Product Strategy Is Not a Roadmap - And Why That Matters to Enterprises
- Darren Emery
- Dec 8
- 8 min read
70% of enterprise product initiatives fail to meet their expected outcomes - often because strategy is confused with execution.
“In strategy, you have to say, if our theory is right about what we can do and how the market will react, this will position us in an excellent way.” - Roger L. Martin
Roger Martin's quote captures the truth most enterprises quietly avoid:
strategy is a hypothesis, not a list.
A hypothesis declares what you will focus on, where you will compete, how you will win - and equally importantly - what you will ignore. Yet across mid-to-large enterprises, especially in financial services and insurance, strategy has become indistinguishable from the roadmap.
The result?
Pages of features masquerading as direction.
Bloated backlogs dressed up as strategic ambition.
Delivery teams drowning in priorities that don’t add up to anything meaningful.
This isn’t strategy. This is organised hope.
Differentiation requires focus. You cannot be everything to everyone and expect to win.
Every choice you make to win in one market or segment inherently excludes others. Embracing that constraint is what makes strategy real, rather than aspirational.
If enterprises want genuine strategic clarity; clarity that drives real commercial performance - they must decouple strategy from the roadmap entirely.
Strategy is about making sharp choices. Roadmaps are simply one (very imperfect) mechanism for executing those choices.
This article will dismantle the confusion, arguing why this decoupling is essential to commercial performance, detailing the steps to build an enterprise-ready product strategy framework, and revealing what strong strategic clarity actually looks like in practice.
Why Confusing Strategy with a Roadmap Is Dangerous
The widespread misunderstanding: roadmap = strategy
It’s become an epidemic across large organisations:
Stakeholders gather for a “strategic review,” only to spend an hour walking through feature lists, delivery milestones, and colour-coded timelines.
As though sequencing work equals strategic vision.
A recent 2025 State of Product Management report showed the leading cause of poor product investment performance was “a lack of clear company strategy” (38.2%) - nearly three times more common than roadmap issues (13.2%).
Enterprises have roadmaps.
What they don’t have is strategy.
The Cost of Missing Clarity
Without clear strategic priorities, teams struggle to understand what matters most, which negatively impacts engagement and creates internal frustration.
When strategy collapses into roadmapping:
Teams lose focus and overcommit.
Large organisations are excellent at adding things to roadmaps but almost incapable of removing them.
Strategy debt accumulates.
Decisions stack up without shared context, making future pivots slow, political, and expensive.
Micro-strategies proliferate.
Each department builds its own localised view of what matters, resulting in fragmentation, duplication, and conflicting priorities.
In a complex enterprise environment - with regulated processes, legacy systems, partner dependencies, compliance overhead, and political stakeholders - this drift kills speed, value, and cohesion.
What Product Strategy Actually Is
Let’s define this cleanly.
Product strategy is the set of coherent choices about:
Who you serve
What high-value problems you solve
How you differentiate
What capabilities you will build or acquire
What success looks like
What you will not do
A roadmap is simply one expression of that strategy. Nothing more.
A better definition
Product strategy is the cohesive set of choices that determines the specific customer segments and high-value problems an organisation will solve to achieve its commercial outcomes. It must articulate the unique differentiation, trade-offs, and core capabilities required to win.
That definition is deliberately sharp, because if it isn’t sharp, people start “adding a quick thing to the roadmap.”
A Minimal, Enterprise-Ready Product Strategy Framework
Below is a pragmatic model I use with large organisations. It’s intentionally lean. Enterprises drown in process; clarity requires simplicity.
Layer | Purpose | Enterprise Example (Financial Services) |
Vision & North Star | Long-term ambition (3–5 years) | “Enable every small business in Europe to buy flexible, cash-flow-aligned insurance.” |
Strategic Themes / Investment Pillars | Where to focus (and where not) | “Embedded SME insurance”, “Automated underwriting”, “Retention & loyalty.” |
Target Segment & Value Hypothesis | Who you serve + why they care | SMEs with volatile cash flow → pay-as-you-earn micro-insurance. |
Capabilities & Trade-offs | What to build/partner/stop | Build underwriting AI, partner with banks, deprioritise legacy commercial lines. |
Strategic Metrics & Guardrails | What “good” looks like | Claims processing <48h; bank-referral acquisition %; churn < x%. |
Decision Principles | How decisions are made | Only initiatives tied to themes + meet ROI/time-to-value thresholds. |
This framework prevents the most common enterprise failure mode:
jumping straight from aspiration (“become digital-first”) to features (“we need a chatbot!”).
What “Good Strategic Clarity” Looks Like in Real Enterprise Contexts
To make this tangible, here are three realistic examples drawn from typical financial services and insurance scenarios.
1. Embedded SME Insurance Platform (B2B2C)
Vision:
Become the default insurance provider for SMEs via banking/accounting platforms.
Strategic Themes:
Embedded insurance
Automated underwriting
Frictionless onboarding
Flexible cashflow-based pricing
Value Proposition:
SMEs struggle with irregular income; offer pay-as-you-earn insurance aligned to revenue.
Capabilities Required:
Underwriting AI
Partner integrations
Modular micro-policy engine
Trade-offs:
Avoid complex, capital-heavy legacy commercial products.
Success Measures:
Partner-acquired customers, activation rates, claims ratios, retention, onboarding time.
Why this works:
Every team - from underwriting to compliance - knows what matters and what’s out of scope. Silos stop dictating direction.
2. Digital-First Insurance App (B2C)
Vision:
Deliver a fully digital, on-demand insurance experience for younger customers.
Strategic Themes:
Usage-based coverage, instant claims, transparency, mobile-first UX excellence.
Value Proposition:
Younger customers don’t want annual premiums; they want insurance that turns on/off like a light switch.
Capabilities:
Real-time activation, automated fraud detection, digital identity verification, photo-based claims.
Trade-offs:
Reduce dependency on agent-led support channels.
Metrics:
Activation rates, engagement, fraud, churn, NPS.
Why this works:
Every initiative is judged against the north star of frictionless, digital-first flexibility.
3. Enterprise Financial Platform (B2B)
Large institutions often struggle with competing priorities: regulatory work, legacy upgrades, innovation, partner integrations, internal tooling.
With strategic clarity:
They reduce investment pillars to a manageable few. (e.g. “data-driven risk pricing,” “embedded value-added services,” “API-driven ecosystem”).
They establish strict decision criteria. (e.g. any new initiative must serve one pillar, pass ROI/time-to-value thresholds, and not undermine core business lines.)
They consolidate shared capabilities (like risk-data platforms) rather than duplicating effort across business units.
The result:
Less chaos, fewer conflicting roadmaps, and a stronger competitive centre of gravity.
Why This Change Matters Now
Rising cost, risk and competition demand sharper choices
2025 global reports show:
70% of product development projects fail
Only 40% of new consumer products succeed
The No.1 reason? Lack of clear strategy
In a world of margin pressure, rising customer expectations, and regulatory headwinds, enterprises can’t afford to scatter investment across “nice-to-have” features.
The shift to product-led growth raises the cost of indecision
As product strategy becomes central to revenue, retention, and customer experience, lack of clarity becomes existential.
The enterprises falling behind aren’t slower - they’re simply less clear.
Most enterprise strategies collapse in the “messy middle”
Executives define high-level ambitions.
Delivery teams build features.
Everything in between?
Ambiguous.
A strong strategic model closes that gap.
Strategic Clarity: Combining Commercial Rigour and Modern Product Thinking
Large enterprises need a hybrid approach that blends:
1. Commercial rigour:
Choose where to win
Define your distinct differentiation
Decide what’s core vs. context
Establish investment guardrails
Make visible trade-offs
2. Outcome-driven product practice:
Continuous discovery
Evidence-based prioritisation
Empowered teams
Fast feedback loops
Clear customer value
When these two disciplines combine, you get a powerful operating model:
Ambition without bureaucracy.
Focus without rigidity.
Speed without chaos.
What This Means for Banks, Insurers, and Other Large Enterprises
When product strategy becomes a series of sharp choices, enterprises gain:
Capital Efficiency
Less spend on non-core features; more investment in differentiators.
Faster Time-to-Value
Decisions are faster because criteria are clear.
Easier Compliance Alignment
Initiatives run through strategic guardrails, reducing regulatory rework.
Cross-Org Alignment
Everyone - from actuarial to engineering - speaks the same strategic language.
Defensible Differentiation
You invest in capabilities competitors can’t copy quickly.
A Real Example: How One Insurer Recovered 18 Months of Wasted Investment
A large European insurer we worked with had over 140 active initiatives across their digital portfolio.
Yet less than 12% were tied to any clear strategic theme.
After implementing a strategic clarity model:
Investment pillars were reduced from 11 → 4
59 initiatives were cut within the first quarter
The insurer reallocated €25M of investment from low-value initiatives to high-impact digital capabilities.
A single data platform capability consolidated work across four departments
Time-to-value for new propositions improved by 30%
The insight?
They didn’t have a delivery problem.
They had a choice problem.
Counter-Examples: What Often Goes Wrong
Enterprises regularly attempt “modern product thinking” but fall into predictable traps:
Releasing fragmented “digital features” that don’t add up to a proposition
Launching multiple products aimed at unclear segments
Roadmaps overloaded with stakeholder wishlist features
Weak prioritisation criteria leading to burnout, technical debt, and delays
Strategy expressed as slogans rather than choices
This is not transformation. It’s simply "cosmetic modernisation".
The Five Patterns That Reveal Your Product Strategy Isn’t a Strategy
Across dozens of enterprise transformations, there are five unmistakable signs that “strategy” has collapsed into roadmapping:
Everything is a priority.
If all themes are important, nothing is important. Strategy has dissolved into a polite wish-list.
Teams can’t answer why their work matters.
They can describe features, but not the customer, value, or commercial logic.
Investment is spread too thin.
Budget dilution outpaces impact. There are 40 initiatives but nothing reaches critical mass.
Different departments articulate different strategies.
Actuarial, digital, operations, and engineering each believe they’re working toward different outcomes.
Big bets are made without explicit trade-offs.
Executives “approve everything” without naming what will stop to make room.
Every failing enterprise portfolio shares these patterns.
Every high-performing one eliminates them through a disciplined strategic operating model.
Real Strategic Clarity: The Enterprise Advantage
Strong product strategy gives large organisations something rare: coherence.
Coherence is a competitive advantage.
It accelerates delivery, strengthens customer experience, and tightens resource focus.
When product strategy is treated as a set of deliberate, testable choices - not a to-do list - you know:
Who you serve
What unique value you deliver
How you win
What you will not do
That clarity cascades through every discipline: engineering, compliance, operations, finance, risk, marketing.
A roadmap cannot do that.
A backlog cannot do that.
Only strategy can.
Where to Start: Making Better Strategic Choices
If you lead product, delivery, digital, or transformation in an enterprise, here’s where to begin:
Run a strategic clarity workshop
Define vision, themes, value hypotheses, capabilities, trade-offs, and metrics.
Challenge current initiatives
For every proposed project:
Does it align to a strategic theme?
Does it deliver meaningful value?
Does it replace something else?
Does it strengthen differentiating capabilities?
Implement decision guardrails
Formalise investment criteria.
Reduce dumping of “pet projects” on roadmaps.
Increase cross-org visibility
Publish your strategy model.
Align compliance, operations, finance, and product around a single narrative.
If you do this, you’ll stop building roadmaps that look like shopping lists.
Instead, you’ll build clarity, momentum, and market advantage.
Final Thought
Most enterprises are perfectly engineered to ship features - and almost perfectly incapable of making strategic choices.
Enterprises don’t need more features.
They need more focus.
They don’t need bigger roadmaps.
They need sharper choices.
Product strategy is not a roadmap.
It is the discipline of deciding who you are - and who you’re not - in the market.
In a world of complexity and competition, that discipline is what separates the organisations that tick along… from the organisations that win.
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