The Ask-Every-Team Test (Diagnosing a Missing Strategy)
Interview teams and leaders to reveal whether a real, aligned strategy exists — or just lives unspoken in people's heads.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Perri diagnoses whether an organization actually has a deployed strategy by talking to people, not reading documents. She looks for a telltale symptom pattern, then runs two probes: asking every team what they're doing and why to see if the answers ladder up and match, and interrogating leaders to surface strategy that exists implicitly but was never written down.
Origin
Melissa Perri's standard opening diagnostic when brought in to assess product organizations, refined across hundreds of engagements.
Core principles
- 01A deployed strategy shows up as a consistent story every team can tell, from tactical work back to business metrics.
- 02Often a strategy exists but only in leaders' heads — the failure is in writing it down and communicating it, not in thinking.
- 03Misalignment across the org (different answers to 'what's the vision?') is itself the diagnosis.
How to run it
- 1
Check for the no-strategy symptom pattern
Look for teams working like dogs (80-hour weeks, constant releasing) while none of the metrics move and executives treat product as a black box.
Pro tip The combination of frantic activity plus flat metrics plus executive confusion is the clearest tell.
- 2
Ask every team 'what and why'
Go to all the teams and ask what they're working on and why. If they all tell a similar story — connecting their tactical work to an initiative, to customer value, to business value and new markets — strategy is deployed well.
Pro tip If lots of people ask you 'why are we building this?', the leader failed to explain the strategy — not the team's fault.
- 3
Interrogate leaders to surface hidden strategy
Ask leaders probing questions: is it good if we hit these numbers, is it bad and why, if we release this what will change? This pulls out beliefs about goals that were never explicitly written.
- 4
Test vision alignment across the org
Ask many people 'what's the vision?' Different answers reveal a lack of alignment; a slogan that no one can elaborate on is a tagline, not a vision.
Watch out A phrase like 'be the backbone of healthcare' that no one can explain is a red flag, not a strategy.
In the wild
Perri asked a healthcare company's entire executive team what the vision was. They said 'to be the backbone of healthcare.' When she asked what that meant, nobody could elaborate.
→ She flagged it as a tagline, not a vision, and prescribed writing a proper two-pager defining what the company is manifesting into and who it wants to be in 5-10 years.
Common mistakes
Assuming the problem is training
Perri says 99% of the time leaders think their issue is people-training when it's actually how they set goals and deploy strategy — trained people with no strategic context have nothing to work toward.
Mistaking a slogan for a vision
Aspirational taglines that can't be elaborated give a false sense that a strategy exists, masking the missing work of defining what you will and won't do.
Is it for you?
Best for
A new product leader, consultant, or executive trying to quickly assess whether an organization's strategy is real and deployed.
Not ideal for
Tiny early-stage teams where everyone already shares full context informally.
From the transcript
“i'd always ask them like what are you working on what's the most important thing you could be doing and why and i would try…”
“signs that there are no strategy teams are all working like dogs like they're they're working 80 hours a week”
“you go to all of your teams and you ask them what they're doing and why exactly what i was talking about before and they…”
“to be the backbone of healthcare i said what does that mean and they couldn't elaborate”
From the episode
How to create a winning product strategy
Melissa Perri