Strategy: What’s in it, and what it enables
Strategy is a clear articulation of your situation, your goals, and a pathway to achieve them. It guides decision-making across Sales, Product, Technology, and the broader business.
Forming a strategy allows your organisation to:
Articulate the landscape, and define key areas of focus
Define who the organisation wants to be including differentiators and ideal customers
Define specific, measurable goals
Prioritise capabilities required to reach those goals
Becomes a single source of truth, and a tool for communicating broadly
Becomes the backbone for decision making organization wide
Key factors for ensuring your strategy is successful:
Communicated
Documented
Actionable
Tied to metrics
Accountable
Your strategy must be well communicated to ensure all teams are engaged with the broader reasons (the why) of the activities they are responsible for. Proper communication also ensures the strategy can be followed and executed correctly.
Each team, each individual, must be crystal clear about how their work specifically relates to the overall organisation, and how it will help to achieve the goals. Without clarity teams are at risk of investing energy into solving the wrong problems, delivering wrong solutions, and worse - low retention.
Your strategy must be well Documented to reduce misunderstandings, provide practical utility, and consistency between teams, and most of all it must be accessible.
Good-practice recommends a single, central location for documents that are accessible to all by default. Without a clear and accessible reference, teams must rely on hearsay, memory, and their own conversations which will vary.
Your strategy must be Actionable to ensure outcomes are actually achieved.
The work of linking an aspirational vision to clear and coherent actions is the job of leadership, and must not be left to the teams or it begins to invite inconsistencies. This process will include work to define required capabilities as well as when outcomes must be delivered.
Your strategy must be tied to Metrics that provide objective measures of success for the organisation. Metrics also provide a way to define and mitigate delivery risks.
By developing meaningful metrics connected to the strategy early in the process it allows you to review and course-correct early and often. You may even choose to automate your metrics collection and presentation ensuring consistency and regularity of your system feedback.
A strategy is only successful when it holds people Accountable to outcomes. A strategy, just like teams, is effective because it’s a range of different capabilities with different outcomes that are achieved in harmony. By allocating clear ownership for various outcomes, deliverables, and timelines, it provides clarity for their work, and for their teams.
This kind of specificity (with high visibility) also ensures each individual can see how their work and the work of others contributes to the overall strategy. Reducing gaps and overlaps in the organisation.
Accountability to outcomes (rather than tactical solutions) also provides freedom to deliver outcomes in new and efficient ways.
Common challenges in Strategy:
Some key common challenges that can occur are:
Avoidance of responsibility where people are concerned about their bonuses and KPIs being affected. Remedy: High alignment between personal and organisational KPIs.
Articulating the work to be done in order to achieve your vision. Deciding a future stage is often where the work ends, but figuring out the path to get there is where the real work happens. Remedy: A focus on facilitation of that process helps get beyond the superficial and the comfortable.
Tracking delivery and timelines with respect to a market goal, upcoming competitor announcement or spend of internal budgets. It is common that deliverables in a strategy are projects or programs of work within themselves. Having metrics and reporting in place, and potentially a project manager or PMO setup to assist in managing this at the day to day level helps bring it all together.
Three key takeaways
Do we have a documented, actionable strategy?
Is the governance and support structures in place to keep us on track?
Does everyone know about and understand their role in the strategy?
