A newly created team focused on intermediate advertisers had no clear charter, principles, or strategic direction. Roadmap conversations kept centering on features instead of the customer problems those features were meant to solve.
I volunteered to lead strategy workshops, created customer-centric problem statements and a Jobs-to-be-Done framework, and drafted the team's mission, vision, and guiding principles. Through the process, I continually redirected discussions back to customer needs instead of letting them jump straight to solutions.
Teams don't default to strategy — they default to features, because features are concrete and strategy takes deliberate work to build. Someone has to keep pulling the room back to the customer problem, or roadmap conversations quietly become a list of things to build instead of problems to solve.