The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)
Connect team-level work to business outcomes through three linked layers so no one asks why they're building something.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 95%
Most companies have strategy trapped in executives' heads and a set of teams shipping features, with nothing connecting the two. Perri calls this gap the 'missing middle.' Her fix is a three-level strategy tree — strategic intents (business-level bets), product initiatives (big customer problems), and options/solutions (what teams build) — each written as a short two-pager and linked so anyone can read from a team's task all the way up to the company vision.
Origin
Developed by Melissa Perri across 30+ deep consulting engagements (including interim-CPO work with Insight Venture Partners' portfolio) and taught in her book 'Escaping the Build Trap' and at Harvard Business School.
Core principles
- 01Every layer must ladder up: a team's work should trace to a customer problem, which traces to a business mover.
- 02Prioritize at the top first — strategic intents force a choice about direction before the portfolio is built.
- 03Write it down. Strategy that lives only in heads cannot be deployed to hundreds or thousands of people.
- 04Keep each artifact to a two-pager of prose, not a 20-page requirements document.
How to run it
- 1
Executives write the strategic intents
Leadership prioritizes the two-to-three-year 'really big business movers' — e.g. go up-market, go down-market, expand geographically, or enter a new market. These are ranked, not a wish list.
Pro tip Force an explicit priority order so trade-off conversations later are objective, not emotional.
Watch out If everything is a priority, nothing is — spreading teams thin across many intents is the failure mode.
- 2
Product leaders write the product initiatives
Directors and VPs (usually not the CPO) translate each strategic intent into meaty, problem-oriented initiatives: big customer problems worth solving that are each made up of multiple epics.
Pro tip Frame initiatives as problems to solve, not features to ship.
- 3
Teams define the options (solutions)
Product teams working with developers define the solutions — Perri calls them 'options' — that address the initiatives' problems and roll up to the strategic intents.
- 4
Write a two-pager at each level and link them
Each level gets its own one-or-two-page memo (vision, positioning, priorities, target outcomes) stored in a shared doc or wiki and hyperlinked so a reader can traverse from any team's work up the full tree.
Pro tip Reuse a company's existing template if it has one — don't reinvent the wheel.
In the wild
When consulting deeply, Perri would go to every team and ask what they were working on, the most important thing they could be doing, and why — then try to ladder each answer up into a strategy herself to see if it connected.
→ A broken chain revealed that no one was formulating and deploying strategy from the top, signalling either a missing or wrong CPO.
Common mistakes
Leaving the middle layer out
When the initiatives layer connecting business intents to team work is absent, teams ship features in isolation that never move the business metrics executives care about.
Spreading teams too thin
Without a prioritized tree, leaders scatter teams across many initiatives; one thin team is rarely enough to move a hard-hitting metric, so executives see no progress.
Is it for you?
Best for
Scale-up product leaders moving from a single product to a multi-product portfolio who must deploy strategy to hundreds of employees for the first time.
Not ideal for
Early pre-product-market-fit teams where the job is rapid experimentation and execution, not portfolio prioritization.
From the transcript
“prioritize their strategic intents or what i call them which are like really big business movers”
“this i call it the missing middle is usually gone which connects those strategic intents and those business outcomes back into what the teams are”
“we typically have executive teams writing the strategic intents for the business level we've got product management leadership directors vp cpos writing the product initiatives”
“you can go from one to the next and then read all the way up the strategy tree”
From the episode
How to create a winning product strategy
Melissa Perri