The product strategy advice the most experts agree on: bet on strong long-term trends, and move early when technology shifts your market. 11 experts say it, from Aaron Levie in 2017 to Bill Gurley in 2025. We read 239 product strategy quotes from 64 experts, each from a dated recording, and sorted them into 20 pieces of advice. 19 were said before 2024 and again in 2025 or later, by at least two people. None shows up only from 2025 on.
Questions
104
Quotes
239
Experts
64
Recorded
2011–2026
What founders ask
We sorted 52,235 comments from three founder YouTube channels into the 22 founder problems. 104 of the 3,016 founder questions were about product strategy (3.5%), rank 12 of 22. 79 came from Alex Hormozi's audience.
“I'm 41 minutes in, and I am very disappointed. Why focus on the orgs he worked in, and not ask about how he thinks about building products that customers will.pay.for, what are his key questions, etc. If he was to.work for a brand new company, how would he go about building killer features.”
“Question: Can you explain where the line is between selling the accessories to go with ‘Susie's running shoes’ and falling into a Woman in the Red Dress trap? Like, where does expanding product offerings start to dip into accidentally getting into a diff business?”
“Intresting to know how the short term lift might not have any impact in the longterm but the question is how to actually strategize for longterm when short term lifts can be entirely relied on. Also in this world where AI is changing the way businesses are done so it makes it difficult to plan for something for 20 years now”
“A question I always wanted to ask people like Tony is - how do you reconcile ‘building for pain points’ and creatively imagining what the next device would look like grounded in technological evolution (eg ‘we will still need a screen!’), but without the context of pain point and people needs.”
Said by at least two experts, at least once before 2024 and again in 2025 or later. The first one has the most experts behind it. The others follow in the same order. Each shows an early and a recent quote, from two different people where the data allows.
Bet on strong long-term trends, and move early when technology shifts your market.
11 experts
· 22 quotes
· 2017 to 2026
20112026
“always sort of look for these changing technology factors because any Market that has a a significant change”
Quoted: Aaron Levie, Alex Rampell, Andrew Chen, Andy Grove, Bill Gurley, Brad Jacobs, Ethan Smith, Jason Lemkin, Jeff Jordan, Rory O'Driscoll, and Shaan Puri.
Look for markets where current products frustrate, overcharge or ignore customers.
10 experts
· 12 quotes
· 2017 to 2026
20112026
“you want your technology to work across all of the platforms so that way you can work with so many different kinds”
New advice is said by at least two experts, every time in 2025 or later.
No advice meets that bar this quarter.
How the questions moved
Product strategy's share of all founder questions in each half-year, with a 95% range.
H2 20233.8%
H1 20243.1%
H2 20242.9%
H1 20254.3%
H2 20254.5%
H1 20264.9%
H2 2026 (to Sep)1.7%
Dark bar: share of founder questions. Light band: 95% range.
The share was highest in H1 2026 (4.9%, 17 questions) and lowest in H2 2026 (to Sep) (1.7%, 2 of 117). The ranges overlap, so the change may be chance.
Where experts disagree
Two named experts give opposite product strategy advice in 5 places. Each split comes from a Gavel framework page.
All splits
describes a model where teams are given problems, not features, and anyone in the building can run discovery and land on something that works for the customer and the business. Installing the titles and the ceremonies without that is why most adoptions change nothing.
is describing a company that has none of that yet: ship the jankiest version, filter a hundred curious people down to the five or six with a hair-on-fire problem, and let their reaction decide what is real. Discovery at that stage is the founder and five users, not a capability you distribute.
assumes you will have rivals and tells you how to beat them. Diagnose the crux, concentrate force at the decisive point, and apply a named source of power such as leverage or focus. Competition is the terrain, not a mistake.
calls competition a loser's game. Profits get bid away in a crowded market and companies converge on each other, so the real move is to build something new enough that nobody is standing there to fight.
ran the test and left. Intel pioneered semiconductor memory, and when Japanese manufacturers became a 10x force in it, Grove exited the business the company had invented. A real inflection point does not respect what you are known for.
found the opposite pattern in the companies that made the leap. They picked the one intersection of what they could be best in the world at, what drove the economics and what they cared about, then said no to everything outside it for decades.
diagnoses strategy by walking the organization and asking every team what they are building and why. Convergent answers that trace up to a business metric mean the strategy was deployed; scattered answers mean it never left the slide. She runs the same probe on the vision, and a statement nobody can elaborate on is a tagline.
would call a company that recites one story aligned but not strategic. His four hallmarks of bad strategy include fluff and goals mistaken for a plan, and his heuristic is to strip the buzzwords and see whether anything substantive remains. On that reading a well-cascaded slogan is the more dangerous case, because the alignment makes it look solved.
Advice that one expert gives, or that has no quote from before 2024 yet. Not counted above.
Build AI products for what models will do in a few months, not only today.
Too soon to call
· Amjad Masad, Ian Silber, Jenny Wen, and Tara Seshan
· 6 quotes, 2024–2026
Method
Quotes: 239 verified quotes from Gavel's expert cards tagged with product strategy. Each quote was checked word for word against the recording, and each card links to the moment it was said. 64 people are quoted.
Dates: a quote is dated by its recording's upload date on YouTube. An old talk uploaded late counts from the upload. 68 quotes are from before 2024 and 129 from 2025 or later.
Advice: we read every quote and wrote 20 short statements of advice. A classifier (Jev) then placed each quote under one statement, or under none. It agreed with our own reading on 200 of 239 quotes. 177 quotes landed under a statement.
Quotes shown: for each piece of advice we show quotes where the classifier and our own reading agree. We skip a quote that is too short to state the advice on its own. It still counts.
Time-tested: at least two experts, with one quote from before 2024 and one from 2025 or later. New: at least two experts, with every quote from 2025 or later. Both cut-off years move forward when a new year starts.
Questions: 52,235 comments from a16z, Alex Hormozi and Lenny's Podcast, from the second half of 2023 to September 2026. A classifier (Jev) marked which ones ask for help and sorted those into the 22 founder problems. The ranges are 95% Wilson intervals.
Limits: the quote mix follows which recordings Gavel holds, and 129 of 239 quotes are from 2025 or later. Advice can look new only because older recordings of it are missing. Most questions come from one channel's audience.
Refresh: every quarter we add new quotes and questions and rerun the counts. This page is as of Q3 2026. Next refresh: January 2027.
Cite
Cite as: Arun Agrahri, “Product strategy advice: what has held and what changed,” Gavel, as of Q3 2026, https://usegavel.com/research/what-founders-ask/product-strategy
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