How to "Be Strategic" When No One Will Teach You

Kate champions AI innovation at Knak, helping shape how marketing teams build and scale campaigns with intelligent tools. With over 15 years of experience across healthcare and high-growth technology, she’s built products that span regulated medical devices to modern MarTech platforms. Kate blends market insight, UX collaboration, and disciplined execution to deliver products that create measurable business and user impact.

I've spent two decades in product leadership at companies where strategic thinking wasn't optional - it was the difference between making your quarter and missing it. At Sony, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, HERE Technologies, and Universal Electronics, I learned that advancing in product management isn't about execution speed. It's about strategic capability.

The challenge is that strategic thinking is rarely taught systematically. Organizations promote you for good execution, tell you to "be more strategic," then expect you to figure out what that means on your own. I saw this pattern repeatedly as I moved from IC roles to leading product teams - and I see it now in the mid-level PMs I work with who feel stuck.

That's why I teach Strategy at University of Washington and Seattle University, and why I c

This Lightning Lesson is about showing you what that actually looks like. Not abstract framewor