Stop Calling Revenue Targets a Strategy: How To Make Goals That Actually Move Your Product

Why most strategies collapse into feature backlogs by May

A VP of product told me recently, 'Our strategy is to grow revenue 15% and ship the new platform by Q3.' That is not a strategy. That is a spreadsheet target plus a project plan.

I see this pattern across mid market and enterprise teams. Strategic goals are either very financial or very project based. Grow revenue by 15%. Launch the new app in three months. Approve the rebrand. None of that tells your teams what meaningful shift you are trying to create in the business.

The real job of strategy: a meaningful shift, not a task list

A real strategy is an outcome that materially moves your business or product forward. It is a shift. You should feel like you are going from here to there in a way that matters.

You are here right now. As a business and as a product. Where exactly do you want to get to. Not this quarter, but in the next eight to twelve months. When you answer that honestly, it almost never sounds like a single revenue number or a single project.

You can tell you have a real strategic goal when:

• It describes a concrete change in how the business works or wins, not just how much money it makes.
• It is stable over time. You do not rewrite it every few months.
• It is measurable with real metrics, not just themes or slogans.
• You can explain it in one or two simple sentences to anyone in the company.
• You can draw a clear line from work on the roadmap to that outcome.

If you want the classic textbook take on this, the MasterClass overview of business strategy at what is strategy and Harvard DCE on corporate vs business strategy both describe strategy as a long term plan to achieve specific objectives. I agree. I just want you to feel that shift in your gut, not only see it in a framework.

Why most strategies vanish after the January deck

Here is what usually happens. In January you present a polished strategy deck. Beautiful slides. Clear pillars. Everyone nods.

Then reality hits. By April or May, when you actually look at the roadmap, it is a backlog of features, customer requests, technical clean up, and one off executive asks. Some work loosely ties back to the strategy. A lot does not. The original goals sit in a folder or a board somewhere, static and unmeasured.

I talk to leaders who admit they change strategies every couple of months. Or they show them once at the start of the year and never again. There is no drumbeat of measurement. No honest check on whether the work is moving the outcomes you said you cared about.

Use your three letter meetings for realignment, not status theater

Most organizations already have the right forum for this. The three letter groups. ELT. DIG. Whatever you call the monthly meeting where product, business, and other functions get together.

That time is gold. Use it to realign strategy and execution, not just to give status updates. Every month, you should be asking three simple questions:

• Is the work we are doing actually aligned to our strategic goals.
• Are the metrics that define those goals moving in the right direction.
• If not, do we need to adjust the work, the sequencing, or the strategy itself.

For every strategic goal, you should have a small set of metrics. Some will be quantitative. Churn, retention, expansion, activation, engagement, NPS, revenue from a specific segment. Some can be qualitative. Customer interviews. Field feedback. Support pain themes.

Link leading indicators to lagging indicators. If you build a feature to reduce churn, you should see usage and engagement as leading signs before churn actually drops. This is the heart of outcome based product work, and I go deeper on it in this breakdown on tracking outcomes in product management.

Stay with the problem long enough to solve it

Here is the messy part. You can be perfectly aligned and still not get the results you wanted.

Imagine your top strategic goal is to reduce churn in your core segment. You commit to it for the year. The team lines up six big initiatives they believe will help. Over the next quarter, they ship all six. You look at the churn graph. Flat. No movement.

That is the critical moment. Most companies quietly move on. New strategy. New slogan. Same unresolved problem.

The better move is to pause and ask hard questions. Were those the right bets. Are we solving the right problem. Do we actually have a pricing issue, or a packaging issue, or a positioning issue instead of a product issue. Do we need to change the strategy or just change the work under it.

Most real strategic shifts take eight to twelve months of consistent, focused effort. That matches what you will see in more formal guides to strategic planning, like Enterprise Nation's view on strategic business planning or Rhythm Systems on longer range planning. The difference is that the best product organizations do not just plan. They measure and adjust relentlessly until the gap is closed.

From churn to global expansion, one strategy at a time

When you work this way, something important happens. Eventually the gap on a strategic goal gets small enough that it is no longer the top priority.

Back to our churn example. After months of focused work, measurement, and adjustment, churn finally drops to a healthy, stable level. At that point, churn reduction no longer needs to be the top strategic goal. You can call that a success and move on to the next big shift, like expanding globally or owning a new segment.

That new strategic goal then drives a fresh wave of projects. Translation. Localized onboarding. New logistics partners. Compliance work in target countries. Market specific positioning. And a new set of leading and lagging metrics.

This is what real strategic sequencing looks like. One big shift at a time, carried through to completion, instead of a new strategy headline every quarter.

What if you feel powerless to change strategy or culture

Here is what I hear from a lot of product leaders. 'I cannot impact strategy. The culture here is too broken. I am already in thirty five hours of meetings a week. We just acquired a company. I do not have time to fix how this place works.'

I get it. You are not going to rewrite the company operating system on your own. That is not the goal. The goal is to make sure the work you are directly responsible for is truly impactful and clearly tied to strategy.

Start with your own team and your own projects. For every initiative you touch:

• State which strategic goal it supports, in plain language.
• Model the impact you expect that work to have on specific metrics.
• Decide up front how you will measure success once it ships.
• Review the actual impact and share the results, good or bad.

Do that consistently and you are already shifting culture. You are moving from output obsession to outcome clarity. If you want more on that shift, I break it down in this piece on moving from velocity to value, and I talk about how to tell the story of impact in this article on storytelling for product leaders.

When you make this system repeatable, others will copy it. Leaders notice when someone can clearly show which projects worked, which did not, and why. That is how you earn the right to be in the strategic conversation.

The real test for product and strategy leaders

You cannot always control what the slide at the top of the all hands says. You can control whether you know, with evidence, if the work happening this week is moving you toward the outcomes you committed to.

For me, success as a product or strategy leader comes down to one question. Is what we are doing right now actually moving us toward where we said we wanted to go. If you can answer that confidently, and you can prove it with data and stories, you have a system that can scale beyond you.

If you want more classical strategy examples to pressure test your own thinking, resources like Navalent's view on business strategy and differentiation or EPAM's summary of business level strategy are useful complements to the more outcome focused lens I am describing here.

At Iteright, our whole philosophy is built around that same idea. Make strategy visible. Tie work to outcomes. Give leaders and teams a clear way to see whether they are actually making progress. If you are ready to push your own organization in that direction, start by making your next strategic goal a real, measurable shift, not just a revenue number or a project list. The rest of the system gets a lot easier from there.