Product Strategy: Full Guide

The PM’s main job is to propose the future (strategy) and make it happen. The strategy is considered good ONLY if two conditions listed below are true:

Condition #1: stakeholders are on board with your story
They nod at the problem/opportunity and trust your plan to fix/capture it. We all know these moments when it is not the case. For example:

• We read/listen to the pitch and think, “I get the words, but I miss the point.” In this case, obviously, the story is unclear.
• Or you think: “I get it, but why is it a problem at all?” In this case, the problem is weak, or you weren’t able to get the message across properly.
• Or you hear chains of thoughts which you hardly believe (“We’ll add AI here to fix it all in one go…”). Sure, exactly in one go. In this case, you doubt that the creator of this has dug into the problem deep enough, but rather, just throws around nice slides and words that are likely to get some hype.

There is a catch, though: sometimes the presenter is persuasive, or stakeholders (leadership) want to believe the story themselves, and it will only take a year or two to realise that the nice slides were just slides. By then, both parties might already be moving forward (laid off, or worse, promoted), and the company will have to start from scratch, having lost two precious years.

But regardless, make sure that your story is clear.

Condition #2: You deliver what you promised
Whom would you trust to build your house: a new person who has built five houses or the one who has built zero but has drawn five pretty architectural plans? Exactly.

This reflects a super simple rule of the product universe: PMs who consistently deliver on what they strategize get promoted; the rest earn the reputation of slide-builders. There is a network effect in action: in the forums you are not even part of, your senior stakeholders will say, “That PM who came up with an idea X and made it happen, let’s assign them for this new project; I trust them to deliver.”

And the reverse is also true: “This PM asks to lead this project, but we don’t have any evidence they can handle it, and the risk of mistakes is too high.”

Long story short: writing a good strategy is as important as delivering what's written in it.

This is a document (slides or text) that clearly answers the most critical product questions:

• What is the problem and/or opportunity? Can we make it measurable?
• How do we divide this problem into smaller pieces that we can solve one at a time?
• What is our plan to solve these little sub-problems? What is the first step in this plan?
• What are the risks we might face, and how are we going to mitigate them?

There are dozens of thousands of strategy templates available online. Yet, the main complex questions above is still valid. Therefore, by the way, a good template is applicable to projects of any size; it will just change the level of detail, the name of the document, but the core remains the same, and the main questions can be asked for various product artifacts:

• Projects/company strategy (Project Review doc, Strategy doc)
• Services/team strategy (Product Review doc, Service scope doc)
• Features/team projects (Product Requirements doc, Stories Breakdown for backlog)

Try answering the core questions for your team, major products, or your 2026 features that big enough, and you will be surprised by how hard it is.

Usually, a PM evolves through these mental stages when creating their strategy:

• Pink ponies: “Pff, this is easy. My manager asked me to do the doc, I promised I’ll make it by next week”.
• Panic: “When I started to write things down, I realised I can’t even pinpoint the problem. Omg, why does my team/product even exist?!?”
• First version: “Ok, I seem to have made it. The story came together so fluidly, stakeholders will love it.”
• Version #1: “Manager left 26 comments, and despite their polite smile, it was clear that the story is crap.”
• Denial: “My manager just doesn’t understand it, I will show it to another stakeholder”.
• Acceptance: “I pitched it to X, and their questions made it clear they were completely lost. Ok, it is now clear I need to redo everything.”
• Version #2: “I showed a new version to my manager, and they left just 5 comments and created one new slide. We are getting there!”
• Version #3: “I showed a new version to my director, and they left just 15 comments and just three slides. Nice, the story is getting traction!”
• … (8 iterations later)
• Version #11: “Even after 3 months (we are already building the product at full speed!) I am still adding some bits into the strategy - it is a living document.”

Before I share the template, it is useful to know what it is not.

• This template WON’T do the work for you, and you’ll still need to think deeply to answer the core questions above. The template also clearly states what NOT to do for each step; read it carefully. Honestly, this VERY deep thinking is your last resort when AI slowly takes over the other operational parts of your job. No kidding.
• This template is NOT AI-generated, and I do NOT recommend using AI to create your strategies. The result will be quite embarrassing: a lot of words, but the meaning floating away from the reader. The audience might feel you’re wasting their time—not the best result of the pitch, especially if you are wasting the time of very senior leaders.

Imagine if I had given you the template without the prelude above, it would’ve been just a table with some words in it. Now I hope you understand the importance of this “just table” and can convert it into a convincing strategy that you can deliver.

And then do it for another problem. And then for another. And then get promoted. And then again for a more complex problem. And so on. PM’s job is cool, isn’t it?

The template

Vladimir Kalmykov, Group PM Booking.com
Alex Povarov, Head of Payments Wolt
Igor Semachev, Head of Product Semrush