“I gotta get back to work,” I say.
“Oh, you’re going to write another Notion doc?” someone on the growth team smirks. 🤦‍♂️

Most strategy documents are beautifully written lies.
They make the future sound deterministic: if we do X, then Y will happen.
But the world isn’t deterministic, it’s probabilistic.

Still, humans crave determinism. We want to believe that cause and effect are linear, that there’s a map, that someone is steering the ship.

That’s why strategy documents exist. Alignment.

The Real Function of Strategy Docs

A strategy document exists to manufacture perceived clarity.

Because people don’t move faster when they have perfect data, they move faster when they feel sure enough. Perceived determinism gives courage.

A good strategy doc is a narrative compression layer.

It takes thousands of inputs - dashboards, feedback loops, chaos - and distills them into a few shared heuristics the team can act on.

Even if those heuristics aren’t perfectly true, they’re functionally useful.

The Key Outputs of Strategy

A strategy document should achieve the following:

1. Creates constraint → makes it easier to say no.

   EG: We are focusing on increasing Contribution Margin

2. Creates conviction → motivates teams around an objective

   EG: We need hit $XM revenue as it helps us unlock the next stage of funding

3. Creates cohesion → allows independent teams to work together without waiting for permission

   EG: Jack is focused on paid ads, Amada is focused on finding creators to support this.

The test is simple: If you disappeared for 30 days, would the team still make the same trade-offs you would?

If not, the strategy isn’t clear enough.

The Half Life of Clarity

Every strategy decays. New data appears, competitors shift, people forget.

Think of clarity like radioactive material, it has a half-life. After about three months, the energy that made it powerful starts to fade.

That’s why rewriting isn’t failure. It’s maintenance.

Treat strategy like software:

• Minor patches: monthly → adjust bets or focus areas.

• Major releases: quarterly → reframe core priorities.

• Refactor: annually → test whether the logic itself still holds.

Strategy with Scale

At small scale: “Do this.”

At medium scale: “Prioritize anything that moves this metric.”

At large scale: “Here’s how to think about trade-offs.”

That’s the evolution from directive clarity → heuristic clarity → principle clarity.
You stop making decisions for people and start teaching them how to decide.

As you scale, your job isn’t to make more decisions. It’s to make better decision-makers.

Closing Thoughts

A strategy document is a temporary operating system for collective cognition.

It’s not the truth, it’s the best current version of your shared delusion.

You’ll update it, break it, rewrite it again.

That’s the point.

Until next time,

Ajay

🧠 Ajay’s Resource Bank

A few tools and collections I’ve built (or obsessively curated) over the years:

• 100+ Mental Models
  Mental shortcuts and thinking tools I’ve refined over the past decade. These have evolved as I’ve gained experience — pruned, updated, and battle-tested.

• 100+ Questions
  If you want better answers, ask better questions. These are the ones I keep returning to — for strategy, reflection, and unlocking stuck conversations.

• Startup OS
  A lightweight operating system I built for running startups. I’m currently adapting it for growth teams as I scale Superpower — thinking about publishing it soon.

• Remote Games & Activities
  Fun team-building exercises and games (many made in Canva) that actually work. Good for offsites, Zoom fatigue, or breaking the ice with distributed teams.

✅ Ajay’s “would recommend” List

These are tools and services I use personally and professionally — and recommend without hesitation:

• Athyna – Offshore Hiring Done Right
  I personally have worked with assistants overseas and built offshore teams. Most people get this wrong by assuming you have to go the lowest cost for automated work. Try hiring high quality, strategic people for a fraction of the cost instead.

• Superpower – It starts with a 100+ lab tests
  I joined Superpower as Head of Growth, but I originally came on to fix my health. In return, I got a full diagnostic panel, a tailored action plan, and ongoing support that finally gave me clarity after years of flying blind.