Waiting for someone else to create your strategy is a trap

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Most product managers at the junior or mid-level spend too much time waiting for a “real” strategy to show up. They assume someone more senior will set direction and they’ll just execute.

The problem is that product people who don’t practice thinking strategically stay stuck executing someone else’s to-do list. If you want to grow, you have to learn how to lead strategy before someone asks you to.

Many think strategy is reserved for directors or VPs. They assume it has to be comprehensive, perfect, or formal. So instead of developing strategic muscles, they wait for permission to “be strategic.” That permission rarely comes.

You don’t get promoted and then start thinking strategically. You start thinking strategically and then get promoted.

Let's talk about how.

Takeaway 1: Strategy starts with constraints.

When most people try to sound strategic, they start with the company’s goals. “We’re trying to grow revenue by 15 percent.” “We want to improve retention.” Fine. But those are just desires. Real strategy starts with understanding what’s in the way.

What are the hard problems? Where are you weak? What’s changing around you that makes your current approach outdated? Constraints shape strategy. Goals don’t do anything on their own.

You don’t need to be a VP to notice friction. You just need to pay attention.

Are customers consistently confused by onboarding? Are engineers burning cycles on bugs caused by legacy systems? Is sales constantly selling features you don’t have?

Any of those could become the spark for a strategic shift. Your job is to notice the pattern and start asking better questions.

Takeaway 2: You need a theory.

Too many product managers freeze when they hear the word “strategy.” It sounds corporate and big. But what if you just framed it as a theory?

Let’s say your retention is down. You could form a theory like: “I think we’re losing new users in week one because they don’t see value early enough.”

That’s a strategic hypothesis. From there, you test it. Look at the data. Run some interviews. Try a lightweight experiment. See what changes.

The mistake junior product people make is assuming a strategy has to come as a 20-page deck with executive buy-in.

That’s not how good strategy works. Good strategy is a live conversation. It’s a series of moves in response to your environment. If you can form a smart theory and start testing it, you’re already working strategically. You just don’t realize it yet.

Takeaway 3: Execution without perspective is a career plateau

Let’s say you’re great at execution. You manage Jira like a pro. You run standups. You deliver on time. That’s great for a while, especially if you don't have much experience. But eventually, your manager stops seeing you as someone who can think beyond tickets.

At that point, you’ve hit a ceiling. You’re the “safe pair of hands,” but not someone they’d trust to own a big initiative. The only way out is to start building perspective.

That means looking at what you're working on and asking questions.

Why does this matter right now?

How does this help us win?

What happens if we don’t do this?

Is there a simpler way to reach the same outcome?

You don’t need full autonomy to practice those questions. You can apply them to anything you’re doing today. That’s how you go from executor to thinker. That’s how you start to get noticed.

Takeaway 4: Your edge is being close to the work

Here’s the irony. While senior product leaders have more influence, junior and mid-level product managers are often closer to the truth.

You talk to customers more often. You sit in daily standups. You debug problems. You feel the bottlenecks firsthand. That proximity is power. Use it.

If you notice that most drop-off happens after a specific email, dig in. If engineering is blocked every sprint by bad handoffs, suggest a process tweak. If support is logging the same bug ten times a week, raise a flag.

This is how strategy actually happens. Not from slide decks. From someone noticing something small and pulling the thread. You can be that person right now, regardless of title.

Takeaway 5: Good strategy makes tradeoffs. Bad strategy makes lists.

The most common sign of a junior product manager pretending to be strategic is this: they make a laundry list.

“We’ll fix onboarding, and also build personalization, and also localize for Germany, and also improve the dashboard, and then.....” That’s not a strategy. That’s an unordered backlog.

Real strategy is about focus. That means making explicit tradeoffs. It means deciding not just what to do, but what to defer, reject, or kill.

This is hard, especially if you’re used to trying to please everyone. But it’s how product people gain trust.

If you say, “We’re going to focus the next two quarters on improving the activation rate for first-time users, and that means saying no to internationalization for now,” that’s strategic. It tells people where you’re headed, what matters, and what won’t get prioritized.

You can do that even if you’re early in your career. You just have to be brave enough to draw a line.

In Conclusion

No one taps you on the shoulder one day and says, “You’re strategic now.” It doesn’t happen after a promotion. It doesn’t happen after a reorg.

It happens when you stop waiting for a perfect strategy and start forming imperfect theories.

It happens when you treat roadblocks as invitations to think, not just problems to fix. It happens when you decide that clarity is worth more than consensus.

If you want to grow, don’t just build better features. Build better thinking. You’re not too junior. You’re right on time.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.