Product Strategy Choices: Pursuing Explicit Priorities as a Product Team

If your Product Strategy sounds like “make the product better” or “be more like Spotify,” then it’s probably not helping you make real decisions. A useful strategy isn’t about sounding good—it’s about making clear, explicit choices and turning them into action. This article walks through how to define those choices for your product and how to bring them to life using OKRs.

Too many Product Teams fall into the trap of writing fill-in-the-blank strategy statements that look polished but lack substance. Sure, they’re easy to present—but they don’t help you prioritize, say no to distractions, or guide your focus in the problem or solution space.

The real work of Product Strategy is about seeing the bigger picture: understanding your market, your users, your competition, and then making and measuring the specific bets that will help you win.

Understanding the Responsibility of Product Strategy

First, let’s clear up where Product Strategy fits in your role as a Product Manager—and what feeds into it. One of the most common points of confusion? The difference between Product Vision and Product Strategy.

Product Vision is about the destination. It paints a picture of the future your users will experience because of the value your product creates.

Product Strategy is the route. It lays out how you’ll get there—what direction to take, which bets to place, and what to prioritize along the way.

While they’re distinct, Vision and Strategy are tightly connected. A solid Product Vision gives you the ambition. A sharp Product Strategy turns that ambition into a focused direction.

To build that direction, a useful Product Strategy must be grounded in four pillars:

• The Idea — the core concept or belief driving your strategy (this ties into your Strategic Narrative).

• The Market — the arena where you plan to compete and win (sometimes called your “Playing Field”).

• The Value — the benefits your product must deliver to succeed in that space.

• The Capabilities — what your team must be able to do to bring the idea to life, deliver the value, and outpace competitors (this connects to the “Winning Choices” you make for your Playing Field).

These four elements give structure to your thinking and ensure that your Product Strategy isn’t just aspirational—it’s actionable.

Why Product Strategy Needs Explicit Choices

Your Product Vision feeds directly into the Idea pillar of your Product Strategy. It defines the long-term changes you're aiming to make—and sets the tone for what matters most. But here’s the catch: turning that vision into a working strategy doesn’t happen through vague statements or flashy templates.

Most Product Strategy frameworks end up boiling down complex, tactical thinking into surface-level summaries. That’s fine, as long as they’re backed by actual decisions—not just placeholder goals like “increase revenue” or “build useful products.”

That’s where Product Strategy Choices come into play.

Strategic Choices Require Real Trade-offs

Roger Martin, author of Playing to Win, offers a refreshingly blunt way to test whether a strategy is actually strategic:

“My test for whether a stated choice is actually a strategic choice is whether or not the opposite of the choice is stupid on its face.”

If the reverse of your statement sounds ridiculous, then it’s probably too obvious to be useful.

Take the classic example: “Make the product better.” Sure, it sounds nice, but what does it actually do for a team? It doesn’t focus your options. It doesn’t frame a trade-off. It doesn’t even clarify who “better” is for. Everyone? At once?

You end up with a dozen paths, no priorities, and a bunch of confused Product teams spinning their wheels.

How to Spot a Weak Strategy

To avoid this trap, test your Product Strategy statements for real constraints and direction. Ask yourself:

• Would the opposite of this choice be totally stupid?

• Does it tell us what to say no to?

• Is it specific enough to guide discovery and delivery?

If the answer is no, it’s not a real choice—it’s a corporate shrug.

Make Choices That Competitors Can’t

Instead, focus on something only you can do—and that competitors can’t or won’t. That’s where strategic differentiation lives.

For example, let’s say you decide to grow your SaaS business by prioritizing agency clients. That’s a real choice. It tells you who your multiplier is, how your product needs to change, and which buyer personas to focus on. It also shows what you’re not doing—like chasing enterprise clients who require a different set of features entirely.

That’s what a strategic choice looks like: specific, directional, and based on trade-offs.

Use Gaps in Evidence to Refine Strategy

Sometimes, the best way to pressure-test your Product Strategy is to examine the gaps—especially if your user research keeps surfacing the same problems. If those pain points come up again and again within your chosen segment, something’s missing.

That “something” is usually one of two things:

1. You don’t fully understand the Job your users are trying to hire your product to do.

2. Your team lacks the capabilities required to actually deliver on that job.

Either way, the answer isn’t more vague brainstorming. It’s about refining your Product Strategy through sharper, more explicit choices.

Why Explicit Strategy Choices Guide Discovery

Clear Product Strategy decisions do more than sound good on a roadmap slide. They actively steer your team’s attention. They shape what to prioritize in your Product Discovery. They help you focus on learning what matters most—faster.

The graphic below breaks down how these kinds of strategic choices help your team focus, structure decisions, and avoid chasing noise.

Turning Strategy into Action: From Choices to OKRs

Even the clearest, most explicit Product Strategy won’t deliver results on its own. You need practices that bridge the gap between intention and execution. That’s where Product Management OKRs come in.

One of the most effective ways to execute on your strategic choices is to translate each one into specific proxy metrics. These metrics can then anchor your Product OKRs—so you’re not just moving, you’re moving in the right direction.

Use OKRs to Execute Strategy, Not Just Chase Numbers

Reaching a Key Result just to check a box doesn’t mean you’re making progress. A 100% completion rate only matters if it reflects strategic intent and is grounded in a deliberate choice.

Remember: tactics and goals are tools. Your Product Strategy—and the vision it supports—is the destination.

When translating your choices into OKRs, define what success would actually look like. That means avoiding lazy, generic KPIs that are always floating around, like NPS, signups, or activation rates. These catch-all metrics don’t reflect the nuance of real strategy.

If you're making explicit choices, your metrics should reflect that. They should clarify the impact you’re trying to create—not just keep you busy with more of the same.

From Strategy to Metrics: Examples of Translating Choices into Key Results

Let’s take that earlier strategic choice: “Grow through agency clients as strong multipliers” for an analytics SaaS company. That’s specific. Now, here’s how you’d make it actionable with OKRs:

• Key Result: Generate $200,000 in opportunity value from agency prospects in the sales pipeline

• Key Result: Enable the creation of 12 new client projects on the platform

Or take a different strategic choice like: “Scale client growth through onboarding automation.” This can be broken down into OKRs like:

• Key Result: Reduce onboarding time for support reps by 40%

• Key Result: Increase the number of customers onboarded by 30%

The point isn’t just to set goals—it’s to make your strategy measurable and real. Clear choices lead to clear metrics, and clear metrics drive real progress.

Aligning Strategy with Team Execution

Depending on your product and the altitude of your Product Strategy, you might need to break down those proxy Key Results into more leading team-level OKRs. These are your front-line indicators—they help the team track tangible progress and shape day-to-day Product Discovery and Delivery decisions.

Think of them as your team’s answer to the question:
“How might we…?”

This creates a direct line from strategic intent to execution priorities.

Revisiting Your Strategy at the Right Cadence

Not every Product Strategy choice should change with each quarterly cycle. Some of them are foundational and built to last longer. But you should regularly check whether your actions are aligned with those choices.

Use your OKR cycle as a natural moment to check in, evaluate progress, and make adjustments—not to reinvent your strategy, but to keep it relevant and on track.