wunder beta📘 How do you write a strategy doc that decides?
Strategy is a coherent set of choices about how an organization will win in a specific arena—not a goal, not a vision, not a wish. Richard Rumelt, in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (2011), argues that strategy is fundamentally a way through a d
What you’ll learn
- What Strategy Actually IsDefine strategy as a coherent set of choices for overcoming a challenge and distinguish it from goals, vision, and operational effectiveness using Rumelt's kernel.Strategy is a coherent set of choices about how to win in a specific arena—not a goal, vision, or plan. Richard Rumelt frames it as a way through a difficulty, structured as a kernel: diagnosis of the central challenge, a guiding policy to overcome it, and coherent, mutually reinforcing actions. Good strategy concentrates resources on a few pivotal objectives to create leverage. Michael Porter further separates strategy (choosing different activities for unique value) from operational effectiveness (doing the same activities better), which is easily copied and rarely yields lasting advantage.
- The Hallmarks Of Bad StrategyIdentify Rumelt's four hallmarks of bad strategy and apply them as a checklist to pressure-test a draft strategy.Rumelt argues bad strategy has a recognizable positive form, marked by four hallmarks: fluff (inflated jargon masquerading as insight), failure to face the challenge (no defined obstacle, so the strategy cannot be evaluated), mistaking goals for strategy (ambitions with no approach), and bad strategic objectives (disconnected laundry lists or restated end states). Each hallmark is a diagnostic lens. Together they form a cheap, powerful audit: a draft that fails any one is almost certainly bad, so authors should run this checklist before seeking stakeholder buy-in.
- Playing To Win CascadeExplain Lafley and Martin's five-choice strategy cascade and evaluate whether a set of choices coheres into a complete strategy.A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin's Playing to Win frames strategy as an integrated cascade of five reinforcing choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, the capabilities required, and the management systems required. Where-to-play and how-to-win are the heart of strategy; the winning aspiration is the most abstract layer, and capabilities and systems are the concrete enabling foundation. The cascade's power lies in coherence—each choice must fit the others, and authors iterate up and down the cascade until the five choices lock together into one logic.
- Strategy Versus Roadmap And OKRsDifferentiate strategy, roadmaps, and OKRs by altitude and purpose, and test for alignment using traceability.Strategy, roadmaps, and OKRs are distinct artifacts at different altitudes. Strategy is the coherent set of choices that sets direction; a roadmap is the sequenced plan of what to build and when; OKRs are measurable near-term targets. They form a stack in which each layer derives from the one above. Treating a roadmap or OKRs as the strategy repeats Rumelt's goals-as-strategy error. The practical alignment test is traceability: every roadmap item and key result should map to a specific strategic choice, and anything that maps to none signals drift.
- Making Real Trade-OffsApply Porter's principle that strategy means choosing what not to do, using trade-offs and opportunity cost to make deliberate, coherent exclusions.Michael Porter argues the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do; a strategy that adds commitments without removing any is a wish list, not a strategy. Genuine trade-offs—incompatible activities—make a position defensible because rivals cannot copy it without giving something up. Because capacity is finite, decisions should be judged by opportunity cost: not 'is this good?' but 'is this the best use of resources given everything else?' A strategic 'no' is traceable to the diagnosis and choices, so the exclusions form a coherent pattern, and writing the explicit not-doing list disciplines the team against scope creep.
- Writing And Pressure-Testing The DocStructure a product strategy document around the kernel and cascade and pressure-test it using pre-mortem, red-teaming, and a bad-strategy audit.A strong product strategy doc has a predictable spine: it leads with an evidence-based diagnosis of the crux challenge, states the winning aspiration and where-to-play/how-to-win choices, names required capabilities and systems, lists explicit trade-offs, and connects to roadmap themes and OKRs. It makes its logic and assumptions visible so reviewers can challenge specifics. Before shipping, it should be pressure-tested—via Gary Klein's pre-mortem and red-teaming, and an audit against the four bad-strategy hallmarks. A strategy is a living bet on assumptions, revisited on a cadence and revised when core assumptions break.
- Guided Project: Strategy Document (Simulation Score)Produce a complete, coherent product strategy document for a realistic SaaS scenario by synthesizing the kernel, the cascade, and explicit trade-offs.In this capstone you write a full product strategy document for a SaaS company with stalling growth and an upmarket competitor. You proceed step by step: a sharp diagnosis (the leaky-bucket retention problem), a winning aspiration and where-to-play (small teams), a fitting how-to-win (fast time-to-first-value differentiation), explicit trade-offs with traceable reasons, and a bridge to roadmap themes and OKRs. You finish by pressure-testing with a pre-mortem and a four-point bad-strategy audit. The simulation score rewards coherence and real cuts and penalizes fluff, evasion, goals-as-strategy, and laundry-list objectives.
Questions this course answers
According to Rumelt's framing, which statement best captures what a strategy fundamentally is?
Rumelt defines strategy as a way through a difficulty—a coherent approach to overcoming an identified obstacle. A goal (option A) and a vision (option D) are destinations or purposes, not approaches, and Rumelt explicitly warns against mistaking goals for strategy. A long list of initiatives (option C) is a hallmark of bad strategy, not strategy itself.
A product team writes: 'Our strategy is to grow active users 50% this year.' Why is this not actually a strategy?
This is the classic error of mistaking a goal for a strategy: it names where the team wants to arrive but not how it will get there against competitors and constraints. The target's size (A) and its phrasing (D) are irrelevant to whether it is a strategy. Revenue is not the 'only true' strategic metric (C); the flaw is the absence of an approach, not the choice of metric.
In Rumelt's kernel, what is the correct relationship among the three components?
Rumelt's kernel runs diagnosis (understand the challenge), then guiding policy (the chosen approach to it), then coherent actions (coordinated moves implementing the policy). The order in A is reversed, and B wrongly puts policy before diagnosis. Diagnosis and guiding policy are distinct stages, not synonyms (D): one frames the problem, the other chooses the response.
A bank states its strategy is to pursue 'customer-centric financial intermediation excellence.' Which hallmark of bad strategy does this best illustrate?
This is Rumelt's own example of fluff: abstract buzzwords that, decoded, mean only 'being a bank,' creating an illusion of strategy with no actionable content. It is not failure to face a challenge (B), since no challenge is even mentioned; it states no goal or target (C); and it is a single empty phrase, not a long list of objectives (D).
Why does Rumelt argue that a strategy which never defines its central challenge cannot be properly evaluated?
A strategy is a response to a challenge, so if the challenge is undefined there is no benchmark for judging whether the chosen approach addresses it well. Option A describes a stylistic preference, not the logical reason. Undefined challenges are not necessarily a data problem (C), and evaluation does not hinge on financial projections (D)—it hinges on whether the approach fits the named obstacle.
A strategy doc lists 23 initiatives, one from each department, with no logic linking them. Which hallmark is this, and what is the fix?
A disconnected laundry list is Rumelt's 'bad strategic objectives' hallmark; good strategy focuses on a few pivotal objectives, so the fix is subtraction—cutting to the handful that create leverage on the central challenge. The list is not jargon (A) or a single goal (D), and adding a vision statement (B) would not address the lack of focus.
Grounded in trusted sources
- Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (Crown Business, 2011)
- Michael E. Porter, 'What Is Strategy?', Harvard Business Review (November–December 1996)
- Richard Rumelt, 'The Perils of Bad Strategy', McKinsey Quarterly (June 2011)
- A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)
- Roger L. Martin, 'The Strategic Choice Structuring Process', Harvard Business Review / rogermartin.com
- Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (Crown Business, 2011)
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