A political failure pattern in which leaders hire an outside firm to produce the company's Product Strategy rather than building the internal capability to do it themselves. The appeal is asymmetric political cover: if the outsourced strategy works, the leader who hired the firm can claim credit for the decision; if it fails, the blame lands on the consultants rather than on internal leadership.
This is a symptom, not a strategy problem per se — it signals that the organization has not built internal strategic muscle (the ability to gather evidence, make the tradeoffs, and write the 'why' down — see Amazon's Six-Page Narrative). The fix is to shift ownership of strategy-making back to the internal product leader, even if that's slower or messier than commissioning an outside deck.
Outsourcing strategy to a consulting firm functions as a political hedge for leadership: credit is claimed internally if the strategy works, and the outside firm is blamed if it doesn't. This asymmetric incentive is a large part of why the practice persists even when it produces worse strategy than doing the thinking in-house — see Strategy Penetration Test for why outsourced strategy also tends to fail to propagate through the org.
Cagan argues the usual finance-driven case for outsourcing engineering (loaded cost per developer) misses that the engineer's role itself is different in a product-model company: engineers there are expected to contribute to discovery and problem-framing, not just implement specs handed to them. Comparing costs per developer treats the role as fungible labor, which is only true in the roadmap/feature-factory model. This is a root-cause explanation, not just a caution: outsourcing doesn't merely raise coordination costs, it removes the role the product model actually needs filled. Related to the Waterfall Handoff pattern in Product-Model Transformation Anti-Patterns (Taxonomy), since an outsourced engineering org is structurally set up to only ever receive finished specs.