Shreyas Doshi's diagnosis for the common PM complaint that "strategy and priorities keep changing every week": in his experience, at least 50% of the time this isn't genuine external chaos but a symptom that the PM (or group PM / PM director) never clarified their own strategy for their area and got explicit buy-in on it from upper management.
The mechanism: the whole point of a strategy is that it becomes a framework for future decisions — a new customer requirement gets evaluated against the agreed strategy ("is this actually important, is it not important, or is there new information that requires amending the strategy?", the same test as "Is This On Strategy?" Filter). Without that agreed framework in place, upper management has nothing to filter against. When something new lands on their desk, they don't have the time or context to derive a strategy for the PM themselves, so they default to reacting to whatever is newest — which reads, from the PM's seat, as arbitrary, ever-shifting priorities. What feels like chaos imposed on the PM is frequently self-inflicted: a vacuum the PM never filled. Compare Air Sandwich (Strategic Context Gap) and Outsourcing Strategy (Political Failure Mode), which describe related failures where strategic ownership or shared context between levels breaks down, and Product Strategy Excuses as Fear-Avoidance, a distinct failure mode where the block is fear of committing rather than a missed clarification step.
Doshi locates the fix mostly within the PM's own control: senior PMs, group PMs, and PM directors can prevent this class of thrash by doing the clarification-and-buy-in work themselves, rather than treating shifting priorities as something done to them.
In the remaining cases, three other situations apply, and none of them are a clarification failure: