Guest: Martin Eriksson is the co-founder of Mind the Product, co-author of Product Leadership, and a former product partner at EQT Ventures where he worked with portfolio companies across Europe and the US. His new book, The Decision Stack, is about the gap between strategy and execution that he has seen repeat itself across hundreds of product organisations. He has been building products since 1994.

What this episode is about:

Most product leaders are called in to fix the execution. Martin's argument is that execution is rarely the real problem. What is actually missing is shared context - a clear, living strategy that connects what is happening at the top to what teams are doing day to day.

In this conversation, Martin and Stephanie go deep on why strategy communication fails even when leaders do everything right, how to stop your CEO from overwriting priorities, and what AI actually changes for product leadership (hint: not what most people think).

Chapters

🔥 2:34 - The existential crisis every product leader knows. Why a pony farm in Cornwall was always more dream than plan.

🔥 3:41 - Being a leader means enabling teams to do great things. Why the aha moments shifted from shipping to watching people grow.

🔥 4:44 - Most product problems are shared context problems. What Martin kept finding when he was called in to "fix the product team."

🔥 7:29 - The biggest surprise about the strategy-execution gap. 95% of your team doesn't know what your strategy is. And yet exec teams assume the work is done the moment the deck is finished.

🔥 9:09 - How to properly communicate strategy. Co-creation, principles, and why once you are tired of repeating it, people are just starting to hear it.

🔥 12:13 - Strategy is a living document. How to handle the fact that strategy changes mid-communication and what to do when people notice.

🔥 13:29 - Strategy problems are people problems too. Why there is no perfect answer to communication, and why the burden we put on leaders is often too high.

🔥 16:26 - To build a great product is to say no to more than you say yes to. What separates high-performing product orgs from struggling ones comes down to one thing: focus.

🔥 18:11 - How to stop your CEO from overwriting your priorities. Evidence over opinion, the post-it wall, and "not yet" as an alternative to no.

🔥 21:29 - Why some leaders struggle to say no. Psychological safety, the cost of always saying yes, and why Stephanie never had this problem.

30:13 - Sometimes you just have to build what needs to get built. The Cazoo story and the difference between product as the thing you sell and product as an enabling function.

🔥 35:07 - AI's impact on product leadership. Why getting drawn into building with AI tools is the wrong move, and why strategic clarity matters more now than it ever did.

Links

Martin's book: The Decision Stack (available wherever great books are sold) 

Follow Martin on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/martineriksson

Connect with Stephanie Leue: LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/stephanie-leue