✍️Writing a Great Product Strategy
Ravi Mehta's framework — the most-respected strategy writing playbook for senior PMs.
Strategy writing is the single highest-leverage senior PM output. The PMs who can produce a clear, opinionated strategy doc get promoted to Director and beyond. Those who can't stall.
A great strategy doc is opinionated, specific about what you won't do, grounded in customer and market evidence, and structured so the reader can answer 'so what should I do tomorrow?' by page 3. The structure matters less than the discipline of making real choices.
Ravi Mehta's structure (a proven template)
- The problem. What customer or market problem are you solving? Why now? Why this team?
- The customer. Specific segments. Their JTBD. Their current alternatives and the gap.
- The market. Size, structure, competitive dynamics, what's changing.
- The opportunity. Where you'll play (and where you won't). The specific edge you bring.
- The product bet. What you'll build. What you won't build. Why.
- The plan. Phased milestones, success metrics, operating model.
- Risks. What could kill this. How you'll detect and mitigate.
What separates great from mediocre
Mediocre strategy docs:
- Describe everyone (not specific)
- Avoid trade-offs ('and we'll also do X, and Y, and Z')
- Use buzzwords without definition
- Skip the risks
- Have no clear success metric
Great strategy docs:
- Name one customer segment as primary
- Make explicit what you're NOT doing
- Have a 'why now' that's defensible
- Acknowledge what could kill the plan
- End with a single number that defines success
The writing process
- Draft as ugly bullet points. Don't optimize for prose yet.
- Pressure-test with 3 senior leaders separately. Each will surface different gaps.
- Rewrite as a narrative. First-person plural ('we believe'), specific, opinionated.
- Cut 30%. Every sentence earns its place.
- Get one engineer and one customer-facing person to read. If either is confused, fix it.
- Ship. Update quarterly.
The whole thing should fit in 5 pages. If you need more, the strategy isn't sharp yet.
Real-world examples
Ravi Mehta led Tinder's product strategy refresh as CPO. The team rallied around a sharper strategy doc that reframed the business around 'connection quality' rather than match volume. The doc itself drove the cultural change.
Go deeper — recommended reading
Interview questions (1)
Q1What makes a product strategy great?strategysenior▼
Four things:
- It's opinionated. A great strategy makes choices that exclude alternatives. If your strategy could describe a competitor, it's not a strategy.
- It's specific about who and what we won't serve. Half the value of a strategy is the things it forces you to NOT do.
- It's grounded in evidence. Customer interviews, market data, competitive analysis. Not vibes.
- It's actionable. A junior PM reading it should be able to make better trade-off calls tomorrow.
The single biggest tell of a mediocre strategy: it sounds plausible but doesn't change what the team does. A great strategy changes the next sprint planning.