A company can know exactly what makes it different while its product behaves like everyone else’s.
The strategy is clear in the deck. Leadership understands the market, the audience and the reason the company should win. The positioning is sharp in the sales narrative. Then a customer opens the product and meets something competent and generic, a set of reasonable features arranged the way the category arranges them.
The customer meets a different strategy: the one the company actually carries out. Most of it lives in the product, in what it puts first, what it explains, what it remembers, what it makes easy and what it leaves alone. When the strategy in the deck and the strategy in the product drift apart, the rest of the organisation pays to close the gap from outside. Sales explains what the experience should have made obvious. Marketing buys the recall the product failed to earn. Customer success repairs what the product left unclear. Leadership keeps restating the strategy, because nothing in daily use is doing it for them.
I think of this as the experience-strategy gap. Its most reliable symptom is commercial: growth that depends on paying, again and again, to win customers the product should have kept.
An underdog with a strong proposition
When I joined loveholidays as Director of Design and Research, the company was moving from underdog to market challenger. It had a strong commercial proposition, momentum, and ambitions in new European markets. It also had low brand awareness and expensive acquisition channels. Those two facts belong together. Low recall and costly acquisition are what it looks like when a proposition is carried mostly from outside the product, and each booking has to be won as if for the first time.
The first piece of work was a brand system: vision, mission, positioning, proposition, and a visual and verbal identity built around being the smart way to get away. A positioning like that creates an obligation. If the brand says smart, the product has to behave smartly on the customer’s behalf, in the booking moments and app flows where a holiday is actually chosen and paid for. Otherwise the claim becomes a line that marketing has to keep paying to repeat.
So the design question became where, in a real journey, a customer experiences the proposition directly, and what each team would have to decide differently for that to happen. The brand had to become judgement that product teams could use without reinterpreting it every time: what to say, what to build, what to repeat, and what to refuse.
Strategy becomes behaviour
A strategy is a pattern of choices about who to serve, which problem to own, which advantage to build and which opportunities to leave alone. Customers meet it as emphasis, sequence, defaults, language, constraints, feedback, pricing, onboarding, and the product’s willingness to make some things easier than others.
The translation depends on the advantage. A company that wins on reliability has to make status, recovery and accountability visible. A company that wins on expertise has to guide judgement, where a generic product would simply expose options. A strategy that depends on trust has to make provenance, control and consequence legible. A company that has chosen focus needs a product that knows how to say no.
A product can be good in every local way and still carry none of this. The flows are efficient, the interface is clear, the system is accessible and well built, and the whole remains strategically indistinct, because each improvement was judged on its own merits. Local quality needs a centre.
A centre for the roadmap
Roadmaps drift when every reasonable request is treated as strategically equal. A competitor gap, a customer request, a sales objection, a regulatory requirement: each is defensible, and together they make the product broader, busier and harder to explain. The useful test is short. Does this make the product more itself? Does it reinforce the advantage the company claims, and help people experience why this way of solving the problem deserves to exist?
The test works only when the organisation is arranged to apply it. Where product owns delivery without owning the proposition, design owns usability without shaping differentiation, and marketing owns the message with little say over product behaviour, the strategy is agreed at the top and fragments in execution. It has to be held where teams make decisions: in principles they can apply, in decision rights that are clear, and in roadmap conversations that ask what each item carries.
What would count
The claim that a product carries the strategy needs evidence like any other. People should be able to say what is different after using it. The key journeys should make the advantage visible as well as completing the task. Activation is stronger evidence when it follows comprehension. Retention is stronger evidence when it reflects value, and weaker when it reflects lock-in. Expansion is stronger when deeper use maps to deeper capability.
Beneath all of these sits one question: did using the product teach people why it exists? When it does, the rest of the organisation gets to amplify something customers already know.
Mintzberg and Waters distinguished intended from realised strategy, and the distance between the two is the subject here. Strategy as trade-offs and fit, after Porter, coherent action, after Rumelt, and strategy as an integrated set of choices, in Martin and Lafley, all sit underneath.
The reading offered here is a designer’s: for most customers the product is where intended strategy becomes realised, and the gap announces itself first in what sales, marketing and customer success have to keep doing to compensate.