I Have No Product Strategy, What Now?
All best practices are great, and you understand what is needed to create a good roadmap. But you’ve been told to “just create a roadmap.” The strategic input? Lost in the ether, or too vague to really use. Welcome to the most common anti-pattern product managers meet on day one of a new job.
Why a strategy-free roadmap is a trap
A roadmap is supposed to map the “why” and the “what”: vision first, features second. Skip the “why” and you get a checklist of pet projects, opinions, and a demotivated team. Translation: no focus, no impact.
Before you open Jira, ask:
“What high-level Job-to-be-Done do we want to start serving, or serve better, next, to ultimately support the company’s success?”
“How will we know if we have moved the needle?”
If leadership can’t answer, that’s a problem, but not a blocker.
Meet the bottom-up strategy
There is a Latin saying, “Aut inveniam viam aut faciam”: “I shall either find a way or make one”. Congratulations, you’re now the acting strategist!
Step 1: Go on a strategy safari
Dig. Talk to sales, customer success, tech support: anyone who touches the customer. Talk with customers as much as possible in the short timeframe you probably have. Look for recordings of customer conversations to speed it up. Ask your GenAI of choice. Find data and feedback, hopefully already collected in systems, but not necessarily. A quick hallway chat often reveals even more.
Pro tip: start with the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and their Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD).
Step 2: Draft options
Draft 2–3 lightweight strategy options. Keep each to one page, containing at least:
- Key market and business assumptions
- The customer Jobs-to-be-Done we aim to solve
- Segment size / revenue potential
- Our right to win (why specifically our product can outperform alternatives)
- Success metrics
Step 3: Build parallel roadmaps
For every strategy variant, create a mini-roadmap:
- 3–5 initiatives
- Potential impact on strategic goals
- Rough timelines
This meets two goals:
- It shows consequences. Stakeholders see that different “whys” reshuffle the “whats.”
- It forces a choice. Picking a roadmap implicitly picks a strategy.
Step 4: Put them on the table
Run a 30-minute review:
- Present each strategy-roadmap pair.
- Ask leadership to “green-light one, kill the rest”, or to give you a new one you have not captured.
- Capture objections to your logic and refine.
Even if no option is approved outright, the room finally debates strategy instead of projects. That alone is progress!
Step 5: Lock the winner
Once you have a blessed strategy, prune the other drafts and evolve the chosen roadmap as facts change. Revisit quarterly: markets and your understanding change, and so should the plan.
TL;DR
- No strategy, no roadmap. Period.
- Ask for the strategy; if none emerges, write a few yourself.
- Build matching roadmaps to expose trade-offs.
- Present, debate, decide, then execute.
That’s how you turn a chaotic situation into a manageable one, and how a PM can become a more trusted voice at the decision-making table.
