An open, high-stakes question the plan is exposed to, raised under its objective or initiative.
A strategic question is an open, high-stakes question a plan is exposed to but has not yet answered — most often about coordination, ownership, or where a boundary falls. It is the live, unresolved question that sits between an assumptionAssumptionStrategyA belief taken as true that underpins a strategyView reference → and a decisionDecisionStrategyA recorded decision with context, rationale, and consequencesView reference →: not a premise the plan is built on, and not a choice already made, but the thing that must be answered for the plan to hold together.
The idea draws on the practice, common in strategy consulting and OKR planning, of separating what a team has decided from what it still must resolve. Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's Playing to Win frames strategy as a cascade of hard choices, each of which begins life as an open question. In everyday planning those questions accumulate in a document's RisksRiskComplianceA risk to the product or businessView reference → & Open Questions section.
The UPG lifts that section out of prose and into first-class nodes, so the open questions a plan carries are queryable and traceable to the objectiveObjectiveStrategyA strategic goal (OKR)View reference → or initiativeInitiativeStrategyA large coordinated effort to achieve a strategic goalView reference → that raised them — rather than being lost between planning cyclesPlanning CycleProduct SpecificationThe cadence axis of a plan: a dated interval a team plans in, be it a sprint, iteration, quarter, or program increment. cadence_kind classifies its granularity in methodology-neutral terms (period for a coarse container, iteration for an execution box, buffer for cooldown slack) while cadence_label keeps the team's own word for it. Cycles self-nest, so fine iterations sit inside a coarse period to form a granularity ladder. Objectives scope to a cycle and stories schedule into it by deliberate links, not containment: a story keeps its feature or epic parent.View reference →.
A strategic question is raised under the objective or initiative it hangs off, via objective_raises_strategic_question or initiative_raises_strategic_question. It stays open while the team gathers the context to answer it, and typically resolves into a decision once the answer is agreed.
The distinction from an assumption is deliberate and load-bearing. An assumption is a premise the plan rests on and resolves by being tested — it becomes a hypothesisHypothesisValidationA testable belief about a solutionView reference → and is validated by evidenceEvidenceValidationData supporting or refuting a hypothesisView reference →. A strategic question resolves by being answered, not tested: no experimentExperimentValidationA test designed to validate a hypothesisView reference → settles who owns a capabilityCapabilityStrategyAn ability that enables value deliveryView reference → across teams or where a boundary falls after a reorg.
Strategic questions hang off objectives and initiatives and usually terminate in a decision. Sitting alongside assumptions and decisions in the strategy region, they complete the picture of a plan's epistemic state: what it assumes, what it has decided, and what it still has to work out.
The common mistake is overloading assumption for open questions, which buries real unknowns inside a validation backlog where no test ever resolves them. The opposite error is recording a question that is already settled — that is a decision, not an open question. A strategic question earns its place only while it is genuinely unanswered.
High Important; address in the current sprint or planning cycle.
Type-specific fields on BaseNode
questionstringThe question itself. Primary content.
contextstringContext that surfaced the question: the reorg, the boundary, the unowned area.
resolutionstringThe answer, captured when the question moves to `resolved`.
priorityenumImportance to resolve relative to other open questions.
idstringrequiredUnique identifier (UUID)
typeNodeTyperequiredDiscriminator for the entity type
titlestringrequiredDisplay name
descriptionstringOptional detailed description
statusstringLifecycle status
tagsstring[]Freeform tags for filtering
2 phases, initial: open
2 edge types connected to this entity.
objective_raises_strategic_questioninitiative_raises_strategic_question