The Strategy Test

A good way to find out whether a strategy is clear is when teams have to make a decision. Ask a few people in the business what matters more right now and you can get completely different answers.

That's when you find the strategy document either doesn't exist, was written a couple of years ago or in some cases, keeps getting longer and longer. Most of the time, the choices haven't been made yet.

I've seen strategy decks where growth is important, retention is important, enterprise is important and paying down technical debt is also important. And the most recent big customer request, you guessed it...important too.

The problem is they don't all matter equally and they don't cost the same amount of time or effort either. Eventually someone has to decide what matters more.

Say a large customer asks for something that could help close a deal. Engineering says it will take 6 weeks. At the same time, there is a product problem that has been sitting there for 3 months.

In a lot of businesses, the team goes back to the founder or CEO and asks them to make the call.

Now the CEO has to context-switch, zoom into the details and try to get up to speed as quickly as possible to unblock the team. You can do that in a smaller company but the larger the company gets, the harder it becomes. Eventually it becomes impossible for the CEO to be across all these decisions.

The strategy should give the team enough direction to work out which option matters more without going back to the CEO every time. It doesn't need to cover every possible decision. It needs to stop most of these trade-offs from travelling all the way back up the organisation.

One test I like is asking a few people separately: "What is the company trying to win at right now?"

If the answers are very different or they start with "It depends" adding another slide to the strategy document won't help.

You've got to go back to the choices.

Even a complicated business can still have a clear strategy. In fact, the more complicated the business gets, the more important it is that people know what matters.