I’ve worked with plenty of CEOs who become frustrated with strategy.

Not because they don’t believe in it, but because they’ve seen what happens when strategy becomes an activity in its own right. Workshops lead to more workshops. Questions uncover more questions. Decisions are postponed while somebody gathers another piece of information, validates another assumption or tries to remove another uncertainty.

Eventually someone says: “Can we just get on with it?”

It’s a reasonable frustration.

But I don’t think the problem is strategy. The problem is the belief that strategy and action sit at opposite ends of a spectrum, and that you have to finish one before you can begin the other.

You don’t.

In good product businesses, strategy should actually make action easier.

You will never have all the information

One of the biggest barriers to action is uncertainty.

Boards understandably want evidence before committing money. Product leaders want confidence that they’re solving the right problem. Technical teams want clarity about requirements. Sales wants to know the proposition will be commercially attractive.

All reasonable questions, the difficulty is deciding when you know enough.

In product development, particularly in edtech, there is almost always something you don’t know. You may not know exactly how customers will respond, how quickly a market will develop, what competitors will do next or whether the assumptions behind your proposition will prove correct.

You can research. You can test. You can speak to customers and analyse data. But eventually you have to make a decision.

The interesting question is whether the uncertainty that remains is significant enough to justify delaying the decision.

Amazon has long talked about “one-way door” and “two-way door” decisions. Some decisions are difficult and expensive to reverse, so they deserve careful consideration. Many others are reversible. You can make the decision, see what happens, learn and change course.

I think product teams could benefit from making that distinction more often. A major platform migration isn’t the same as testing a new onboarding process. Entering a completely new market isn’t the same as trialling a proposition with ten schools. Yet organisations frequently apply the same governance and demand the same level of certainty to both, and the result is that relatively low-risk decisions become unnecessarily slow.

Strategy isn’t supposed to predict the future

Part of the problem comes from how we think about strategy itself. Strategy is sometimes treated as a document describing what is going to happen over the next three or five years. But no product strategy survives contact with reality completely unchanged.

Customers behave differently from how you expected. Competitors move. Technology develops. Government policy changes. A new opportunity appears. Something you thought would be difficult proves easy, while something you assumed would be straightforward becomes enormously complicated.

This is particularly relevant in edtech, where businesses operate at the intersection of technology, education, public policy, procurement and changing school priorities. Trying to create a strategy that accounts perfectly for all of those variables before taking action is impossible.

A useful strategy doesn’t tell you exactly what will happen.

It tells you what you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to create value for, where you intend to compete and, crucially, how you’re going to make decisions along the way.

Without strategy, somebody else will create one for you

The alternative to strategy isn’t freedom, it’s competing priorities.

• I’ve seen this happen many times in product businesses.
• Sales needs a feature to close an important deal.
• An existing customer wants something added urgently.
• A competitor launches something new.
• The CEO has an idea.
• Customer support highlights a recurring complaint.
• Development identifies technical debt that needs addressing.

None of those people are necessarily wrong. In fact, they may all have perfectly legitimate arguments, but without a clear product strategy, there is no consistent way of deciding between them.

The roadmap gradually becomes a negotiation between whoever has the strongest argument, the biggest customer or the loudest voice, and that’s the point when product execution becomes reactive.

You move from one urgent request to another and can appear incredibly busy while making surprisingly little progress towards anything meaningful.

This is why I still believe strongly that product leaders need to own the direction of their products.

Owning it doesn’t mean ignoring stakeholders – quite the opposite. Good product leaders should be listening constantly to customers, sales, support, marketing, technical teams and the wider market. But listening isn’t the same as handing over the steering wheel. Strategy gives you the context in which all that information can be assessed.

Strategy should make saying “no” easier

One of the most useful tests of a strategy is whether it helps you make difficult decisions. If every opportunity can somehow be justified by your strategy, you probably don’t have much of a strategy.

A clear strategy creates boundaries.

It helps a product leader explain why a seemingly attractive customer request isn’t a priority. Why a competitor’s new feature doesn’t automatically need copying. Why a potentially lucrative deal may take the product in the wrong direction.

And equally, it helps explain why something does deserve investment. This matters because product teams have finite resources.

Every “yes” consumes development capacity, management attention, implementation effort and opportunity cost.

The job isn’t to find enough good ideas.

Most businesses already have more good ideas than they could possibly execute.

The job is deciding which ideas move you towards where you have chosen to go.

Action is also part of strategy

There is another side to this: strategy cannot become an excuse for inactivity. At some point, the only way to answer a strategic question is to do something.

• Build the prototype.
• Test the proposition.
• Put it in front of customers.
• Run the pilot.
• Enter the conversation.
• Measure what happens.

. . . then use what you’ve learned to refine your thinking.

This is why I increasingly see strategy and execution as a loop rather than a sequence. Strategy informs action. Action creates evidence. Evidence improves strategy. The revised strategy informs the next action.

The real question isn’t strategy or action

When I originally wrote about this subject several years ago, I ended by saying that product managers should remember they are the CEO of their products.

I’d probably phrase that slightly differently today, but the principle behind it still stands.

Product leadership requires ownership.

You need to understand where the product is going, why it is going there and how that supports the wider business. You need to bring stakeholders with you. And then you need to create enough clarity for people to act without reopening the strategic debate every time a decision needs to be made.

Ultimately, strategy and action aren’t competing forces; strategy without action achieves very little, action without strategy can achieve an enormous amount in completely the wrong direction.

There’s skill to knowing enough to choose a direction, moving, learning from what happens and being prepared to adjust.

That’s not abandoning the strategy; that’s strategy doing its job.