How to Focus on Product Strategy Patterns, Not Templates

Crafting a solid Product Strategy isn’t about ticking boxes or breezing through a workshop checklist. It’s a process—one that evolves over time through actual work. The real question is: where do you start, and how can you tell if what you’re doing is actually working?

“Good” vs “Bad” Might Be the Wrong Lens

In Product Management, terms like “good strategy” or “bad strategy” are often too vague to be helpful. Why? Because product teams vary wildly—different goals, business models, organizational setups, and levels of experience. There’s no single playbook that fits them all.

That said, we still need a way to make sense of the chaos. That’s where Product Strategy patterns come in.

Instead of chasing the illusion of a perfect template, these patterns help you spot what works in your current environment. They keep you grounded and focused on what's actually useful—right now—not what looks polished on a slide deck.

How to Know When Your Product Strategy Is Actually Working

A useful Product Strategy shows its value in subtle but critical ways. You’ll know it’s working when feature ideas get rejected for clear, strategic reasons. You’ll know it’s doing its job when teams can confidently set—and adjust—their Discovery priorities without second-guessing. And you’ll really know you’ve nailed it when people across the company can talk about strategic direction without pulling out a deck or checking their notes.

Why Templates Can’t Do the Heavy Lifting

Patterns are helpful because they point to what’s universally important in your current context—things like narrowing down your user segments, identifying the most pressing jobs within those segments, and standing out from your competition.

You’ve probably tried filling out Product Strategy templates to surface these insights. The problem? Templates can only capture what you already know. They’re great for organizing existing knowledge, but they won’t uncover the gaps. They won’t tell you what you should be learning next.

Why Product Strategy Templates Fall Short

Templates tend to push teams into filling out the same types of information, in the same sequence, and with the same assumptions—often without questioning if those inputs are even relevant. The problem isn’t using structure; it’s using someone else’s structure as if it fits every situation. Product Strategy isn’t one-size-fits-all, and your process shouldn’t be either.

Instead of locking yourself into a fixed format, look for common Product Strategy patterns. Patterns give you flexibility. They support iteration and help you think more clearly without forcing a rigid, linear process.

Recognizing Product Strategy Patterns

So where do you start? One helpful foundation is Roger Martin’s take in Playing to Win:

“Strategy is an integrated set of choices that positions you on a playing field based on vision and goals in a way that you win.”

Effective Product Strategy is about recognizing the larger patterns that apply—no matter your product or industry. Once you see those patterns, you can decide which specific components are needed to define your choices in a way that actually fits your context.

The following graphic illustrates this idea visually:

Break Down Strategy with Patterns, Not Guesswork

The Strategic Narrative explains why you’re going after a specific opportunity or market—your chosen Playing Field. It frames the problems you're solving, for whom, and why it matters. Your vision and longer-term goals fill in the rest of the picture.

The Playing Field is the actual market environment you're operating in. It includes your real, specific strategic options—and the ones you’re actively choosing not to pursue. Think of it in terms of user, buyer, or stakeholder segments and the jobs you’re helping them accomplish. It also includes the competitors or alternatives your audience is weighing you against.

The Winning Moves are your bets. They define how you plan to win in this environment—what offerings you're creating, how you’ll deliver them, and how you’ll stand out from alternatives. As Roger Martin puts it, the goal is to win, not just play to play.

All three parts affect each other. If you change your target user, your competitors may change too. If you shift which jobs to solve, the value you deliver and how you deliver it changes. These elements are tightly linked.

Your Product Strategy should come from spotting useful patterns across these three areas. Ask yourself:

1. Do we have a clear Strategic Narrative? If not, what’s missing?

2. How well-defined is our Playing Field? Are the choices real and specific?

3. Do we understand our Winning Moves—beyond just listing features?

This kind of pulse-check cuts through the noise and helps clarify where your team stands on the fundamentals of Product Strategy, no matter whether you’re B2B or B2C.

Aligning Product Strategy at Every Level

Spotting these patterns also makes it easier to understand how different levels of strategy relate—and where to focus your effort. Think of this like a Strategy Stack:

• Company Strategy sets the big-picture direction: entering new markets, changing business models, or redefining the company's position based on vision and strategic intent.

• Product Strategy gives focused guidance for execution in a specific market. In early-stage companies, Product Strategy is often Company Strategy.

• Feature Strategy is about tactics—making sure specific features move the right metrics. This is what Casey Winters refers to as Feature/Product Fit: solving meaningful problems in ways that reinforce your core product.

Each level comes with its own context—both inside your team and out in the market. Once you see the difference between them and how they connect, you’re in a much better place to define and act on the Product Strategy that fits your current situation.

Navigating Strategic Layers Inside a Large Company

In a large organization, Product Strategy decisions aren’t made in isolation—they’re often distributed across multiple departments, teams, and levels of leadership. That’s why it’s even more important to come back to the fundamentals. Focusing on the core building blocks of Product Strategy gives every team a shared foundation to work from.

Strategy Has Different Cadences—And That’s Okay

A good Product Strategy should be adaptable. It needs to shift as conditions change, without losing sight of what really matters. That’s where understanding the cadences of strategy becomes useful.

Some elements of your strategy form the stable core:

• Vision

• Mid-to-long-term goals

• User or buyer segments

• Your unique differentiators

These rarely change. You don’t need to revisit them every quarter unless your environment drastically shifts.

Then there’s the dynamic periphery—the areas where regular adjustments are not just expected, but necessary. These include:

• The jobs your audience needs help with right now

• The channels you use to reach them

• The specific offerings or value props that solve those jobs

Knowing the difference between core and peripheral elements makes it easier to update your Product Strategy without losing direction. It helps you stay aligned, responsive, and focused on what matters.

Product Vision Is Core—But Product Strategy Needs Flexibility

Your Product Vision sits firmly in the “core” of your strategic thinking. It’s meant to be stable, resilient to market noise, and strong enough to weather unexpected shifts. But your Product Strategy? That needs room to breathe. It should be reviewed and refined regularly—ideally aligned with something like your OKR cycles—to evaluate progress, validate strategic bets, and adapt to what you’re learning.

From Chaos to Clarity: How Strategy Actually Takes Shape

Let’s be clear—filling in a strategy template won’t magically give you a great Product Strategy. The real work lies in sifting through uncertainty, making sense of messy insights, and recognizing the patterns that actually matter to your product, your team, and your customers.

The development process usually starts with ambiguity. You’re not totally sure what’s needed yet, and that’s fine. That’s where you begin—not where you fill in neat little boxes. Patterns help you move from that chaos to clarity. Once you’ve uncovered useful patterns, you can express them clearly through a structure or framework that others can act on.

Many teams rush straight to filling out templates—like gap texts or canvas models—as if those templates create the strategy. But that’s backward. Those tools are supposed to capture strategy after you’ve done the hard thinking. They’re a way to communicate it—not a shortcut for discovering it.

Strategy Patterns Come First—Templates Come Last

You might eventually plug your strategic insights into a gap text or canvas—but that’s just a way to share and align, not where your strategy should begin. Those tools are fine for wrapping things up. They’re not where the actual thinking happens.

Building a real strategy means starting from the top. You’re connecting long-term, North Star-like outcomes from your Strategic Narrative down to the near-term Key Results that shape quarterly execution. That translation from vision to action is the real work.

Product Strategy Is a Process, Not a Workshop

Let’s stop pretending you can craft an effective, evidence-backed Product Strategy in a two-hour session. You can’t. And you shouldn’t try.

Skip the trendy templates and buzzwords. Start with the patterns—Strategic Narrative, Playing Field, Winning Moves—and keep an eye on how they evolve. That’s how you land on the right strategy for right now. One that reflects your product’s role in the business, your users’ actual needs, and the path that gets you both where you want to go.