How to be strategic

Reference:

Strategy: a high-level plan to achieve one or more goals under uncertainty
Many times executives do feel that there is a gap in their understanding when defining the strategy but they do not really know and hence cannot address it. It is the product leader’s responsibility to identify this gap and look for opportunities to fill those gaps
Product leaders should help the executives to understand their ideas and what they meant. This can be done in the following ways:
- Reflect back on what you understood from the idea
  - Summarise in your understanding and own words
  - Helps the executives to understand from different perspective
  - Gives the feeling of being heard
- Ask why they think is a good idea
  - Make up a theory as to why this is a good idea
  - When presenting as a theory as against directly, people are more receptive to the theory since it is detached with their own opinions/ideas
- Take their idea to the next level of detail
  - Many times the high level ideas are not thought through and leave many gaps
  - Help executive understand these gaps by taking those ideas to the next level of details, identify the gaps and also bring in solutions to cover for those gaps OR a good alternative for them to agree to