Product leaders know what happens to a product without a strategy. It becomes a treadmill of backlog items, bug fixes, and reactive feature requests. The same thing happens to your career if you treat your job as nothing more than a stream of execution tasks.

Just like a product needs vision, prioritization, and trade-offs, so does your work. But here’s the challenge: execution will always crowd out strategy unless you intentionally design for it.

Execution Lives on the Manager Schedule

Paul Graham, in his classic essay, described two types of schedules. The manager schedule breaks the day into hour-long slots for meetings and quick tasks. The maker schedule protects large blocks of time for deep, creative work.

Execution naturally fits the manager schedule. Your calendar fills with updates, cross-functional syncs, and urgent asks. Strategy, however, requires the maker schedule. You cannot build vision or frame trade-offs in 30-minute increments between stand-ups.

When product leaders let the manager schedule take over, they become excellent at delivery but invisible in shaping direction. The organization sees someone reliable at execution, not someone ready for bigger leadership.

Treat Your Job Like a Product

The way out of this trap is to think of your role as a product. Products drift without a strategy. So do careers. Managing your job like a product means:

  • Vision: Define what kind of leader you want to be known as. Are you the one who drives clarity in ambiguous bets? The one who scales cross-functional collaboration?

  • Roadmap: Decide what outcomes matter most in your role. Not every meeting or email contributes. Prioritize the initiatives and conversations that advance your vision.

  • Trade-offs: Recognize that every yes is also a no. Time spent on another status meeting is time not spent shaping a long-term decision.

When you apply product thinking to your job, it becomes obvious that execution-only work is equivalent to shipping features without a roadmap. You’re active but not strategic.

How to Reset the Balance

Escaping execution mode requires a deliberate reset. A few practical steps:

  1. Audit your calendar. Look at the next two weeks as if you were doing a product backlog review. Which items deliver real strategic value? Which are just noise?
  2. Block maker time. Create at least two half-day blocks per week where you do not take meetings. Use these for strategy thinking: defining trade-offs, clarifying bets, and preparing conversations.
  3. Redesign conversations. Use part of your maker time to float early-stage ideas with stakeholders. These don’t need to be polished—think of them as prototypes for strategy.
  4. Hold the line. Just as you wouldn’t let every feature request hijack a product roadmap, protect your maker time from ad-hoc asks.

The Leadership Shift

Execution keeps the lights on. Strategy moves the business forward. Product leaders need to do both, but only one requires you to be intentional about carving out space.

Treat your job like a product. Give it a vision. Prioritize its roadmap. Protect the maker time that allows you to think, design, and steer. Otherwise, you risk being excellent at execution but absent in leadership.