What about feature-level work?

If you work as an individual contributor, you may be wondering how this applies at smaller scopes than a whole product.

Strategic thinking applies across all altitudes, with nested scopes. If you've ever heard strategy described as "fractal," that's what it means. The ways of thinking are the same across scopes.

If you're leading an area within a product, the framework still applies, but it's nested. At the feature level, the thesis is inherited from the overarching product strategy. You're not choosing the customer, the core differentiation, or defensibility. You're contributing to them.

What's yours: the context and challenge within your scope, and the bets you make. This is where you prove you can think strategically. What specific initiatives will you pursue, and why those over alternatives? You also need to be clear about what type of work your feature needs: finding traction, core feature development, growth, platform/scaling, or expansion (see the appendix on the three bet lenses).

The key question changes from "how will we win the market?" to "how does this feature help the product win?" Everything you do should ladder up to the product-level approach. If you can't draw that line, maybe you shouldn't build that feature.