AI Is a Feature, Not a Strategy

Your board wants an AI strategy. Product teams respond to the challenge, and add a chatbot into their product. IT evalutes LLM options and provides employees with access to Claude of GPT.

That's an AI strategy, right. Right?

To troubleshoot your strategy, delete the word "AI" from your strategy decks. Did anything change? What changed for the customer? How do we win? If the deck collapses, you had an AI feature-focused slide, not a strategy.

Strategy should answer three questions:

Which customers are you serving?
Where are they struggling to accomplish their goal— what's the Job-to-be-Done?
Why will they hire you over every alternative, including doing nothing?

While we can leverage AI to help us analyze data that goes into a strategy, or we can use it to bring customer needs into focus, AI shows up after those answers, not before. Sometimes it helps to remove real friction that customers will pay (or stay) for that. Sometimes it's theater that wins the board meeting, but loses the renewal (rehire).

There's a separate consideration and that how teams are structured and operate. Jeff Bezos' rule of thumb for "Two Pizza Teams" is now too big. Teams are smaller, one pizza teams of 1-3 people and 6-12 agents. These teams ship faster, if not daily, then every two days. They ship end to end bets, not updating the color of a button. Discovery happens in hours, not weeks or months. That advantage is real, and it shows up in your margins, not just your marketing.

So before the next AI roadmap review, ask some pivotal questions: what need(s) or Job does this get done that customers couldn't get done before — or couldn't get done this cheaply, this quickly? How are we measuring success of this? If we place this bet, what return do we expect?

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