Product Helmsmanship (P1): Balancing Strategy, Execution, and the Storms in Between
I call this balance Product Helmsmanship.
The Origin Story
When I first stepped into tech, I started from the lower decks. I began in execution, first as a developer writing code since I was 12, then as a Business Analyst turning requirements into documents and diagrams right after university, and later as a Project Manager focused on delivery.
The transition into Product Management felt natural, but in the early years my role often felt like translation, helping business leaders and technical teams understand one another, sometimes mapping business requirements to technical jargon and vice versa.
Over time, I realised Product Management is less about translating and more about helmsmanship (the action or skill of steering a ship or boat).
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What This Really Means
A good PM, like a skilled helmsman, does not simply sit at the wheel and do what they are told. They know when to change course with the wind, when to slow down in a storm, and when to hold steady on a path others may not yet see.
But here’s what most PM advice gets wrong: it assumes you should always be strategic OR always be tactical. Real helmsmanship is about constant recalibration between both.
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Recalibration Is the Default
Every new role, every project, every employer, and every wave of technology or market movement has forced me to rebalance between strategy and execution.
Sometimes I’ve had to lean into hands-on execution to get a product unstuck. Other times I’ve needed to step back, recalibrate, and focus on the bigger picture.
Like a helmsman reading the sea, Product Managers constantly adjust to shifting winds.
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A Real Example
Over my career, I’ve recalibrated countless times to fill whatever gap the product needed most. Here’s one of those moments:
A few years back, I joined a company to help with execution and meet high client demand for reporting. We had a financial solution rolled out across many small-to-medium clients. Same core platform, but different reporting needs.
Problem: every custom report request went into a queue, waited for weeks, and eventually the dev team built it and pushed it out to all clients. The backlog grew, delivery slowed, and frustration mounted on both sides.
Leadership thought the issue was execution speed. Their answer was to add another pair of hands, me, to talk to clients, design and document report structures, and hand them off to dev to speed up the process. Classic feature factory thinking.
The real problem: Jumping to solutions before understanding the root cause.
After working closely with both customers and dev team, it became clear the issue was not execution, it was strategy. Clients were not asking for custom reports because they needed something unique. They were asking because our core reporting functionality was broken.
Every report had to be created, maintained, tested, and fixed through every upgrade. A nightmare for the dev team, slowing them down.
Over the next six months, I worked with the team closely to build my vision of a self-service analytics and dashboard engine.
The impact was dramatic. We moved from unhappy customers and an exhausted dev team to a new upsell revenue stream. Customers could now create their own reports or request on-demand, fee-for-service reports, handled by a low-cost support team.
Since reports lived client-side in our engine, developers only had to test core backward compatibility. Dev team freed up to focus on more value added development.
That recalibration from execution to strategy completely changed the outcome.
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Why This Matters
Some PMs get stuck because they’re trying to be consistent. They know the tools and hard techniques really well, but think being strategic means always staying high-level, or being execution-focused means always being hands-on.
But real helmsmanship is about reading the situation and adjusting your approach. Sometimes the ship needs a steady hand on the wheel.
Sometimes it needs someone to climb the mast and look ahead. Sometimes it needs someone to get down into the engine room.
The skill isn’t in picking one approach; it’s in knowing when to switch.
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What’s Coming Next
This mindset shift changed everything about how I approach product work. But knowing you need to recalibrate and knowing WHEN to recalibrate are two different things.
Over the years, I’ve developed a simple framework, just three questions, that tells me exactly when it’s time to shift gears. It works whether you’re dealing with stakeholder misalignment, technical decisions, or market changes.
I’ll share that framework in my next post, along with the specific examples of how it guided some of my biggest product decisions.
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Your Turn At The Helm
For now, think about your current product challenges: Are you trying to solve a strategy problem with execution? Or an execution problem with more strategy?
Sometimes the answer isn’t working harder at your current approach ; it’s stepping back and asking whether you’re steering from the right position.
What’s your experience with this balance? Have you found yourself over-correcting in one direction or the other?
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Footnotes:
Why “Helmsmanship”
I’ll be honest, I know absolutely nothing about sailing a boat. I can barely manage a kayak without going in circles. But I am a Star Trek fan (yes, I’m one of those nerds who drops Star Trek references into everyday conversations).
Naturally, I wanted to borrow a phrase straight from the show.
The problem? It felt a bit too niche, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be running into copyright trouble. So instead, I borrowed the spirit of it and adapted it into “helmsmanship.”
Think of it as my way of sneaking in a Star Trek nod without making half the audience feel lost in space. :)
Product Helmsmanship Series:
This article is part of a series on “Product Helmsmanship” modified for Medium. In this series I explore PM craft of knowing when to switch between strategy, execution, and everything in between. In the future posts I will explore framework for recalibration, Decision framework for PMs and AI impact on product management.
Originally published here: https://medium.com/@alivahed/product-helmsmanship-balancing-strategy-execution-and-the-storms-in-between-10c911a3f801
⚓️Join me in this journey and share how you recalibrate when your product drifts off course
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