Make Strategy Your Side Project
Start small, stay close to delivery and follow through where others don't
You’re delivering. Focused. On top of your product.
So is everyone else.
The other product managers on your team? They’re delivering too. Many are ex-consultants or former managers with strategy experience. Leadership wants strategic thinking from all of you, but also immediate results.
The catch? Strategic projects don’t fall in your lap.
If you want to shape priorities and earn visibility, you have to spot an opportunity and build support, without losing sight of your core product work.
The product managers who stand out aren’t the ones throwing out lofty visions. They’re the ones who:
Start small
Stay close to delivery
And follow through where others don’t
In this article, you’ll learn how to:
Choose the right kind of strategic project (without falling behind)
Frame it in a way that earns support, even from a skeptical manager
Build visibility with senior stakeholders
Track progress, even before anything ships
Why Strategic Work Feels So Hard to Start
Strategic work is often mistaken for slide decks full of market trends, competitor grids, or long-term “north stars.” That’s one kind of strategy — but it’s not the kind that builds trust in product teams.
For most product managers, strategic work is about spotting patterns no one else sees. It’s often hiding in plain sight — across tickets, in customer feedback, or buried in cross-team friction.
So why don’t more product managers do it?
Because it’s invisible on your roadmap. It’s not an OKR. It’s not something anyone’s asking for. And when it goes nowhere? You’ve spent cycles with nothing to show for it — maybe at the cost of delivery momentum.
That’s why the best strategic work doesn’t start with a moonshot.
It starts small and stays close to your product roots.
What Strategic Work Looks Like (That Actually Gets Noticed)
There are two kinds of strategy work that product managers take on:
Market-level strategy (hard to connect to execution)
Solution-level strategy (shapes your product directly)
This article focuses on the second kind — strategy that helps your team see the system more clearly and make better decisions, faster.
Strong strategic projects share a few key traits:
Solve a recurring pattern or friction
Clarify tradeoffs or enable smarter decisions
Sit adjacent to your existing work
Are helpful to the team, not critical of others
Example of strategy-worthy problems:
Sales requests features from outside the roadmap
Customers can’t monitor usage and keep hitting capacity limits
A newly available internal capability could change how your product works
Competitors are pulling ahead — but no one’s mapped where and why
A feature demo lags badly, and no one seems to notice or prioritize it
Customer docs don’t match what marketing is promising
These might feel like someone else’s job. But they often expose silos, mismatches, and overlooked opportunities — the exact kind of mess strategy work can untangle.
Just remember: not every idea is worth chasing.
How to Pick the Right Strategy Project
You want to start with a bet that:
Ties to something leadership already cares about
Resolves a recurring tension or debate
Doesn’t rely heavily on others to get going
Can evolve as you learn
Try the “Billboard Test”:
If this project worked, would your team be proud to say:
“We figured that out. That changed how we operate.”
If the answer is no, your project might be too narrow, too early, or not worth the time.
If the answer is yes? You’ve got something worth nurturing.
How to Frame a Strategy Project (So It Passes the Billboard Test)
Early on, strategy projects are fragile. Your coworkers might see them as distractions. Your manager might be skeptical. It’s hard to see the value before it’s fully formed.
That’s where framing comes in. The goal isn’t to sell a strategy — it’s to frame a learning arc that earns space and attention.
Reframing goes like this:
Call it an exploration or hypothesis — not “a strategy” (Leading a Hypothesis)
Frame the pattern you're seeing and its possible impact
Minimize dependencies — make it easy to start
Keep a simple POV doc that evolves as you learn (How to do a POV)
Refine toward actions and decisions, not just insights
Test against the billboard — would this outcome make the team proud?
Some ideas will fizzle out — and that’s a win too. You’ve saved the team time and cleared space for a better bet.
The Differentiator: You Follow Through
Plenty of product managers propose ideas.
Plenty of product managers share decks.
Very few follow through when the work gets hard, messy, or unrewarded in the short term.
That’s what builds trust. Not just that you had an idea, but that you shaped it into something useful. You involved others. You clarified the next steps. You helped the team get unstuck.
When you get to that point, close the loop:
Archive it with findings and a clear decision
Add it to the roadmap
Investigate further with the right stakeholders
Or simply say: “Not now — but we’ll be ready next time.”
Final Thought
Strategic work won’t always be glamorous.
But it is how you earn influence — and shape what happens next.
Make it your side project.
Start small.
Stay close to delivery.
And follow through where others don’t.
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I'm in agreement with Dutch that strategy should be core and not a side project, but I think you and I may have different definitions of strategy.
A strategy is the set of choices one makes to achieve an objective. i.e. "strategic work" doesn't exist on it's own, but in service of something you need to achieve.
I do agree with you that it must "Tie to something leadership already cares about". i.e. a business objective of some kind.
I use the framing of business and product objectives to define what is important. This should be a core task shepherded by Product Leaders (Directors, VPs, CPOs etc) and the IC PMs are then clear on what they are working towards. I wrote about it in detail here.
https://swkhan.medium.com/driving-clarity-and-alignment-via-business-and-product-objectives-6d2c9cca2046
As for roadmaps, by definition they are strategic. There needs to be a distinction between roadmaps and plans.
https://swkhan.medium.com/product-roadmaps-vs-product-plans-11b027321ca0
I've also written in detail on creating truly strategic roadmaps.
https://swkhan.medium.com/how-to-create-a-real-strategic-roadmap-part-1-4916926f39b5
Product Management is a strategic business role. Strategy isn't a side project. It's the heart and soul of our work. Maybe not everything takes DEEP strategic thinking, c-suite buy-in or gathering metrics, but it's still critical to:
1. Understand the problem
2. Describe it to the team
3. Define the solution and acceptance criteria
4. Get the solution built
5. Validate the solution against the definition of done
6. Make it available to users and confirm the problem has been solved.
That's ALL strategic effort.
Maybe your definition of "strategy" is something else?
Maybe companies want their PM to "stay close to delivery" because they think the Product Lifecycle and the SLDC are the same thing? (They aren't.) Product Management isn't part of the Engineering team, even though there's a "Product Owner" usually handling that *part* of managing the Product Lifecycle. There's work before and after SDLC that Product oversees, which is all strategic thinking and planning.