Are You Being Strategic or Just Tactical in Disguise?

Strategy or Tactics? A Quick Gut-Check for Busy Builders

Most teams move fast, talk louder than their calendars, and badge every decision as “strategic.” Speed feels good, and “strategy” sounds grown-up. The result is a blur of “initiatives” that last a quarter, retire quietly, and leave a litter of half-finished dashboards in their wake. After a few cycles you can’t tell whether you’re steering a ship or surfing debris.

Getting clear on the difference matters because strategy is what lets you throw work away without losing your way. Tactics are the work. When you mix them up, short-term moves masquerade as destiny, and every pivot feels like starting over.

What Real Strategy Looks Like

• Time horizon: Strategy: 12-36 months (or longer); Tactic: Days to quarters
• Purpose: Strategy defines the game you’re trying to win and how you’ll win it; Tactic executes a play given the current score
• Stability: Strategy endures market bumps and leadership changes; Tactic evolves or expires quickly
• Signals of success: Strategy leads to structural advantage; Tactic delivers features, metric lifts, or bug fixes
• Flexibility: Strategy allows many paths and course-corrections; Tactics are bound to a chosen path

Example:

• Strategy: Own the customer relationship by becoming the single source of product truth across all channels.
• Tactics: Spin up a POC headless CMS, launch a React-Native app, migrate the catalog to GraphQL…

Five Questions to Test Your Thinking

• Could it survive a bonfire of current deliverables? If you scrapped the whole backlog tomorrow, would the guiding idea still tell you what to build next? If yes, you have strategy.
• Does it force a trade-off? Real strategy makes you say no. If nothing is ruled out, you’re probably just listing hopes.
• Is the time horizon explicit? Saying “let’s migrate to microservices” without anchoring the value two years out is a tactical itch disguised as vision.
• Would your competitors care if they knew? A tactic can be copied tomorrow. A strategy would force them to reconsider their own plans.
• Can you write it on one slide? If the guiding idea itself needs a gantt chart, you’re still in tactical territory.

Red Flags of Faux Strategy

• Quarterly identity crisis. The “north star” changes every three months because last quarter’s metrics slipped.
• Tech first, value later. Declaring “We’re an AI company now” is a tool choice, not a strategic position.
• Budget whiplash. Funding swings wildly with no shared outcome measure.
• No sunset ceremony. When work is killed, no one knows if the idea failed or just the implementation. So the same mistakes repeat.

When Throwing Work Away is Healthy

Imagine you spent six months building an internal pricing engine. Mid-way, a SaaS vendor releases a stable, cheaper service that meets 90% of your needs. Under a solid strategy (“price differentiation through rapid experimentation”), you happily bin your code, buy the service, and redeploy engineers to revenue-generating tests. The short-term artifact dies, the long-term positional goal lives.

Contrast that with a company whose “strategy” changes to whatever the new CIO likes. First quarter: build in-house. Second: buy best-of-suite. Third: switch to open source for “cost control.” Engineers burn cycles migrating the same feature three times, learn nothing about customers, and still lack a durable advantage.

Practical Habits to Stay Strategic

• Write a “Stop-Doing List.” Revisit it every planning cycle. If something moves from “stop” to “start” without a real market shift, dig in.
• Tie funding to hypotheses, not projects. Fund “reduce fulfillment lead time by 50%” rather than “implement warehouse drones.”
• Draft an obituary for the idea. Name the evidence that would make you abandon the strategy. If that evidence doesn’t appear, don’t pivot.
• Separate review cadences. Strategy check-ins semi-annually; tactical retros bi-weekly. Don’t mix them.
• Celebrate course-corrections, not just completions. When a team kills work in favor of a better path, celebrate it as proof the strategy is alive.

Closing Thought: The Compass and the Map

Think of strategy as the compass: always pointing to true north. Tactics are the map routes you draw in pencil. Rivers flood, bridges close, and sometimes you wade across unexpected streams. With a reliable compass, redrawing the map is progress. Without it, you’re just spinning paper and calling it momentum.

Before your next “strategic initiative” hits the slides, pause and ask: If everything on this roadmap evaporated tonight, would I still know why we’re here and what bets matter? If the answer is yes, congratulations—you’re steering by strategy. If not, sharpen the compass before you lace up your sprint shoes.