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Strategy for practical people
- 1. The Magic of Strategy: A practical guide for practical people
- 2. “…” 2015: “It’s this” 2016: “No it isn’t”
- 3. What is strategy? 1. A long term plan 2. A guide for making decisions 3. A way to think about different markets 4. Something something business model 5. Some stuff we have to do, because it’s the strategy 6. The magic way everyone else is better than us 7. etc etc
- 4. Innovation is anything new that breaks trade offs and constraints. Strategy is about thinking that embraces your constraints. What is strategy?
- 5. • “Don’t be evil” • Launch a new app • £10m in revenue • Be the best X Not a strategy Values An Objective The vision Budget
- 6. Has to help you make trade-offs It has to help you answer hard questions It has to make difficult choices clearer The strategy…
- 7. For instance… • Should we build our own CMS/ad-server/log in • Should we partner with X/put all our content on Facebook/Apple News/sell through Amazon • Should we charge for X/be a subscription business • What are we going to do about customers doing less of X and more of Y?
- 8. Strategy is to business what architecture is to developers A structural, abstracted way of looking at problems, processes and products
- 9. Strategy is business storytelling A narrative approach to structural problems, and one that compresses complexity into a something readable
- 10. Strategy is an attempt to change your thinking The use of data and logic to clarify and perhaps persuade
- 11. Strategy is often a Powerpoint With terrible clipart!
- 12. A summary of what the problem is – how many people do we reach globally? How did we count? What strategy to make it grow? The data: who are these people? Where? How did they reach us? How do different facets of the data compare? The diagrams: are they clear? What commonalities do they show? What structures?
- 13. Story-telling: what gets pulled out of the data? Is it to be dramatic? Choices: are they helpful distinctions? Is there evidence you can’t have both? Assumptions about customers: is that what people really do? The asks: are they clear? Would your team like them answered?
- 14. 1 The data What does it really say? Is it sampled, industry-wide, or specific? Is it robust? 2 The questions it asks Are they clear? 4 The structure it proposes Do you understand it? 5 The story What is the narrative here? How to read (and write) a strategy 3 The diagrams Clip-art hell – but what do they reveal? 6 The choices it proposes Is it clear? 8 The assumptions People are not economics robots 7 The timelines Ho ho ho 9 The asks If answered, which teams are happy? What progress can be made? 10 The appendixes What didn’t fit? Why?
- 15. What to do when there is no Strategy
- 16. • Regular time, ideally at the start or end of the week • Try and understand the way they frame things • Find places to add your data and perspective – most strategy people enjoy finding more information • Ask them about the bits outside your domain, like pricing, market positioning – use it to pull as well as push • Gain insight into what the rest of the company, particularly senior stakeholders think – and worry – about • Read, read, read – blogs (Stratechery), HBR, business books (on Kindle, skim them) You need to work with Strategy
- 17. What to do when the Strategy is wrong
- 18. • Regular time, ideally at the start or end of the week • Try and understand the way they frame things • Find places to add your data and perspective – most strategy people enjoy finding more information • Ask about the bits outside your domain, like pricing, market positioning – use it to learn • Gain insight into what the rest of the company, particularly senior stakeholders think – and worry – about • Read, read, read – blogs (Stratechery), HBR, business books (on Kindle, skim them) You need to work with Strategy
- 19. 19 •Set the strategy team real problems you encounter •Challenge – especially the data (garbage in > garbage out) •Ask them to distill it to first principles When it’s wrong…
- 20. 20 Great strategy, crap company is not a thing that happens But remember….
- 21. 21 Strategy is as much an output of great product, strong culture, brilliant hiring and luck as it is a creator of those things. Just be great at what you do. But remember….
Editor's Notes
- I’ve worked at a range of traditional media companies, first as a journalist, but then I became a Product Manager, and now I’m a Head of Product. In terms of strategy, these are three sizes of company. Dennis was small, and we basically didn’t talk about strategy. It was not a word we knew. The Telegraph had a great Head of Strategy, and a lot of what’s in this talk I learned from him. We had one. We didn’t do it. People didn’t believe it was for us. At BBC News, it’s a huge company. The strategy has to answer these absolutely enormous, fundamental questions.
- Strategy has to help you make choices and help you price options. Should we go in FB IA, should we do an app, etc. Strategy has an opinion here. It should help you think through problems.
- Build vs buy is a classic strategic question because it’s about how we deploy our resources, and what do we want to be good at vs where do we just want to tick the boxes.