The Fake-Strategy Smell Test
Nine warning signs your team's strategy is, in fact, a slide deck with ambitions. Score yours honestly. Nobody's reading this over your shoulder.
A huge fraction of the documents companies label "strategy" are not strategies. They are a combination of aspiration, roadmap, and the word platform. A new PM who can tell the difference — privately, without announcing it — becomes useful to senior people very quickly, because they stop being fooled by the theatre.
Below are nine smells. Each one, individually, is forgivable. Two or three in the same document and you are looking at fiction. Five or more and the most senior person on your team probably knows and is quietly hoping you won't ask.
Grab the current strategy doc for your team or product. Check each sign. Keep score. The total at the bottom is for your own information.
The document includes what you will do, who it's for, and an inspirational paragraph — but no explicit list of what you are refusing to do, and nobody will be upset if you stop doing it. A strategy with no non-goals is an agenda.
Redact the company name and show the deck to a friend in a different company. Can they tell whose it is? If no, you are selling a market, not a strategy. Generic strategy is the same as no strategy, dressed nicer.
Or "world-class," or "category-defining," or "industry-leading." Strategic claims are made with specifics. Marketing claims are made with superlatives. When the document reaches for superlatives, it has temporarily stopped arguing and started hoping.
Features are what you build, not why you win. If your strategy reduces to a feature list, you have written a roadmap in formalwear. A strategy should explain why those features, in that order, against those competitors, for those users.
Every real strategy has a hinge — a trade where the team chose one thing over another, costing them something. If you read the document and can't find the trade, either (a) no trade was made and the "strategy" is a collection of yeses, or (b) the trade was made but leadership wasn't willing to write it down. Both are bad, in different ways.
"Launch X features by end of Q2" is not a success metric. It is an activity. Real strategy metrics describe a change in the world — users doing something new, buyers buying a new thing, a market share line going somewhere it wasn't going before. If your scoreboard only measures whether you shipped, you are grading yourself on attendance.
This is the cleanest field test. Find two senior leaders — ideally one product, one not — and ask each, independently, "what's our strategy this year?" If the answers don't rhyme, the strategy exists on paper but has not survived into the operating reality of the company. That's the version that actually runs things.
You tripled headcount, acquired another team, lost a major customer, or got a new CEO — and the strategy document is from before any of that. Real strategy is a living argument. A document that has not been edited in 18 months is a museum piece. Politely.
Ask: "what signal would force us to revisit this strategy?" If the honest answer is "we'd revisit at the next annual planning cycle regardless," the strategy is a calendar event. Real strategy makes predictions. Predictions can be wrong. Strategies that cannot be wrong are not strategies.
Your honest score
0–3 points. Congratulations, you have a real strategy. Send a quiet thank-you note to whoever wrote it. These are rarer than you'd expect.
4–7 points. You have a directional strategy with some specific gaps. This is normal. The useful move is to pick one or two of the smells and raise them, carefully, in a 1:1 with your manager. Not as a critique — as a question.
8–12 points. You have a strategy-shaped document but not a strategy. The work you're doing is probably not wrong, but it's not pulling in one direction. Do not try to fix this alone. Find allies.
13+ points. The strategy is, to be precise, a group fiction. Don't announce this. Just start reverse-engineering what the real bets seem to be from how leaders actually spend money and attention. Write that down for yourself. You now know more about your company's real strategy than most of your peers.
What to do once you've scored
The wrong move is to march into an all-hands with a slide titled "the strategy is fake." You will be correct and unemployed.
The right move is the 1:1 version. In your next check-in with a senior product leader, pick the single smell that bothered you most, and ask the version of the question that helps rather than accuses. "I'd find it really useful to understand what we explicitly decided not to do this year — I can't find it written down." That sentence, delivered with genuine curiosity, has launched more real strategy conversations than any offsite ever has.
Being the person who asks the uncomfortable strategy question — kindly, and about the work, not about the people — is the single fastest way to look senior before you are.
Being fooled by fake strategy is the default. Refusing to be fooled, privately, while helping the team build a real one — that's the job.
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