Bets Without Non-Priorities Are Wishes
We are getting close to mid-year. Spring has already sprung, we are starting to get warmer weather, and the kids’ school year is about to end. I have already read so many thought pieces about strategy documents being compressed with AI.
Documenting a strategy has been compressed. The artifact, the deck, the one-pager, and the proposals can be generated faster with AI than ever before.
But the thinking doesn’t compress. Deciding what you’re betting on, who your product is for, what you won’t do, and how you’ll know it’s working. That still takes hours of staring at a wall of AI-generated text. AI can create the document in 20 minutes. It cannot tell you what your strategy is. AI can research your competition, but it cannot decide which bets are worth placing. AI can synthesize the experimentation data, but it cannot prioritize what comes next.
This may be a contrarian opinion but I think that we need to define comprehensive product strategies that clearly articulate the product, user segments, competitive advantage and open questions we haven’t answered.
Strategy is as much what we would do as it is what we wouldn’t do. The non-priorities are essential to be included in the strategy document to bring clarity to the team and remove the guesswork of whether something was essential to execute the strategy.
Non-Priorities could be things that we are never going to do, and the things we are not doing right now. This makes the priorities clear to the team and helps bring focus.
A clear strategy also helps defend against the noise, your loudest stakeholders, and a wish list that someone has. When a new request comes in, a detailed, clearly articulated strategy can help anchor the team and help make a case for no or not-yet.
Strategy is also the spine that holds team decisions together when the cost of building collapses. When everyone can ship faster, every team has a plausible reason to plant a flag. Without explicit non-priorities, the strategy is silent on what to refuse, and capacity goes to whoever asked loudest or moved fastest.
This is the upstream version of the agent land grab I wrote about. When a team can’t name what it isn’t doing, every new request, including the new agentic one, gets a yes by default. The “compared to what?” question presumes there is a clear strategy to compare against.
The question for your next strategy review isn’t whether the document is short enough to read in 20 minutes or can be created in 20 minutes using AI. It’s whether the non-priorities listed are honest, clear, and consistent with the priorities.
What is your team explicitly not doing this quarter, and what does the rest of the org know about it?