David Bland has spent years teaching product teams to test their assumptions before they build. So I went on his podcast How I Tested That expecting to talk about product discovery.
We didn't, really. We talked about everything above it.
Because it turns out David and I share the same frustration. Teams have become very good at de-risking the thing directly in front of them. Assumption test, prototype, five customers, then a long argument about sample sizes. But go up a layer or two and the discipline vanishes. The vision, the strategy, the objectives, the one-pager going to the board: all of it rests on assumptions that nobody wrote down, let alone tested. David's phrase for it was "assumptions all the way down", and he's been pushing the same tools at business artefacts for a while now. I've been pushing them up the Decision Stack, most recently in Coherent and wrong, the first in a series on the assumptions your strategy is standing on. Same fight, different ends of the building.
So that's most of what we talked about. Why speed isn't the same as velocity, and why neither is the same as momentum. Why empowered teams still need to know where the business is going (empowerment without direction isn't empowerment, it's abandonment). And what AI actually changes here. Building is drastically faster and cheaper than it was two years ago. But that only removes one risk, feasibility. Whether anyone wants it, whether it makes money, and whether you should be building it at all are exactly as hard as they were.
Have a listen, and then tell me which assumption your strategy is standing on:
Takeaways
- Speed without direction is not enough. Teams can build, ship, and test faster than ever, but without strategic alignment they may simply move in different directions more quickly. Martin frames this as the difference between speed, velocity, and organizational momentum.
- Empowered teams still need strategic context. Autonomy works best when teams understand where the business is going, how it plans to get there, what matters now, and how their work connects to those choices.
- Assumptions exist at every layer of the organization. They are not limited to products or experiments. Vision, strategy, objectives, opportunities, and execution all rest on assumptions that can become dangerous when they remain unspoken.
- Strategy is a series of connected choices. The value of a decision stack is not just having vision, strategy, objectives, opportunities, and principles—it is making sure those decisions connect from the top down and can be traced back from everyday work.
- Use testing and discovery on strategic decisions, not only product decisions. Teams have become good at de-risking what is directly in front of them, but the same tools can be applied to bigger bets around strategy, markets, and the future of the business.
- Not every assumption can be eliminated, but it should be named. At the strategy and vision level, some choices will always remain bets on the future. Making those assumptions explicit allows leaders and boards to monitor when conditions change and decide whether the risk is still acceptable.
- AI changes the economics of building, not the fundamentals of product. Faster and cheaper delivery reduces feasibility risk, but teams still need to understand customer value, business value, usability, distribution, pricing, and whether something should be built at all.
