What about 0-1 products?

Two things change: hold everything lightly, and run faster cycles.

In a 0-1 situation, you have exactly one challenge: find product-market fit. Everything else is noise. If you're at a startup in this stage, the product strategy is essentially the company strategy. (This doesn't apply if you're doing a 0-1 product within an existing business.)

"Hold everything lightly" means treating every element of your strategy as a hypothesis to test, not a position to defend. Your thesis and approach are guesses, and your bets are fast experiments rather than quarterly initiatives. Defensibility in particular comes later. There's no point in building moats around a castle nobody wants.

"Run faster cycles" means don't run quarterly cycles, run 2-6 week cycles on all these hypotheses. The thesis will probably pivot multiple times before it stabilizes.

If you're exploring wildly different directions—whether in pre-PMF exploration or a pivot—make each direction its own theme and use small exploratory bets to test the value thesis for each. The strategy cycle becomes your learning loop. Once one direction solidifies, zoom in and run the full process within it. From there, it's back to normal.

The big trap is premature scaling. Your stance here is 100% offense: all energy goes toward traction. No platform work, no scaling, no operational excellence until you have clear evidence of PMF.