"Strategic thinking." Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? The kind of thing we expect from leaders, not just order-takers. But here’s the truth: it’s not an inborn talent. It’s a skill that can be developed with deliberate practice. Like learning to ride a bike, or in our world, learning to ship something that truly matters.

Too often, what gets labeled as “strategy” is really just a diagnosis or a broad policy statement. What’s missing are the coherent actions that connect intent to outcomes, as Richard Rumelt explains in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. The result is a lofty plan with no map to the ground.

But here’s the opportunity: you don’t need to wait for a perfect strategy handed down from above. With the right mindset, you can drive clarity and alignment from wherever you sit.

So, where do you start?

Step out of the delivery mentality

Resource planning, hiring, and unblocking—these are important. But perfectly delivering features your customers don’t care about won’t move the business forward. It’s about building the right products, not just building them right.

Engineering teams play a crucial role here. As Marty Cagan notes in his work on empowered teams, product success isn’t the PM’s job alone. Engineers deserve a seat at the table in shaping the “why.”

Learn your product domain

It’s easy to get lost in firefighting and lose sight of the roadmap. Make space to learn the nuances of your domain—healthcare, fintech, logistics. You won’t become an expert overnight, but consistent, purposeful effort compounds. Over time, people will respond to the value you bring.

Embrace product thinking

Start with the “why” behind what you’re building, not just the “when” (delivery date) or “who” (staffing). Ask for the rationale. Understand the business impact, customer segment, and target metrics. [...]

When you’re deep in product work—dreaming up features, refining flows, or debating the next roadmap bet—there’s a sneaky force that can derail even the most well-intentioned efforts: confirmation bias.

It’s a natural human tendency. You form a belief, and suddenly your brain filters reality through a lens that only shows evidence supporting that belief. Contradictory data fades into the background. In product development, this can be deadly. You may convince yourself you know “the next best thing to build,” but if you only seek validation, you risk building the wrong features—those customers don’t care about—perfectly.

The history of tech is full of examples. Google Wave, for instance, was launched with huge fanfare. It combined chat, email, and document collaboration in one tool. But the team, fueled by belief in their vision, overlooked whether users actually wanted such complexity. Confirmation bias blinded them to signals that the product wasn’t solving a meaningful problem. Within three years, it was shut down.

How Bias Creeps In

Bias isn’t always obvious. It often lurks in subtle, almost invisible ways. Four patterns are especially dangerous for product leaders:

1. Prior Hypothesis and Narrow Focus

You latch onto an initial idea and resist disconfirming evidence. Instead of treating feedback as learning, you filter for validation. This tunnel vision can cause entire product directions to drift off course.

2. Limited Alternatives

Rather than exploring multiple possibilities, you default to a narrow set of options. Intuition dominates over structured analysis, leading to shallow exploration of the solution space.

3. Insensitivity to Probabilities

Teams often view their problems as unique. They dismiss prior data or patterns with the excuse, “That happened to them, but our case is different.” In doing so, they ignore probabilities and repeat predictable mistakes.

4. Illusion of Manageability [...]

In Part 1, we explored the forces that generate demand: the push of dissatisfaction with the status quo and the pull of a better future. Together, they explain why customers look for change and what attracts them to a solution.

But even when push and pull are strong, adoption isn’t guaranteed. Hidden forces often prevent products from being hired. These are the demand reducers: Inertia and Anxiety. As Alan Klement describes, these forces are as real a competitor as any rival company.

To succeed, product leaders must not only generate demand but also remove the friction that blocks adoption. And because customers operate within complex environments, applying systems thinking is critical to understanding how these forces interact.

Inertia: The Pull of the Status Quo

Inertia is the tendency to stick with what you know, even when better options exist. Habits, routines, and sunk costs make change difficult.

Two forms of inertia matter most:

• Habits-in-choice: The friction of switching. Customers weigh the time, effort, or risk of moving from an old solution to a new one.
• Habits-in-use: Even after adoption, customers may relapse into old behaviors or combine the new product with compensatory habits.

Case study: Microsoft Teams vs. Slack

Slack had a strong push (email fatigue) and a strong pull (real-time collaboration). But when Microsoft rolled out Teams, inertia favored them. Organizations were already entrenched in Microsoft 365. Switching costs were high, integration was easy, and many users defaulted to the familiar ecosystem. Even when Slack offered a superior user experience, inertia kept Teams adoption high.

Case study: Quibi’s failure

Quibi promised “quick bites” of mobile video. Yet inertia killed adoption—users were already entrenched in Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok habits. Despite strong funding, Quibi couldn’t overcome the entrenched routines of how people consumed video content. [...]

We hear a lot about being “customer-centric.” It’s on slides, in strategy decks, and peppered into pitches. But too often it’s a buzzword. The real test is this: do we truly understand why customers choose our products—or why they don’t?

The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework, shaped by thinkers like Alan Klement, offers a clearer lens. Customers don’t buy products because of features alone. They “hire” them to make progress in their lives. That progress is the movement from a current state (frustrated, stuck, inefficient) to a preferred future state (empowered, satisfied, more capable).

Think of the classic example: people don’t want a drill, they want a hole. But it goes further. They want the shelf, the organized room, maybe even the peace of mind that comes from reducing clutter. The “job” isn’t drilling, it’s creating order. Products that succeed do so because they deliver on that progress better than alternatives.

The Four Forces of Progress

Alan Klement describes four forces that shape demand:

• Two generate demand: Push and Pull.
• Two reduce demand: Inertia and Anxiety.

This first post focuses on the demand generators—the forces that create the conditions for adoption.

Push: Dissatisfaction with the Status Quo

Change rarely happens without discomfort. Push is the dissatisfaction that propels customers away from their current situation.

• A broken phone creates an urgency to replace it.
• An accountant buried in spreadsheets feels the pain that sparks interest in automation.
• A manager tired of misaligned meetings seeks a better collaboration tool.

Without push, there is no energy for change. Customers content with the status quo will not seek alternatives.

Case study: Slack’s rise

Before Slack, workplace communication relied heavily on email, chat tools, and fragmented systems. The push came from frustration: endless email threads, siloed knowledge, and poor transparency. Slack didn’t invent communication, but it crystallized dissatisfaction into momentum. The pain of old workflows became the fuel for change. [...]