I'm not entirely convinced she did have a plan, to be honest. She had strong beliefs and wasn't afraid to follow her intuition when a large part of the country disagreed with her, but the popular appeal of policies like the "right-to-buy" were more or less a side-effect and her most controversial policy stance on disinflation was so comprehensively reversed under her second Chancellor Lawson that inflation (and interest rates) were approaching the same levels towards the end of her reign as it reached at the beginning. And of course the biggest boon to her political career was Argentina invading. Other policies like the Community Charge were an unmitigated disaster.

Overall, the big change with modern politicians isn't so much that she had a plan as her willingness to take radical actions that weren't part of the plan or some near-consensus view