5 questions to help you build your strategy
Recently I wrote an article about the importance of strategic design and I wanted to follow up with a more practical post to help you start putting a strategy together.
Strategies are complex. Traditionally I have seen them as extremely long PowerPoint documents full of numbers and analysis of previous years. But the best strategies are those that are easy to understand and are implementable by every individual in the company, even if they play a small role.
Creating an easy to a simple but effective strategy is hard work. There are countless directions you can take your company/business unit/team and it is easy to list a bunch of goals, the hard part is being focused on where you want to go, setting a clear direction and mapping out how you’re going to get there.
Here are some questions that can help you get started:
1. What is your strategic goal?
This is the most important question and should be focused on what you want to accomplish and why. Be as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) as possible when setting your goal. I’m sure every company wants to double its profit, so don’t write obvious things like “be a market leader” or “increase revenue”. Define what winning looks like for your company, business unit or team.
2. What is your approach?
Think about is (and what isn’t) in scope for your strategy by considering these options:
Geographies: in which suburbs, regions or counties will you operate or sell to?
Customers: Who are the customers at the core of your strategy?
Channels: how will you reach your customers? For example, through intermediaries or directly? Face-to-face or online?
Offers: what experiences, services or products are you offering our customers?
Process: what will you need to do to bring the strategy to life? What processes exist already and what processes need to be created?
Organisation - who is going to do it? Will it be internal resources? Will you delegate to agencies? Or will you partner or acquire a third party?
3. How will you achieve your goal?
Think about what your competitive advantage is. It should align to your unique ability to deliver impact for your chosen customer segment. Is it driven by:
Price: is it a lower cost, or does it cost the same as competitors but it is cheaper to produce or is it a premium solution with lower volume but higher margin?
Differentiation: is what you’re offering (or plan on offering in the future) to customers distinctive in some way that creates more value for customers?
4. What capabilities do you need to win?
Based on your answers to questions 2 and 3, think about what capabilities your team requires to win. This could range from anything from customer service, software development, warehouse management, robotics and so on. It’s OK if your team doesn’t currently have these skills, this will help inform if you need to hire, acquire or partner with an external.
5. What systems do you need?
Imagine you have all the people you need with the right capabilities in place to execute your strategies. What management systems are required for them to do their job? Do they specific training, bits of software to do their job or an entirely different organisation structure? This stuff might seem obvious when you list capabilities, but it is still important to factor into the strategy, and your budget too.
These are lots of activities, methodologies and frameworks that can be used to help answer each of these questions, but these are just to help you get started. They should also help if you have been given a corporate strategy and asked to create a strategy for your team or product in response.
Remember that strategies require agility when implementing. For example, when starting this process you should pre-define your check-in points so that you can evaluate your execution and review any significant trend, event or technology that changes (COVID is a great example of this). It is good to have these check-ins pre-defined based on KPIs or time based so your team can focus 100% on execution.
Here is a Miro template you can use when workshopping your strategy with your team. If you have any feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear them. Thanks for reading!
Image Photo by Barn Images on Unsplash