Agreement Is Not Alignment
The asymmetry between writing a strategy and getting one adopted.
AI has compressed almost every part of product strategy work. Research, synthesis, documentation, formatting. The artifacts come together faster than ever. Adoption and socialization of the strategy is the one part AI hasn't touched. Which means the gap between writing a strategy and getting the org to align behind it, and actually use it has gotten wider, not narrower. This is still a human job that AI cannot replace.
I wrote about how to tell the story of the product strategy before. That playbook hasn't changed much. What's changed is that the time saved on documenting doesn't compound to the time needed for agreement and alignment.
On one strategy I led, I made an 18-minute podcast using NotebookLM, 3-minute video reels in Canva, and circulated the whitepaper everywhere. I was on a roadshow with every leader I could find. The artifacts scaled. Unfortunately, the alignment didn't.
Once I shared the strategy with my most important stakeholder, a known dissenter, and assumed that one presentation had us both agreed and aligned. She was neither. That backfired very quickly when she called me out on it publicly. I learned the lesson to not assume, but do better stakeholder management by being available to answer all questions that come out of the discussion, repeatedly.
A comprehensive strategy with priority bets and non-priorities is just the start. Getting it adopted by your team, your stakeholders, and your leaders takes weeks, if not months. Constant conversations, repeating the strategy until everyone can answer what the product does, what problem it solves, for whom, how it works, and which bets you're placing to find out.
When done well, agreement happens in the meeting. Alignment is when your stakeholder and team can articulate your strategy in their own words, consistently, even when you're not in the room.
The test I use: is your stakeholder the advocate for your strategy and can walk through it, when you're not in the room? If they can't, you haven't aligned.
AI helps you produce the artifacts for more touch points. Podcasts, summaries, recap reels, FAQs etc. It cannot replace the conversation.
What's the longest you've spent getting a strategy adopted, compared to how long you spent writing it?