Product Bakery – The Product Management, UX & Design Podcast · Alex Dapunt and Christian Strunk

#100 The Best Strategy Comes With Transparency

January 30, 2023·28 min·2 clips

Christian says break rules and go to the CEO if your leader works in secret.

Strategy is still burning. Christian and Alex come back to a topic that seems to have stuck with listeners and people in coaching. Their starting point is blunt enough: product teams rarely know everything, so strategy should stop pretending they do. That makes transparency less noble and more useful. The episode keeps returning to context. Alignment comes from product and design seeing the same risks, tradeoffs, and loose ends, not from one side polishing a strategy doc alone. Product cannot carry the whole thing. Design brings user understanding, research, problem framing, and signals from around the organization into the same room. When those tracks split, the fight becomes familiar fast: whose priority wins? Christian and Alex do not treat escalation as failure. A CPO, head of design, or someone above may need to decide. Still, that decision lands better when product and design have already done the honest work together. The useful version of transparency is measured. Do not publish sensitive strategy everywhere. Share enough direction that people can catch weak assumptions early. Ask what risks they see. That one question can save a team from expensive certainty. For them, leadership means keeping strategy adaptable, visible enough to challenge, and grounded in shared understanding.

As heard by us

A clear look at strategy, alignment, and why transparency helps surface risk early.

The episode treats product strategy as a series of choices made under uncertainty, not a tidy exercise in getting everything right. It keeps coming back to alignment: product and design do their best work when they are looking at the same problem, because split views tend to…

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Why you'd press play

If strategy feels fuzzy, this gives you a cleaner way to talk about product strategy in times of uncertainty.

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