"Present Forward" (also called "small-s strategy") is Chandra Janakiraman's operator's playbook for building a problem-focused product strategy with a roughly two-year horizon, run end-to-end in 8-12 weeks. It is the shorter, more frequent counterpart to "Future Backward" (Big S), a longer aspirational process for 5-10 year visions.
The premise motivating the whole playbook: Janakiraman rejects the idea of an innate "strategy gene" — "it was almost as if there was a strategy Gene you needed to be born with to be good at it" — and treats strategy as a learnable, repeatable procedure, provided the team follows the steps and inputs faithfully: "the output is determined by the quality of your input."
The five phases:
The structural bet: alignment is a byproduct of how the strategy is built (cross-functional co-creation, staged socialization) rather than something bolted on afterward with a persuasive deck.
The ~4-week Preparation phase is staffed by splitting six parallel research streams across the Strategy Working Group (Cross-Functional Strategy Co-Creation Team), one per member, each due on a roughly four-week deadline: behavioral-data meta-analysis, UXR insight meta-analysis, leadership interviews, competitive-stack analysis, adjacent-roadmap review, and direct user observation for empathy. Results roll up into one shared "comprehensive preparation readout" deck that grounds the subsequent Strategy Sprint. See Mistaking a Roadmap for a Strategy for what Chandra deliberately keeps out of this phase (resourcing, roadmap content) so the working group stays focused on problem framing rather than allocation.
The core decision-making phase is a 3-5 day Strategy Sprint, described as the heart of the process. Day 1 is a shared-context 'share-out' where the working group aligns on the same base data and interview findings before any decision-making begins. Day 2 is where the actual strategic choice gets made — see Strategy Sprint Day 2: Problem Clustering, Reframing, and Pillar Ranking for the clustering-to-ranking mechanics. Blocking dedicated, synchronous days for this — rather than spreading it across async work — is treated as load-bearing for the alignment the process is designed to produce.
The framework also draws on the Playing to Win Framework as a cross-check that the resulting written strategy answers all five of its cascading questions.
Leaders usually carry unshared 'pet ideas' about strategy — opinions they're shy to surface for fear of coming across as micromanaging. Directly asking them removes the mystery, and is framed as a strength move for whoever is running the process rather than a weakness signal or deference to authority.
Resourcing questions — what the org can afford to build — are deliberately excluded from the strategy phase itself. Conflating 'what can we afford to build' with 'what matters most' is treated as a category error; resourcing belongs downstream, at the roadmap stage, once strategy has already chosen the pillars.