The Execution Trap And Finding Time For Strategy

As product leaders, time and time again we aren’t making time for strategy. 84% of product professionals recently told us they often or always get caught up in daily/executional tasks, leaving no time for strategic thinking. This is despite one of their top priorities being “balancing daily execution with long-term strategic thinking” – so what is happening here?

This is a sign we are well and truly stuck in the execution trap. While we have goals, what we do every day sets our priorities – irrespective if it aligns with our goals or not! Round and round we go until we realise we have got nothing done except answer some emails and put out some fires.

But if we believe strategic thinking and product strategy is so important, then why do we not make time for it? Well, there are a few reasons:

1. We love the thrill of the “URGENT” – As much as we complain about firefighting, it is exciting, isn’t it? When everything’s on the line and there is visibility, when everyone is trying to “fix” something together, when barriers are removed and consensus is suspended to get decisions made fast! This is why it can be so hard to turn away from what is urgent, even if it is not important.
2. We love the reward of ticking things off – Ever get that thrill when you tick something off your to-do list? As humans we are wired for completion and the faster we can tick something off, the faster we get that little dopamine hit. It can make us addicted to quick to-do’s – to answering that email or doing that stand-up – rather than the longer term strategic thinking that sets vision, direction and strategy.
3. We think someone else owns our time – Logging into your calendar and seeing back to back meetings. Attending a meeting that is booked over your “focus time”. Always making yourself available for a “quick call”. Do any of these sound familiar? One of the biggest reasons for not thinking strategically is we are “too busy”. We might even think busy equals important. But busy is what happens when you’re at the mercy of someone else’s schedule – so I ask a difficult question; who really owns our time?

The trick to finding time for strategic thinking that actually drives our day-to-day execution is to avoid these traps, and this starts with taking back ownership of our time.

First: Realise We Are The Masters Of Our Own Time

The great equaliser is time. No one has any more or less time than anyone else, that is why it is so important how we choose to use it. Harnessing your time starts with realising it is your choice how it is spent.

Most of the time we are not actually forced to spend our time on one thing over another, we may however go along with someone else’s schedule. Setting our own schedule means planning and protecting our time.

This may be confronting at first. It may mean asking for a meeting to be moved. Or not attending it at all. It may mean not responding to every email or direct message as soon as it comes to us. It may mean being less available to “urgent” requests.

Mastering our own time may at first trigger our self-consciousness (what will people think of me?) and maybe a little anxiety (what if they make a decision without me?). In this case, it can be useful to think of mastering your own time as an experiment.

Try to take back a few hours (or at least 90 mins) of your week from other people’s schedules and give it entirely to strategic thinking for 6 weeks in a row. This may look like:

• Asking for a team meeting to be rescheduled to a better time
• Declining to attend a standing meeting, like a standup
• Not jumping to answer your emails or direct messages straight away when you have a block of free time

Just a simple experiment like this can help prove to yourself that you have more control over your time than you think. Using this time to think strategically will then help you execute on the right things day to day rather than being reactive. This gets to the point that while being reactive in execution kills strategy, there is no use in a great strategy if it never gets executed.

Second: Realise Execution Goes Hand In Hand With Strategy

Strategy and execution are not separate things. What you do every day is your strategy – even if it is not very strategic. The trick is making sure you have done the strategic thinking to understand what you should be doing every day and taking the time to analyse how what you actually do fits into your strategy.

Simple rituals can help immensely when it comes to “doing” the work of strategy, like:

1. Planning upfront (day to day or week to week) what needs to be executed to keep strategy on track. Breaking things down into smaller tasks can also help with a bias for completion and the rewards that come from ticking things off.
2. Completing personal mini retros (week to week) of what was executed towards strategy. This means celebrating progress, even when it is small, analysing why some things weren’t executed and what can be done better next week to make sure you remain on track.

While things will always come up, by making sure you are managing your execution time well and are holding yourself accountable for aligning it with strategy, this will help to ensure that your day-to-day will be more strategic overall. Some weeks you may move only slightly towards your strategic direction and others you will move in leaps and bounds. These rituals will however help with motivation over the longer term as you move everyday towards being more strategically aligned with the limited time you have.

Ultimately, breaking free of the execution trap is not magic. There is no one that can wave a wand and ‘give you the time’ to be a more strategic product leader – but we can harness our time better. By being masters of our own time, actually using it to think strategically, planning our execution every day or week and holding ourselves accountable, we can break free of the execution trap and execute more strategically.

Check out our State of Product Leadership research – State of Product in ANZ 2025 Research Summary