The Strategic Formula: Simple Why x Change Agent
Being seen as strategic = articulating a compelling, simple why AND championing big, hard ideas.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Anneka Gupta reverse-engineered the feedback 'you're not strategic enough' into a two-variable formula. Strategic perception requires both a compelling and simple 'why' behind direction, and the willingness to champion big, difficult changes that serve the company's long-term interest. Either one alone fails: a great communicator with small ideas is not strategic, and a big-idea champion who can't explain the why is not strategic either.
Origin
Anneka Gupta (CPO, Rubrik; formerly President/GM at LiveRamp) developed this after receiving 'not strategic enough' feedback twice — once in a performance review, and again years later while interviewing for head-of-product roles — which prompted her to research and define what the word actually means to the people saying it.
Core principles
- 01'Strategic' is a perception held by others, not a private quality — treat it as a decodable signal, not a personality trait.
- 02The why must be both compelling AND simple; complexity reads as confusion, not depth.
- 03Championing means driving hard change through to execution, not publishing a document.
- 04The two halves multiply. One without the other scores zero.
How to run it
- 1
Decode the feedback instead of absorbing it
When told you're 'not strategic', do not treat it as a vague character verdict. Translate it into the two concrete asks: can you articulate a compelling, simple why, and are you championing ideas big enough to change the company's direction?
Pro tip Gupta got the same feedback years apart and only progressed once she realised both instances traced back to the same two themes.
- 2
Pick a small set of company-defining areas
Choose the areas by asking what is most important for the business, what will kill the business if you don't get it right, and what the biggest opportunities are regardless of execution difficulty. Deliberately exclude everything else.
Pro tip Judge the opportunity ignoring implementation difficulty first — technical hardness filters out big ideas prematurely.
- 3
Champion a few genuinely big ideas
Commit to a small number of ideas that would change the direction of the company, including ones that are hard to execute and will meet resistance. Act as the change agent who actually drives them, not just the person who proposed them.
Watch out Bringing only small ideas to the table, no matter how well argued, will still be read as not strategic.
- 4
Compress the why to something simple and repeatable
For each big idea, produce a short, compelling explanation of why the company should do it: why it drives margins, growth, or a new persona. Repeat it until the org can restate it back to you.
Pro tip Anchor the why in an outside-in view — the customer problem and go-to-market — rather than internal engineering rationale.
- 5
Follow through to observable outcomes
Track the big ideas through execution. Being seen as strategic dies if the ideas never land — a doc without delivery reads as talk.
Watch out Publishing a strategy doc and not achieving the outcomes actively reinforces the 'not strategic' label.
In the wild
In a fast-moving cybersecurity landscape with many possible directions, Gupta applied the formula to Rubrik's multi-year planning: pull diverse voices together, synthesize, take ideas one click better from an outside-in customer/go-to-market view, then champion the resulting big bets with a simple why.
→ Over three to six months she saw a material increase in the number of big ideas the company was pursuing and in the quality of strategic thinking she could bring to the table.
Gupta received 'not strategic enough' in a performance review, worked on it, then heard it again years later while interviewing for head-of-product roles. Reflecting back, both instances collapsed to the same two themes, which became the formula.
→ She stopped treating the feedback as diffuse and started deliberately doing both halves — championing a few big ideas and articulating a simple why for each.
Common mistakes
Optimizing only the articulation
Getting excellent at explaining the why while only bringing incremental ideas keeps you tactical in others' eyes. The size of the idea is half the score.
Championing big ideas with a fuzzy why
If people can't restate simply why the company is doing this, the big idea reads as a pet project rather than strategy — and you still won't be seen as strategic.
Is it for you?
Best for
Senior ICs, PMs, and product leaders who have been told they need to 'be more strategic' and don't know what would actually change that perception.
Not ideal for
Early-stage founders or solo operators where no one is grading your perceived strategy — there the constraint is execution, not perception.
From the transcript
“when people say I want someone that's strategic what they're really saying is I want someone that can come up with an articulate a compelling…”
“if you have one without the other ultimately people are not going to see you as strategic”
“what is most important for the business what's going to kill the business if we don't get right”
From the episode
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more
Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik)