Ask HN: Improving at strategic thinking when shipping projects?

A lot of times, I notice that when working with a friend on projects--my friend will sit down and think hard about the project, and then shift the project in some concrete, important way.

I'm good at executing, continuing to do the current thing faster, but I rarely end up shifting the direction of the project.

I want to get better at this skill of strategic thinking. Yet, I'm not sure how. To get better at programming, you can write more code. But, I'm not sure what to do here. Are there any good books to read, practices to follow?

So far, I've come up with always thinking about what the user wants as a guiding principle, but I'm not sure if there are structured frameworks / useful books for this type of thing.

So far, I've come up with this template that I plan to fill out once a day:

``` State of project (1 sentence): Top-1 Priority: What do customers want: How am I doing that: ```