I’ve worked in strategy for about fifteen years: inside two unicorns in growth marketing and product management, before that in Big 4 consulting, then on my own. What follows is written in the style of Ben Horowitz’s “Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager,” a piece I still reread once a year. These are the things I’ve watched separate the good strategists from the bad. I’ve been both.
Good strategists place bets that look stupid if they’re wrong. Bad strategists hedge every bet into incoherence so no single failure is embarrassing, yet no single win is meaningful.
Good strategists keep the one hard trade-off in plain sight. Bad strategists simplify until the trade-off is obscured, and everyone approves the one-pager because it asks nothing of anyone.
Good strategists tell the board the uncomfortable version and put the trade-offs on the table. Their strategies provoke arguments. Bad strategists build the strategy to survive the board meeting. Defensible, prudent, praised.
Bad strategists mistake alignment for consensus. They arrive at the strategy that survived every objection, and a strategy that survives every objection has no edge left. Good strategists know a strategy everyone agrees with is a bad strategy, and spend capital buying cover for the hard move.
Good strategists start from the advantage they already have. Bad strategists pick the attractive market and hope to acquire one.
Bad strategists keep running the insight that founded the company long after the market caught up. Good strategists know when the edge that built the company has expired.
Good strategists plan for what the competitor does next. Bad strategists plan as if the competitor stands still.
Good strategists close their options once a decision has been made. Bad strategists keep them open past that point and call it optionality. Good strategists move fast on the decisions they can reverse and slowly on the ones they can’t. Bad strategists move fast on all of them and call the difference “bias to action”.
Bad strategists say, “execution is everything”. Good strategists know execution without strategy is just motion.
Good strategists name the assumption that would kill the strategy. Bad strategists never write it down, so they can never be proven wrong (or right).
Good strategists change course when the evidence crosses a line they set in advance. Bad strategists measure everything and steer by whatever number is currently moving. They call this being data-driven. One bad strategist resets three times a year and wonders why nothing compounds. Another bad strategist never changes course at all, because their name is on the bet and dropping it means being wrong in front of the people who watched them make it, so they hold the loser long after the numbers stopped being ambiguous. Good strategists treat bets as fungible and drop the loser the day the evidence is clear.
Good strategists run the numbers to find where they’re wrong. Bad strategists run them after deciding, to prove they were right, and it looks like rigour.
Good strategists own the two or three decisions that decide the outcome. Bad strategists own all of it, sit in every meeting, and weigh the trivial and the decisive equally. You can delegate how a thing gets built. You cannot delegate whether the parts add up. Bad strategists delegate the bet itself, call it empowerment, and are surprised at the end that none of it fits together, because the work started before anyone decided what it was for.
Good strategists pick the most important problem within their purview. Bad strategists pick the problem they can definitely solve and call the easy win pragmatism.
Bad strategists write the strategy from their desk without speaking to a customer, a colleague, or a commentator. Good strategists write from the front line.
Bad strategists let the biggest contract set the direction. The account is thirty percent of revenue, it wants a feature that suits no one else, the feature gets built, and now there’s a wing of the product serving one tenant. Filed in the board deck under “customer-led”. Good strategists hear every customer and obey none.
Good strategists write the strategy down, it fits on a page, and someone else can act on it without them in the room. Bad strategists keep it in their heads, where it is always coherent, and call that staying flexible.
None of the bad strategists above is stupid. Each made a defensible call; the calls just don’t add up. That’s the whole disease. Incoherence, not ignorance. Good strategy is mostly the discipline of making the parts cohere, which is unglamorous and most of the job. It’s the work I do with founders and CEOs.