Martin Eriksson is the co-founder of Mind the Product, and co-author of the "Product Leadership" book. Martin has worked with a multitude of companies and has been heavily involved in the VC side of product management. These days, he's advising and coaching companies as well as trying to help us all make good decisions by writing a new book, "The Decision Stack", alongside its supporting website.

It's important for everyone in the company to be aligned on what's important, where the company's going and how they're going to get there. It's crucial for product and business leaders to do the work; both to create a vision and strategy and to share it with everyone who is needed to execute it.

Strategy is about making a coherent set of choices about how we're going to achieve our goals or make our company vision real. But, too many companies have fluffy, vague vision statements that could mean anything, and leaders who want to do everything all at once and don't want to make choices. This limits their ability to actually achieve anything.

A product strategy should support the company strategy and vision but, if there's no company strategy or vision, it's hard to create or defend such a strategy. On the other hand, you should still do the work to create one; either you'll get to go and execute the strategy or you'll have a straw man proposal to provoke further discussion around what the strategy should be.

Back in the day, a lot of product managers were expected to write specifications and get stuff done. They weren't even expected to be strategic, and many still aren't to this day. These skills are learnable; product people need to do their best to up their game, and company leaders need to get more comfortable both delegating responsibility and coaching their employees to have these skills.

"Founder mode" can be used to justify just about any behaviour, invites "hero syndrome" and can lead to micromanagement and single points of failure. Good leaders absolutely need to be deeply involved in their business, but this should not be at the expense of creating strong, aligned teams that can take many day-to-day decisions without them.

• You can catch up with Martin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson
• You can also check his website: https://martineriksson.com
• Keep up-to-date with The Decision Stack: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/