I really love the product strategy direction Marty Cagan proposes in The Alternative to Roadmaps:

Ensure your product organization has a compelling product vision.  Ensure that each product team has a clearly defined, prioritized set of business objectives.  Make sure any commitments that must be made are high-integrity commitments.

This means that instead of prioritizing features (and the timing of those features), the leadership team prioritizes business objectives and problems to solve. There are two components to this:

First, the product vision is about setting OKRs—Objectives and Key Results (again—not features or solutions). From The Art of the OKR:

The objective sets a goal for a set period of time, usually a quarter. The key results tell you if the objective has been met by the end of the time.

Second, high-integrity commitments mean we give teams the time they need to figure out how long something will take. From Managing Commitments in an Agile Team:

So the way we manage commitments is with a little bit of give and take. We ask the executives and our other stakeholders to give us a little time in product discovery to investigate the necessary solution, and validate that solution with customers to ensure it has the necessary value and usability, with engineers to ensure its feasibility, and with our stakeholders to ensure it is viable for our business (they can support this solution).

Once we have come up with a solution that works for our business, we now can make an informed and high-confidence statement about when we could deliver this and what type of business results we can expect. We can also decide if it’s even worth doing.

One day when I grow up, this is how I will run my product team.