About Strategy Canon
Strategy Canon is a map of business strategy ideas, paired with case studies that test those ideas against real companies. I’m Dave Whittemore, and I built it.
Who I am
I’ve built and led products since 2008, mostly at early-stage companies. I was the first product manager at OnDeck Capital and grew the revenue of the products I owned more than tenfold before its IPO. I co-founded Clothes Horse, which sold to Fits.Me, and later led product at Lenda and at Thinkful, which Chegg acquired. In 2019 I founded Practica, a human and AI coaching platform that BetterUp bought in 2024. At BetterUp I led Grow, its AI coaching product, which became the fastest-growing product in the company’s history.
Strategy decisions I’ve had to make
Several ideas on the map are ones I’ve worked through from the inside. At Practica we moved the company from human coaching to AI soon after ChatGPT launched. For Grow, I ran a design partner program that went from first pitch to a shipped product in a few months, which is Customer Discovery with real deadlines, and helped close large enterprise deals with Unilever, EY and Cisco. At Thinkful I led the integration of a company we had acquired and kept its revenue intact, the acquirer’s side of M&A Strategy.
Why strategy
At every one of those companies, the decisions that mattered most were strategic: which customers to serve first, what to build and what to leave out, how to sell it, and what would keep a larger competitor from copying it. A team can execute well and still lose because it picked the wrong customer or the wrong way to reach them. I think strategy is one of the most important parts of founding a company and of leading product, and it’s the part of the work I enjoy most.
What frustrated me is how scattered the thinking is. Porter, Helmer, Christensen, Martin and others often describe the same mechanism under different names, and most writing about successful companies explains the outcome without saying which choice made the difference. I wanted one place that lines the ideas up and then checks them against what companies did.
Who it’s for
I built this for founders, product leaders, and investors facing a real strategic decision. The map gives each concept one page, lists which authors name it and what they call it, and shows how a choice at one layer limits the choices below it. The case studies take specific companies, name the choices that helped them win, and cite the sources for each claim. If you’re weighing a decision, start from the concept and follow it into the companies where it made a difference.
How the case studies are researched
Each case study is built from public sources: company filings, founder interviews and talks, investor memos and press coverage from the time. Every claim links to the source it rests on, and the text of each source is saved when it’s first read, so a claim can be checked again later against the same words.
A company only gets a strategy tag, such as Vertical Specialization or Switching Costs, when its evidence passes a written test for that concept. Those tests are strict on purpose. Research is dated, and when a case study is rewritten the earlier version is kept rather than edited after the fact. Examples on the concept pages are illustrations, and the case studies are where the evidence lives.
Contact and corrections
If you think a case study gets something wrong, or you have a source I should read, message me on LinkedIn. I’d rather fix a claim than defend it.
Last updated .
Why this structure
Three decisions shape the map, each made in response to a specific problem with an earlier version.
1. Concepts, not frameworks
Early drafts had entries called "Five Forces" and "Aggregation Theory". That is an index of books, not a map of ideas — and it hides the most useful fact in the field, which is that the canon keeps re-discovering the same mechanisms under different names. Scale economies appear in Porter (entry barrier), Helmer (Power #1), Neumann (returns to scale) and NFX (a defensibility); switching costs in all four plus Christensen. So every framework is decomposed into its constituent concepts, and each concept page carries a "Who names it" table.
2. Layers ordered by constraint — and the process follows the same order
Layers are ordered by how much each dictates the ones beneath it. Arena records conditions in a named industry at the business’s entry, with separately dated reassessments when justified. Intent explains the company’s response and chosen role in the value chain. Intent narrows which Powers are reachable. The target Power dictates what to build and how to sell (Helmer: strategy is "a route to continuing Power"). Product Strategy sets what Go-to-Market Strategy can do. The Operating Model is the most adjustable layer and constrains nothing above it. The strategy process — diagnose, choose, target, build, sell, sustain — is the same sequence, so the Strategy Choice Cascade and Rumelt's kernel are shown as framings of each step rather than as a separate track. Adding the sixth layer is what made the alignment exact: Martin's fifth question (management systems) had nowhere to live in a five-layer spine.
This order organizes strategic constraints; it is not a company’s chronology. Customer Discovery can revise the chosen market and product before a moat exists. Early customer value and later defensibility need separate explanations.
3. Groups within layers
Each layer groups concepts by mechanism. Defensibility now uses foundations plus four families adapted from Neumann’s taxonomy: state protection and resource control, special know-how, returns to scale, and system rigidity. Within larger families, subgroups distinguish mechanisms that need different evidence. For example: Returns to scale → Cost & risk economies → Risk pooling. That is at most three levels within Defensibility: family, optional subgroup, concept. Finer forms stay inside concept pages.
This is a map across authors, not a claim that their categories are identical. Process power sits with know-how; network effects with scale; counter-positioning with incumbent constraints. Demand ownership combines several mechanisms and is placed beside networks. Cornered resource remains an umbrella concept linked to its specific sources. These placements are editorial choices, and cross-links preserve the overlaps. The expanded pages add diagnostic questions and illustrative scenarios rather than assuming that naming a mechanism proves a moat.
What still overlaps, on purpose
Two concepts appear at two layers under similar names: integration vs. modularity (the industry's state in Arena; the firm's choice in Product) and threat of entry (an industry fact in Arena; the menu of Powers in Defensibility). Those are the same object seen at two points in the causal chain, and each page links to its twin. Platform Strategy and Aggregator Strategy in Intent describe the company’s chosen role in the value chain. Demand aggregation is merged into Aggregator Strategy; enabling industry conditions belong in a separately scoped Arena assessment. Demand ownership in Defensibility separately tests whether the approach produces durable control of customer demand.