Good Product Strategy Makes Every Decision Easier

At SmartRecruiters, I watched a product organization turn into a Frankenstein business.

Not because anyone was incompetent. Because everyone was competent — at building features nobody asked them to stop building. Three product lines, six market segments, twelve active initiatives, and a "strategy" document that said yes to all of them.

That's not a strategy. That's a wish list with a logo on it.

Strategy That Doesn't Decide Isn't Strategy

Here's the test for any product strategy: does it make decisions easier?

When a new opportunity appears, does your strategy tell you whether to pursue it or pass? When two teams compete for engineering resources, does your strategy tell you who gets them? When a customer asks for a feature that doesn't fit, does your strategy give you the language to say no?

If the answer to any of these is "no," you don't have a strategy. You have a deck that describes your aspirations.

The enemy here is strategic theater — the performance of having a strategy without any of the constraint that makes a strategy useful. And it's everywhere in B2B SaaS.

Strategy Must Force Sacrifice

A real strategy says no more than it says yes. That's not pessimism — it's the definition of the word.

Strategy comes from the Greek strategia — the art of the general. And generals don't win by attacking everything. They win by choosing where to fight and, more importantly, where not to fight.

Your product strategy should do the same. If it doesn't tell you what you're NOT building, what markets you're NOT pursuing, and what customers you're NOT serving — it's not a strategy. It's a list of everything you'd like to do if you had infinite time and money.

You don't have infinite time and money. So the strategy needs to make choices. And those choices should make every subsequent decision easier.

The SmartRecruiters Lesson

The Frankenstein problem didn't happen overnight. It happened one "yes" at a time.

A big customer wanted an integration. Yes. A competitor launched a new feature. We should match it. Yes. The sales team identified a new market segment. Let's go after it. Yes.

Each individual "yes" made sense. But taken together, they created a product that tried to be everything for everyone and was excellent at nothing for anyone. Engineering was stretched across too many fronts. The product experience became inconsistent. Marketing couldn't articulate a clear value proposition because there wasn't one.

The fix wasn't better execution. The fix was a strategy that said no. One that forced the organization to pick three things and stop doing twelve. That's painful. It means disappointing people. It means killing projects teams have invested in. It means telling customers "no, we're not building that."

But the alternative — saying yes to everything — is worse. Because yes to everything is the same as no strategy at all.

Three Qualities of a Strategy That Makes Decisions

Good product strategy has three qualities:

• It's specific enough to say no. "We're the best recruiting platform for mid-market companies" is specific. "We help companies hire better" is a tagline, not a strategy. If your strategy can't be used to decline an opportunity, it's not specific enough.
• It creates a decision framework. When a new request comes in, team members at every level should be able to evaluate it against the strategy without escalating. "Does this serve mid-market companies? No? Then we don't build it." That's a strategy doing its job.
• It's revisable based on evidence. A strategy isn't permanent. It's the best bet you can make with current information. When the information changes, the strategy should too. But it changes through deliberate review, not through the slow accumulation of "yes."

Why Teams Avoid Real Strategy

If good strategy is this simple, why is it so rare?

Because saying no is hard. Specifically:

• Saying no to customers feels dangerous. What if they leave? What if the competitor gets them? The fear is real — but the cost of saying yes to every customer request is a product that serves everyone poorly instead of some people well.
• Saying no to leadership feels risky. When the CEO asks "why aren't we in that market?" — saying "because our strategy says no" requires conviction. And conviction requires a strategy solid enough to stand behind.
• Saying no to your own team feels cruel. Killing a project means telling people their work didn't matter. It's not true — the work produced information. But it feels true. And most leaders avoid that feeling.

This is why the Product Calculus mindset matters. Strategy isn't a fixed decision — it's an adaptive framework that evolves as you learn. Saying no today doesn't mean no forever. It means "not now, given what we know."

How to Test Your Strategy

Try this: take the last five feature requests or project proposals your team discussed. Run each one through your strategy.

Did the strategy give you a clear answer for each one? Did it tell you yes or no without requiring a two-hour debate?

If every request passed, your strategy is too broad. A strategy that says yes to everything isn't filtering — it's failing.

If most requests required long discussions, your strategy isn't specific enough. The whole point is to make those discussions shorter.

If nobody on the team could evaluate a request against the strategy without asking you — the strategy isn't being communicated clearly. Your product story isn't reaching the people who need it.

Start Here

Write down what your product strategy says no to. Not what it enables — what it prevents.

If you can't list at least three things your strategy explicitly declines, you don't have a strategy. You have permission to do anything. And permission to do anything is permission to do nothing well.

A good strategy doesn't feel good. It feels constraining. That's how you know it's working.

Is your strategy making decisions — or avoiding them?

In my Eigen Questions workshop, Product and Engineering teams identify the one strategic question that's blocking alignment. We cut through competing interpretations and build a shared strategic frame — so your strategy actually tells your team what to do and what to stop doing.

Book a Clarity Call — 30 minutes, no pitch. Just clarity on whether your strategy is actually working.

Not ready for a call? Subscribe to The Adam Thomas for frameworks and honest takes on product leadership, delivered biweekly.