Vision without strategy is just a dream—and Martin Eriksson is here to help leaders bridge that gap. In this must-watch session from Prodacity 2025, the product leader, author, and creator of the Decision Stack framework, explains why teams struggle to execute strategy and how to fix it.

From aligning teams on strategic objectives to creating actionable principles that drive decision-making, Martin shares practical tools to ensure organizations stop building the wrong things—and start focusing on what truly matters.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• Why most teams fail to connect vision to execution
• The Decision Stack: Five questions every organization must answer
• How to design strategy that works (and avoid common mistakes)
• The power of principles: How clear trade-offs drive better decisions
• Why focusing on problem-solving over feature-building transforms organizations

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: Why most organizations struggle with strategy
[01:06] - The Underpants Gnome problem: How bad strategies fail
[02:31] - Why teams misunderstand strategy (and how to fix it)
[04:00] - The five key questions of the Decision Stack
[06:02] - What happens when your decision framework is missing key pieces
[07:34] - Breaking down Google’s strategy stack
[08:27] - Why a plan is NOT a strategy (and common misconceptions)
[10:23] - Why most organizations default to doing everything
[12:17] - Case study: How Dropbox, Box, and Huddle made different strategic choices
[13:59] - Strategy as a living system (why it’s never “done”)
[15:35] - How to get your whole organization aligned on strategy
[16:51] - How principles guide decision-making when trade-offs are required
[18:42] - The difference between values and actionable principles
[20:09] - Real-world examples: Google, Shopify, and Supercell’s decision-making frameworks
[24:58] - Final thoughts: How to work on the right thing, not just work hard

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Follow us on X: https://x.com/Rise8_Inc
Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rise8/

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Martin Eriksson (00:03):

Seeing as it's been 10 years since Barry and the team wrote Lean Enterprise, and actually 14 years since Lean Startup came out, 17 years since Marty Kagan wrote inspired. And over 24 years since the Agile Manifesto was first written, I thought it was worth kind of taking a step back and thinking about how we're doing on these things. So we've got our iterative ways of working check. We've got cross-functional teams check, we've got empowered teams, hopefully check. So let's go, right? What are we waiting for? Well, not quite so fast, as Rita McGrath, who's a professor at Columbia Business School says, "In a fast moving world, strategy is more critical than ever because executives and organizations have to make more explicit choices." So how are we doing on that front? How are we feeling about strategic direction? Well, let's ask the team.

Presentation  (01:06):

So what are you going to do with all these underpants that you steal? Collecting underpants is just phase one. Phase one collect underpants. So what's phase two? What's phase two? Phase one, we collect underpants. What about phase two? Well, phase three is profit. Get it? I don't get it. Phase one collect underpants, phase two... phase 3 profit. I get it. No, you don't.

Martin Eriksson (01:40):

I think from some of the laughter I'm seeing out there, we all recognize ourselves a little bit there, right? I don't get it either. I don't get that strategy. And the challenge is neither does your team. So this stat's a little bit old, but an HBR research show that 95% of your team members don't understand your strategy. That's a little bit of a problem if we want to try and execute. And this is so pervasive that this has actually become a prompt in Cards against humanity. And I think even worse than that, we keep playing really terrible cards. We want to talk about enterprise features. And the next one it's like, no, let's do, no, I need conversion clicks. Ai, we really, really just need to build AI and everything will be fine.

(02:31):

So the problem is we're pretty good at setting out vision, right? We're all here because we believe in the mission of what we're trying to do. We have a pretty good sense of setting that direction, but then when we want to figure out how are we actually going to get towards that vision, we kind of draw a blank. That strategy isn't clear. Even if our organization has one, our team doesn't understand it. And so of course we end up with do all the things, but it's even worse from the bottom up, sitting there doing your work, you're a designer, product manager, a coder, you're trying to figure out what you want to build. Maybe you have some good goals there. You can figure out, okay, I'm trying to help achieve these goals. But if you dig even a little bit deeper, you draw a blank again and you kind of don't know why you're doing what you're doing, how it connects to that bigger vision.

(03:18):

And so as Peter Drucker said, there is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all. And I think as an industry, we're kind of guilty of this, right? We've developed all these great tools to build stuff really, really fast. We heard Barry talk about continuous development and deployment, but if we're not building the right things, it's kind of useless. We can go back to one of the OGs of empowered teams, right? General Patton. If you tell people where to go but not how to get there, you will be amazed at the results. And I would argue that if you forget to tell 'em where to go, you still don't tell 'em how to get there. You're still going to be amazed at the results. They're probably just not going to be what you want them to be.

(04:00):

So how do we connect the dots for our team? Well, I think every organization, whether it's a for-profit, nonprofit, government, has to answer five questions. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? What matters right now on that journey? What actions do we take to move forward? And how do we want to do the work? This is important. It helps us ladder everything. So from the top down, we can ask, how are we going to achieve this? Well, here's our goals. How are we going to achieve that? Well, here's the actions we're going to take and so on. But just as importantly, from the bottom up, any individual team member can ask why and connect the dots all the way to the top. I call this the decision stack, and I kind of feel like how you answer these questions isn't the important part, but I like to use vision and mission strategy, objectives and key results, opportunities, and then principles.

(05:05):

Now I call it the decision stack because every step of the way you are making decisions. You have to make decisions about what you're going to do and just as importantly, what you're not going to do. It's also important to note that any visual model, this doesn't necessarily represent what your organization might look like. If you're especially in government or a big corporate environment, you might have lots and lots of layers to your decision stack. You kind of get this inception or fractal view of the world. But like any mental model, the simplified view just helps us understand the theory. But it's also probably the most important to you and your team members is to understand their immediate stack. And the structure really helps people because it helps you understand when things don't fit in, oh, we have this opportunity, let's go build this thing. But wait, it's not actually helping us with the objectives that we've agreed. It's not actually helping us with the strategy that we've agreed you might have entire objectives don't fit in, and then you have to rethink why you're doing what you're doing.

(06:02):

But again, most importantly, it really highlights when pieces of the puzzle are missing. And as we all know, when you take out the wrong brick, the result is just painful. So what does this look like in real life? Let's look at an example. So if you look at Alphabet, the parent company of Google, they have a corporate vision, which is to make the world around you universally accessible and useful. You can then drill into Google and they have a vision that ties into that, right? To make the world's information universally accessible and useful. Nest is to create a home that takes care of the people inside it and the world around it. YouTube is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. So you can see how all of these connect to that same corporate vision. We can then dig further into Google and take that vision and see how they start to apply it.

(06:57):

So their strategy is something like to deliver the best search results, capture the demand from those people and match it to ad supply because at the end of the day, they're a two set of marketplace. So these are just examples, but their objectives might be improve search traffic with key results around relevance and speed and improve ad spend with key results around share of wallet and ad spend. There's lots of different opportunities they might pursue to achieve those. And then they have some very clear principles that help underline how they do that work. Things like FAST is better than slow sell only ads. They want to emphasize that they don't want to sell user information.

(07:34):

Sounds easy, right? Let's just go do that. As Bryon said in my introduction, I've been building stuff online for over 30 years. I co-authored the book called Product Leadership published by O'Reilly in 2017 now where we interviewed over a hundred product leaders for the book. And over the last five plus years, I've been advising over 170 portfolio companies of the world's third largest private investors, everything from startups to scale-ups. And what I see is the stack really breaks down in two key places, and that's strategy and principles. And so that's what I want to dig into a bit today. Strategy is really, really hard. It's kind of a loaded word. We use it a lot. I think a lot of you have military backgrounds, you probably have a different view of what that means than the people who don't. And the problem with most strategy out there that I see is that a plan is not a strategy.

(08:27):

You can't just take a spreadsheet, extrapolate a number and go, there's a strategy, let's go do that. OKRs roadmaps, all of these things that we have as outputs in our processes do not replace strategy. So it's worth thinking about what strategy really means and especially doing that together with your team, when you get back to them, you can go down the academic approach. And I actually really recommend this book Strategy Safari. It really breaks down these 10 different schools of thought around strategy, and it really goes into painstaking detail of classifying them and understanding how they work together. And it's an amazing book, but at the end of it, my head kind of hurts because it's a very, very complicated academic subject. So how do we simplify it? Well, I always like to go back to the greats. So there's a couple of definitions I love Michael Porter wrote one of the first books about strategy. He defines it as making choices, deliberately choosing to be different.

(09:26):

AG Laffey and Roger Martin who wrote Playing to Win, define it as two choices. Where are you going to play and how are you going to win there? And for anyone who doesn't work for a for-profit company, that might feel a little weird, but then you can always go for good strategy, bad strategy by Richard Ramo who defines it as a way to deal with a challenge. I didn't set out to want to redefine my own version of this, but I have. So here it is. Great strategy is a coherent set of choices about what we're going to do in order to achieve our vision. It sounds pretty simple when you say it like that, but it's really hard to do in practice. And if you think about strategy in that context, it's no wonder that we're confused when we're faced with this. We haven't made a set of choices. We don't know what that clarity is. There's no coherence in those choices. Of course, we end up trying to do everything and build all the things and just hope something's going to stick.

(10:23):

So let's fill in the strategy template, right? There's a worksheet for this. There's got to be, sorry, there isn't. That's the other problem. There's no cookie cutter version of this. You can't copy and paste this from anyone else. There's no one framework that's going to work for you and your organization, but there's also no right strategy, there's just making choices. I learned this when I was a VP product for a startup called Huddle based out of London, and we were competing with Box and Dropbox. And it's interesting to look at because we sort of started in the same direction. We were all focused on collaboration and file storage, Dropbox more kind of exclusively just on Files Box and huddle. Were both trying to do a bit more than that. We both went down this journey of starting with freemium like everyone did in SaaS, but 15 years ago and then moving upstream into Enterprise and then things started to different, our strategic choices, Dropbox very much focused a hundred percent on file sharing. They executed the hell out of that box, added a few tools around the edges, and we believed that building a full suite was the most important thing. So we had chat before Slack was a thing. We had file sharing, we had all sorts of tools around collaboration.

(11:34):

And then the go-to-market differed. Dropbox basically invented product-led growth while box and Huddle we're still focused on enterprise sales and the outcomes were pretty different. So we raised about $90 million compared to over 1.1 billion of a Dropbox. But the valuations differ a lot as well. You might look at this and think, well, Dropbox won obviously, right? They're the most valuable company here. But if you actually look at the return on investment for investors, they probably did about the same as Box probably did about the same as Huddle, even though Huddle ended up being a 10th or smaller of the size. And so there's no right choices. There's just making choices and executing on.

(12:17):

And in order to design strategy, there's literally a hundred tools out there. This is another HBR article. Even this list is about 10 years old at this point. But fundamentally, the tools don't really matter because tools don't make a strategy. People do. I like some tools. I use about eight or nine of these on a regular basis when I'm working with companies. You might like other tools, that's fine. It's the journey to shared understanding that we take with our teams that actually leads to great strategy because strategy is a mindset. It's all about problem solving and it's all about looking at different lenses. Strategy isn't the slides at the end of this process. It's not this beautifully packaged thing that we then deliver and then never look at again, it's the collaboration and the learning that you did together with your team that got you there.

(13:07):

Strategy is also about context not control. This is not about coming up with a perfect plan and then telling the team to go execute that plan, but it is giving a direction and it's giving a coherency to that direction so the team can still have autonomy on execution. Fundamentally, strategy is part art and science, just like any other product hypothesis, design hypothesis, scientific hypothesis, it's an inductive leap that has to be challenged and we have to put it to logical and empirical tests. We have to test these things. We have these toolkits. If you've been working in lean, if you've been working in design, if you've been working in Agile, you have all these toolkits to go out and test stuff. We just have to do the same thing for strategy. In fact, we're going to hear from David Bland later today who says, your number one job is to test your business ideas to reduce the risk of failure.

(13:59):

Strategy is also never done. I think that's the other important thing. It's not something we put on a shelf and kind of look at and admire and then get on with our day job, right? It's something that is a living thing. Just like anything we do in Agile and lean, it's about reassessing, diagnosing what's happening, exploring different solutions, setting a course and then learning what's working and not working. And I get it, strategy is hard, but that's not an excuse not to do it or not to learn how to do it well, as Tom Lismore, who's the former deputy director of the UK government digital service and was instrumental in the Gov UK product, if you know about it, coming up with a strategy is kind of the easy bit, bringing your whole organization with you. That's the work. And that's why I love Barry's talk this morning about how we can bring our organizations with us and how we can unlearn about these things.

(14:52):

So how do you actually do that? Well, there's a couple of tools you can take home hopefully. So first of all, keep asking why, right? No matter what level you are in the organization, if you're a leader or if you're the most junior person, keep asking Y so that you challenge these assumptions and make sure that the stack is there. Think about 10x instead of 10%. We often get kind of enamored with the idea that we can improve something a little bit and we know take that sure bet. But what would you do differently if you had to hit 10x that number or 10x that improvement, you'd think very differently about the problem. And similarly, think about a different timeframe. Think next year. Think 10 years from now, not just next quarter. What would you do differently if you had a longer term view?

(15:35):

And hopefully all of you're already doing this, but it all relates to falling in love with the problem, not the solution, right? It's not falling in love with this product idea that we have or this thing that we want to build. It's the actual problem that we're solving for our users, our customers, our citizens. That is the most important and probably most importantly is to let your team in on the strategy. Leverage everybody's creativity and insights. Your designers, your engineers, your analysts, everybody on the team has amazing creativity. If you let them be part of the conversation, stop talking about features. Again, roadmaps and things. We all get imbued with this idea that like, oh, we just have to think about the perfect roadmap, but that's falling in love with the solution, not the problem. Encourage everyone on your team to say no and really think about how you can coach strategic thinking.

(16:24):

And finally, really, you can't ever talk about strategy too much. You can never repeat your strategy too often. So think about how you communicate this on a regular basis. Bake it into your existing ceremonies and practices, all hands updates, team updates, everything. Keep talking about why you're doing what you're doing. Fundamentally, how to be more strategic is to challenge the status quo, both in what you're building and delivering to the world, but in how you're doing it as a team. So the other end of the spectrum, where the stack breaks down is principles. And I was lucky enough to learn this early on when I was a product manager at Monster, the job board, and can we all marvel what the internet looked like in 1999? It's pretty amazing, right? This is the kind of website when I was a designer, this is what I could do as a designer.

(17:15):

I can't keep up anymore as a job board. It's a two-sided marketplace. We have job seekers on the one hand and recruiters on the other. And when I started there again over 15 years ago, at this point, every single conversation, sorry, 25 years ago at this point, God, time flies. Every conversation started with that debate. So we want to build a new feature, we have a new initiative, we have a new idea. Do we build it the job seeker friendly way or the recruiter friendly way? That debate could take months. This is back in the day when we wrote really long product requirement documents until one day I was in the headquarters just outside Boston and we were having the same debate about a new idea. And I saw the founder walk by the room and I kind of pulled him into the room. It's the joy of working in startups.

(18:03):

And I said, please help us answer this question. I don't want to have this debate again. And he listened for a few minutes and then he said, hang on, job seekers always come first because if we build an amazing experience for them, then recruiters have to follow. And then it became a principle for us. And you can imagine that suddenly all these debates went away. We never had to have that conversation again. It was always job seeker first. So past decisions can really help you focus your future decisions. And these decisions are your principles. Principles are not just values. And this is why I choose to use a different word for this. I think a lot of organizations out there have values like build a delightful user experience, make something. People want excellence. And these are of course great things and things we want to agree with, but I'll bet you you've never gone into a meeting and gone, I have this great idea.

(18:55):

I want to build a really ****** user experience. And then someone goes, wait a minute. That's not what our values say. We shouldn't do that. Of course we want to build a user experience. That's great. Everyone wants to do that, but it's not helping you make decisions. And this is rife across our industry. You look at all of our top companies out there, we all have these kind of fluffy values and they make us feel good. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a conversation we should have about what matters to us and how do we want to build things. But if they're not actually helping you make decisions, they're not moving you and your organization forward.

(19:29):

So they have to be a framework for decision making. And to do that, you have to be really specific about the trade-offs. So I love using what's called an even overstatement to do this. How do you think about what's more important? So you might talk about conversion even over revenue. You might talk about like Monster did Job seeker, even over recruiter. You might talk about mobile, even over desktop. You might recognize these from the Agile manifesto. And just like the Agile manifesto, we're not saying that the things on the right are not important. We're just saying in any trade-off scenario, the thing on the left is more important. So think about what that might mean for your organization.

(20:09):

Some great examples out there in the industry are focus on the user. And I'll also follow Google. Shopify kind of flips the two-sided marketplace on its head and says, put merchants first because they believe by building the best possible experience for merchants, they'll have amazing stores with amazing products and consumers will come. Klarna, the Buy Now pay later product out of Sweden had conversion Trumps profitability optimization. Now, current market trends, they might've flipped that, but at the time they were more interested in making sure they got the conversion than eking out every last kind of percentage of profitability and gaming companies, Supercell, has long-term retention, even over short-term retention. Now this is a mobile gaming company. They live and die by short-term retention. Of course, they care about day one, day 15, day 30 retention. But they want their teams to focus even more on long-term retention.

(21:04):

So principles also reflect your strategy, right? It connects back up to that decision stack and everything you said no to as you're developing your decision stack is probably a principle. It's also important to note that this doesn't mean we don't want to have the debate. Principles really let you spend time on the important decisions. So you should go do the research, you should work with stakeholders, you should go test a bunch of hypotheses. You should have wild arguments in the boardroom about these principles. But then once you have some clarity, codify it and move on and don't have the debate again, principles are also there can make your values actionable. I take a crap on some of these values sometimes, but instead of saying make it delightful, you can be more specific and say it's intuitive, not learn like Pinterest does. To emphasize that they don't want help, tools and walkthroughs, they want it to be intuitive. Instead of saying just make something people want. You can be specific and say, we design for everyone like co-op in the UK does to emphasize accessibility and usability. Instead of just saying excellence, you can say SaaS is better than flow like Google does.

(22:15):

So good principles describe how you want to build your business and product and the trade-offs that you're willing to make. And therefore they're incredibly specific to you and your company. You can't just copy somebody else's that makes 'em actionable and memorable and hopefully help your team make decisions. Bad principles of the opposite. They're the meaningless fluff that only kind of reflect generic values. Therefore, they don't differentiate you from your competition because everyone's saying the same thing. They don't make any trade-offs and therefore don't help anyone make decisions. So there's two key ways you can do this from the top down. Still encourage that leaders in the room reinforce your strategy by articulating the acceptable trade-offs. What's really going to make your product, your initiative successful, and then provide focus for your teams by helping them say no, but from the bottom up. Just as importantly, you should all be involved in trying to develop these. Think about what you talk about in your retrospectives. What are the regular debates that you have that you might want to codify as a principle? What are the assumptions that you've challenged through the last sprint or quarter or year and what have you said no to? Because that is probably one of your principles.

(23:31):

So that's the decision stack. And hopefully the next time you get dealt this card, you'll know that the answer is coming up with a clear strategy and having some clear principles. And then you can think about profit. But that's how you can connect the dots to your team. And this isn't just about leadership. This is everybody's responsibility from every individual contributor all the way up to the top ranks. Everyone should be focused on how we can provide this clarity for each other. At the end of the day, this is a problem solving challenge. So use your engineers, use your designers, use their kind of superpowers of problem solving to help figure it out. Keep asking questions until your decision stack is clear. And if you're on the frontline, keep answering those questions with the user. Research, the insights, the data that you're generating. Set strategy and use principles to reflect it and make sure that you're setting the right cadence. Your vision is probably more or less static, something you can't achieve in your own lifetime, maybe strategy depends on your organization. Startups, it's usually until your very next funding road might be six months away. The more mature your organization, the more mature your product, the longer your strategy view is. Objectives, I like to work in six weeks. Other people like working in quarters. Hopefully you all know that opportunities and things that we build are in constant flux and principles evolve somewhere in between.

(24:58):

But at any point, if we've learned anything new that invalidates those previous assumptions, then change it. Then don't wait till the end of the quarter. Don't wait till the end of the year to do a big review. Change it then and pivot and execute. So to close out, I wanted to quote Caterina Fake, one of the co-founders of Flickr who said that so often people are working really hard on the wrong thing, but working on the right thing is more important than working hard. So hopefully you can use the decision stack to make sure that you are working on the right thing. You can read a lot more about it on the decisionsstack.com and feel free to subscribe for newsletter. It's also slides up there. Thank you very much.

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