Product strategy in a growing venture is a moving target. What worked when you had ten customers and three people does not work when you have a thousand customers and thirty people. The frameworks designed for established enterprises feel too rigid, while the startup advice to just iterate fast starts to break down when real revenue and real customers depend on your decisions.
Martin Crochelet, Partner at Dualoop, brought a practitioner's lens to this challenge at Gathering #9 in Brussels. Drawing from his work advising ventures at various growth stages, he explored the tensions that product leaders face when trying to maintain strategic clarity while the ground beneath them keeps shifting.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
The Strategy-Execution Gap in Growing Companies
Martin opened with a pattern he sees repeatedly in growing ventures: the gap between having a strategy and actually executing it. Many teams have a strategy document. Few have a strategy that meaningfully influences what gets built next week. The problem is not that founders and product leaders lack strategic thinking. It is that the connection between strategy and daily decisions is too weak.