Make Your Strategic Framework Part Of The Everyday
This is part three of the LVT posts. If you read the previous posts in this series you will have learned how the tree works to identify valuable customer problems to solve and then to how to get buy-in for this through a series of strategic workshops across the company. And what’s more, you’ll have locked in this strategy with the rest of the exec team, and presented it at the start of the year all hands so other leaders in the business can build OKRs in their teams in support of the strategy.
If you are the CTPO/CPO or another leader in your org you now have a clear strategy for growth built around solving meaningful customer problems. You are doing this in a way that is so good people and businesses will pay you money for this solution. And everyone in the company is brought in and aligned.
Happy days!
Actually not! Now the real work begins! Even if the exec team all signed off on the strategy it won’t be long before new topics or market distractions need fielding. And out in the org OKRs quickly get forgotten as the day-to-day business swamps the teams until the first monthly review!
Here Is How To Avoid This..
Reshape Your Org So That It Directly Reflects The Strategy.
This may seem like a tonne of unnecessary complexity if the current marketing, sales and tech departments are all OK. But leaving the org as is a powerful sign that although there is a new strategy nothing has changed. And if nothing has changed its high odds that everyone will carry on doing what they did before.
Spend some time working with the rest of the exec team to create bet teams:
- Truly Cross-functional teams with clear leadership
- Team members are rewarded for contribution — even if not successful
- The expectation is everyone is 100% all in on the validation of the bet
The goal of these teams should be to validate and progress the bet. The note about rewarding the contribution not the outcome is important because if the evidence suggests the bet will not pay off, then the team needs to be incentivised to drop the bet and pick up a new one rather than keep pushing something that will not work
Lessons learned: Work extra hard with the rest of the exec team on this. They are all just people with their own distractions and goals so double down on listening and build true commitment. Also if there are bets not played, take time to speak 1:1 with the affected area. Explain the logic, it will help them stay focused and if they challenge the logic this helps everyone.
Booster: If you can invest in a programme of leadership away you spend time really getting to know each other, creating trust and providing to each other. Sounds like a luxury or possibly a waste of valuable time. But can accelerate the connections between people which means when something is agreed it really is committed to even when distractions come along or other topics. And when feedback or a pivot is needed everyone is coming from a place of shared understanding and mutual trust.
Hunt For Impact And Evidence All The Time
Use every lever there is to keep the spotlight on the strategy. To this end, the executive team should do these three things
- Hold the bet team to account
Do this at regular review meetings, provide support, making connections to other work but challenge the validation evidence. - Use the all-hands
Have the bet teams present their findings and progress to the whole company — nothing forces quality like presenting in front of everyone! And it’s about being visibly intentional about the strategy. If an all hands comes around and it is not about the strategy then the message is that the strategy is not important. If a month has passed and there are no meaningful updates to the strategy then it is back to the org design because there is a problem! - Hold each other to account
At the regular management meetings watch out for side topics that will take time away from the strategies. Use the management meetings to challenge these and set tests to check they are as important as they sound
And if they are that great, back to the exec management meeting and force the trade-off conversation to happen. Nothing kills pace and focus like too many things to do.
The above steps keep the bet team and the missions they are on highly visible and ensure evidence is gathered at every opportunity to show progress, and if there is no good evidence then it’s fine to review the choices.
Lessons Learned:
Numbers numbers: Invest the time to make sure the teams can quickly get to the numbers they need. This does not need to be a whole massive data pipeline and warehouse (although it is very good if you have this infrastructure) it can just be a core expectation of the product managers and all teams to know their numbers as well as they know their products and customers. Take the time to build KPI trees with and keep them under regular review. Use proxies if the real data is hard to get to but do the work to make tracking the progress of the bets easy.
Be Realistic About Everyday Business
It’s tempting to make everyone in the business all in on the bets. Why would you not? If you can genuinely do this then great, but you are just forcing it, you can quickly move to BS territory and people become cynical. Better to just call out that there are business basics still to do: Reception staff are not part of the mission team, they just need to keep welcoming guests, Some of the sales team might be on bet team to open a new market, but lots of the rest just need to keep selling. This is basic operations and it’s better to be upfront about this and be clear that keeping the lights on is also critically important — its the infrastructure that allows the company to focus on the missions.
Lessons learned:
Never underestimate the importance of solid strong leadership in this space. Keeping everything in good shape is critical to creating the space and time to go after big prizes. It can also be tempting to cut corners here — we don’t need this role, it can be covered by another, let’s cancel this service we’ll be alright. But before you know it your product team is covering the call center overspill and the CEO is assembling office furniture. Heroic, but totally wrong!
Look Out For Landmines And Unicorns
You know these will come along:
- “The weekend was a shit show, the platform was down, the call centre was overloaded our NPS score tanked — We have to stop everything and fix this, code red!”
- “I know we said we would focus on this market, but I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to close this global deal….”
- “We have had a look and it’s too hard to fix this product, we have to migrate to this enterprise SAAS product otherwise we cannot deliver on the mission.”
The list goes on and life would not be interesting if you did not hear these sentences fairly often! The strategies above should help mitigate the impact of these and provide good frameworks for trade-off decisions. Especially if the missions have strong outcomes and evidence is coming in that supports these outcomes. This means new opportunities can be compared with the current goals and evaluated as part of the next discovery cycle. If it’s an operational issue then perhaps it’s not an all-stop topic, just a re-prioritisation of the operational focus.
Lessons learned:
House fire or BBQ fire? Beware the operational noise, if your call centre collapses at the weekend it can seem like a disaster. But step back and look at the numbers: What % of customers impacted, what do order volumes look like, seasonal trends etc. Essentially you are looking for a signal to see if this is as big as it feels and create time for a proper root cause analysis
Microsoft will not save you! It is very tempting when looking at a hard problem, you just think “let’s just replace the whole thing with X solution” Beware this unicorn promise. Any software replacement is going to be a hard road of requirements, testing, configuration and customisation — yet there is always someone who says “but it’s easy, we had product X Where I last worked and it was awesome” Speaking from lived experience this is never true. This is not to say don’t replace ever. But just remember two things,
I) Know what you are getting into and set clear milestones, pick your vendor carefully and have you own insider
II) Make a proper root cause analysis of the problem, you may find the problem is not software but rather people and processes.
Where we play and where we don’t: A simple table stating what’s in the strategy and what is out can save a tonne of time. Take time to think about possible options and opportunities and explicitly call out the ones you agree not to do “Our focus is launching product X in market A, we will not launch in Markets B & C”, “Our business is B2B small business, so we will not chase 100+ people companies”. Being explicit is important — never assume! And remember these decisions are not forever but they should be for a meaningful time — 6 months or a year depending on company size and context
