intents, product leaders turn those intents into product initiatives and teams choose the options they will try.
The answer moves with the size of the organisation, and it matters early. A strategy drafted with no approver in mind gets rewritten the week the approver first reads it, usually after the team has spent a month on the interviews and the numbers behind it. Naming the person who can move the money and the engineers, before the draft is finished, is what stops that month going to waste.
The sections below separate the drafting of a strategy from the approval of it. They then set out who owns each layer of the stack at three company sizes. Finally they cover a company strategy nobody upstairs has written, and the difference between authority and influence that a product manager works inside.
Who writes a product strategy
Drafting sits with whoever owns the product area and holds the evidence. In most organisations that person is the product manager for the area, working with a designer and an engineering lead, because a diagnosis depends on things only the team sees. The team holds the support volume, the shape of the funnel, the last round of interviews and the reasons customers give on the way out. Nobody above the team holds any of it.
The team that holds the evidence is still not the team that decides. A draft gathers the evidence, names the obstacle and proposes an approach. The organisation then funds that approach or refuses it. Treating the draft as the decision produces the familiar result, which is a strategy the team believes in and nobody senior has agreed to.
Who approves a product strategy
Approval sits with whoever can move the money and the people the strategy asks for. That test names the person more reliably than a job title does. If a head of product cannot change the engineering allocation, that person approves a document and funds nothing. In a company of forty the approver is a founder. In a company of four thousand the approver may be three people who have to agree in the same week.
Naming the approver before the draft is finished changes what the draft contains. A strategy written for a general audience collects the objections of every audience at once. A strategy written for the person who will fund it answers the one question that person really has, which is what the organisation gives up by saying yes.
Ownership at three company sizes
| Layer | Under fifty people | Fifty to five hundred | Over five hundred |
|---|---|---|---|
| Company mission | The founders | The founders | The chief executive with the board |
| Company strategy | The founders | The chief executive with the executive team | The executive team, supported by a strategy function |
| Product strategy | A founder acting as product lead | The head of product, drafted with the product managers who own areas | A product leader for each business line, under a chief product officer |
| Product roadmap | The whole team | The product manager for each team | The product manager for each team |
| Product goals | The whole team | The product manager with the team | The product manager with the team, inside a planning cycle |
The row that moves is the product strategy row. Mission and company strategy stay with the founders or the executive team at every size, and the roadmap and the goals stay with the team at every size. Ownership of the product strategy changes hands three times across the table. A move from a company of forty to a company of four hundred therefore attaches the same job title to a different decision. At forty people the strategy is a conversation with a founder. At four hundred it is a document that has to survive a product leader, a finance partner and a sales director reading it separately.
Writing a product strategy when the company strategy is unwritten
Every one of those readers assumes a company strategy exists behind the document, and often none does. The mission is on the careers page, the goals arrive with the planning cycle, and the layer between them was never written. Waiting for that layer is the option that feels responsible, and it costs a year.
The alternative costs an afternoon. A product manager writes the company strategy the product strategy assumes, in three or four sentences, and puts it at the top of the document under a heading calling it an assumption. The assumption can be plain. It might say that the company intends to grow through existing mid market customers, that it competes on depth in one workflow and that it holds enterprise sales flat this year. Three sentences of that kind are enough to work from. A wrong version in writing attracts a correction within a week, usually from somebody who objects in a meeting. An unwritten assumption attracts nothing at all, and the product strategy inherits it anyway.
Labelling the assumption is what keeps the move honest. If a product manager presents an assumed company strategy as settled, they have invented the missing layer on their own authority. The correction then arrives much later and costs much more.
Authority and influence in strategy work
The correction costs so much because nobody was asked to give it earlier. A product manager holds influence over the layer above and no authority inside it, and the two work differently. Authority is the power to decide and to commit resources. Influence is the ability to change what the person holding that power decides. A product manager usually holds influence on its own, and the whole craft of the role sits in that gap.
Three things in writing do most of the work in that gap.
- A diagnosis carrying numbers, since a checkable claim is harder to set aside than an opinion.
- A named approver and a date, since a decision belonging to everybody drifts until the quarter ends.
- A record of what the strategy refused, since the refusals are what get reopened once somebody important asks.
The record of refusals is the one teams leave out. A strategy is remembered for what it chose, and it is argued about for what it refused. So the list of refusals is the part worth writing down in the approver's own words.
Ownership settles who has the right to decide a strategy. It says nothing about what the decision should be. Whoever holds the pen, a product strategy opens in the same place. The first choice it makes is where the product will compete, and every choice after that one depends on where the boundary was drawn.