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
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?
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
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…
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….
Notas do Editor
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.