From Vision to Velocity: Making Strategy Tangible Across the Product Lifecycle

Great strategy doesn’t stop at the executive level. In this session, Diana Stepner, Product Management Coach with over 20 years of experience, shares practical approaches to making strategy tangible across the product lifecycle.

We’ll explore how product teams can translate high-level strategic goals into actionable plans, create visibility across organizations, and maintain alignment even when strategies evolve or remain unclear.

What You’ll Learn:

• Creating Strategic Clarity: How to address the common challenge of vague, misaligned strategies that fail to provide clear direction. Learn tactics for simplifying complex strategic visions into actionable frameworks that product teams can easily understand and apply.
• Building a “Strategy Stack”: How to connect organizational mission and vision with product-level execution through a coherent strategy framework that ensures alignment between top-level goals and team-level implementation.
• Making Strategy Visible: How to combat the 75% strategy implementation failure rate by creating accessible, jargon-free strategic artifacts that can be referenced by all team members and reinforced through organizational rituals.

Diana also shares how embedding strategy into day-to-day operations creates a culture where all team members—not just leaders—think and act strategically, enabling faster adaptation and more effective product development.

Key Takeaways

• Simplify and Clarify Strategy Communication: Create short, jargon-free strategy statements that everyone can understand and reference, making complex strategic direction accessible to all organizational levels.
• Implement a Unified Strategy Stack: Develop a coherent framework where business strategy informs product strategy, creating clear lines of sight between company mission and product execution.
• Integrate Strategy into Team Rituals: Weave strategic objectives into recurring team activities rather than treating strategy as a one-time presentation, reinforcing its importance and ensuring consistent implementation.
• Adapt Strategic Focus by Product Lifecycle Stage: Adjust your strategic emphasis based on where your product sits in its lifecycle—from discovery and definition to development and growth—to maintain relevance and effectiveness.
• Empower All Team Members as Strategic Thinkers: Foster a culture where everyone understands and applies strategy, encouraging questions when clarity is needed and enabling broader ownership of strategic outcomes.