Six-Month Strategy Draft Cycle
Learn the product first, then draft and pressure-test strategy with the team
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 94%
Bavaro recommends separating strategy development into a learning phase and a drafting phase. For roughly the first six months on a product, a PM should understand and deliver against the existing strategy while talking to customers, analyzing data, and noticing recurring patterns. Ideas can accumulate, but the new PM should resist arriving on day one to declare the team's direction wrong. After sufficient exposure, the PM blocks about half a day and drafts whichever part of strategy feels most generative: the vision, strategic framework, or roadmap. The draft should surface questions and evidence gaps rather than pretend to be final. The PM then works through it with engineering, design, and other key stakeholders. Repeated, thorny disputes over features are especially valuable signals because they often reveal a deeper disagreement about strategic principles that should be resolved explicitly.
Origin
Bavaro developed this advice from becoming the first PM at Asana and later managing PMs. She observed that managers usually hire someone to build on an existing strategy, while new PMs often try to rethink everything before understanding why the current choices were made.
Core principles
- 01Earn strategic judgment through customer and product exposure
- 02Deliver on the existing strategy before trying to replace it
- 03Private thinking improves the quality of collaborative strategy
- 04Open questions make a draft more useful, not less credible
- 05Repeated feature disputes often signal an unresolved strategic disagreement
How to run it
- 1
Inherit before you reinvent
Learn the team's current strategy and help deliver it during your first months. Treat the existing direction as a hypothesis to understand, not an obstacle to your own influence.
Pro tip Ask why previous choices were made and what evidence would cause the team to change them.
Watch out Declaring the strategy wrong on day one makes collaborators question why you joined and deprives you of the context needed to improve it.
- 2
Build a domain evidence base
Visit customers, study product data, and perform the normal product work that reveals needs and constraints. Record trends, pain points, and strategic ideas as they emerge.
Pro tip Keep a lightweight log of repeated observations so the later draft is grounded in patterns rather than the most recent conversation.
- 3
Draft alone for half a day
After roughly six months, create protected thinking time and begin with the strategy component that draws you most. Write enough to expose your current theory, alternatives, and unknowns.
Pro tip Change environment, remove meetings, and use the first draft to think rather than to perform certainty.
- 4
Name the open questions
Identify what you would need to know to choose between competing strategic approaches. Convert vague uncertainty into research, data, or stakeholder questions the team can answer.
Watch out Do not conceal uncertainty by filling gaps with unsupported assumptions.
- 5
Make strategy collaborative
Bring the draft to the engineering lead, design lead, and other essential partners. Invite them to challenge the assumptions, contribute experience, and reshape the strategy with you.
Pro tip Keep your own view in your back pocket so you can contribute substance without presenting it as a finished answer.
- 6
Elevate recurring disagreements
Track feature arguments that repeatedly become battles of will or values. Reframe them as a disagreement over strategy or product principles, resolve that higher-level question, and then revisit the individual decisions.
Pro tip Write the resulting principle down so the same strategic dispute does not reappear as a series of isolated feature debates.
In the wild
For six months, a newly hired PM delivers the current roadmap while interviewing customers and logging recurring complaints. In a half-day draft, the PM maps those patterns to a proposed strategic pillar, lists the data still needed, and reviews it with design and engineering. The team discovers that its repeated arguments about a requested feature are really a disagreement about which customer segment should be prioritized.
→ The team resolves the segment choice once and uses it to make several downstream product decisions consistently.
Common mistakes
Rewriting strategy before learning the product
A new PM lacks the accumulated customer, data, and organizational context needed for good strategic judgment. Early confidence can therefore destroy useful choices the PM does not yet understand.
Waiting for a perfect strategy
The first draft exists to expose ideas and questions for collaboration. Requiring certainty before sharing it prevents the feedback that improves it.
Relitigating the same feature dispute
Repeated disagreements are often symptoms of a strategic or values conflict. Solving each feature argument separately leaves the underlying difference untouched.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product managers joining an established team who want to grow from executing an inherited strategy to shaping the team's direction.
Not ideal for
Founding teams with no existing strategy or urgent turnaround situations where waiting six months would allow known harm to continue.
From the episode
Jackie Bavaro on getting better at product strategy, what exactly is strategy, PM pitfalls to avoid, advancing your career, getting into management, and much more