How to Be (and Be Seen as) Strategic

Strategy must fit the context and shorten its horizon as uncertainty increases, advancing through proximate objectives that validate direction. Leaders need to balance time/politics, context, direction, and execution to avoid common failure modes and to make strategy real. Product sets direction, technical reshapes context, teams must execute under constraints, and leaders must carve time to think so they are both strategic and seen as strategic.

Key Points

• Strategy is contextual; importing playbooks across companies or market phases (e.g., post-ZIRP) without adjustment leads to failure.
• In high uncertainty, prioritize proximate objectives—near-term, testable steps that confirm or correct direction—over distant visions.
• Effective strategy blends four ingredients: time/politics, context, direction (proximate objectives), and expertise/execution; imbalance creates common leadership anti-patterns.
• Product strategy drives direction; technical strategy should be problem-led and proactively change the delivery context; team strategy must execute despite constraints.
• Leaders need a personal strategy—time and space to think strategically and to make their strategic work visible—to actually be, and be seen as, strategic.

Sentiment

The community finds the topic of strategy genuinely interesting but is largely unimpressed by this particular article. The most-engaged comments critique it as overly generic and jargon-heavy. Commenters prefer recommending established strategy books over engaging with the article's specific framework. The discussion is more interesting for the tangential strategy-vs-execution debate it sparks than for any direct engagement with the article's ideas.

In Agreement

• The quote about being "DDOS'd by the job" resonates as a useful reminder about mistaking busyness for effectiveness
• The distinction between being strategic and being seen as strategic is acknowledged as a real challenge worth exploring
• The topic of strategy itself is considered worthwhile and important for engineering leaders to engage with

Opposed

• Strategy is so contextual that a general article on the topic inevitably becomes platitudinous and void of useful meaning
• The article focuses too much on the optics of being "seen as strategic" rather than on actual strategic substance
• The term "under-indexed person" is confusing jargon that alienates readers and signals insider language
• Execution and solid tactics matter more than high-level strategic frameworks — if your basics are good, basic strategy suffices
• External strategy books like Rumelt and Compo offer more substantive frameworks than the article provides