Ask most teams for their strategy and you’ll get a paragraph about ambition. Be bold. Move fast. Delight the customer. None of that is strategy. It’s tone, and tone doesn’t tell anyone what to say no to.
The strategies that have actually held up under pressure, in my experience, are the boring ones: a specific customer we will not chase, a category of feature we will not build, a channel we will not touch even when it’s working for a competitor. Constraints, not ambitions.
That’s the piece I skipped during the tactics-only stretch. I had plenty of ambition and no constraints, which meant every opportunity looked equally worth chasing. A strategy that can’t tell you what to refuse isn’t one.
This is the first real attempt at writing one down, constraints first, ambition second.
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