There are loads of great resources out there about strategy which I will continue to link below. The added voiceover I would give on the topic is that a lot about strategy is dependent on stage of the company. For very early stage startups pre-PMF (product market fit) then strategy is often just a hypothesis or set of hypotheses, coupled with an ability to get shit done quickly to either prove or disprove those hypotheses. It is often chaos by design. Once the company begins to mature, that’s when strategy starts to take on more structure.
The common anti-patterns I see:
- Creating too rigid a strategy in the early stages - the old saying that you should be stubborn on vision but flexible on details rings true. In the early days of the company the new learnings are endless and uncertainty is high, so having a strategy that doesn’t factor this in makes little sense.
- Failing to mature the strategy as the company enters a new stage - once the company has established initial PMF and scales past a certain point then there’s a risk of continuing to operate in the same way. Just because it’s served the company well up until that point, doesn’t mean it’s what the company needs moving forward. This is typically the stage where lots of new folks join, new teams are spun up, so a lack of strategy destroys alignment and creates a high decision-making burden (if the strategy is not well known or understood then people go off in different directions and there end up being way more decisions that will need to be agonised over)
- Not creating the company strategy first - the number of times I’ve been asked to create the product strategy before we have a clear company strategy! Company strategy needs to come first and it needs to be the skeleton on which all lower level strategies are built.
- Different strategies created in isolation - often the fallout of the above. Different leaders or teams might go off to create their own strategy - product strategy, ops strategy, sales strategy etc. Without the clarity of a company strategy these inevitably go in different directions and the thrash caused when trying to reconcile them all is painful to say the least.
- Having a strategy that doesn’t actually make any choices - a good stress test of a strategy is whether or not, when you sense check the many varied priorities being discussed against it, does it actually provide clear guidance on what we’re saying no to. When a strategy is so vague as to allow everything to be justified as part of it then it becomes entirely meaningless.
- Calling the roadmap your strategy - roadmap is about action, but the strategy should link the actions of today to the vision of tomorrow
- Letting the strategy gather dust - a strategy is only really of value if it is meaningfully used to guide day-to-day action. If it just gathers dust without ever being spoken about then people will soon forget it. The best companies I’ve worked in and best leaders I’ve worked with have used every opportunity to restate the strategy
Company strategy resources
https://www.thedecisionstack.com/your-strategy-probably-sucks/
https://hbr.org/2017/11/many-strategies-fail-because-theyre-not-actually-strategies
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11721966
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuYlGRnC7J8&ab_channel=HarvardBusinessReview
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-perils-of-bad-strategy
Product strategy resources
https://www.hustlebadger.com/what-do-product-teams-do/how-to-write-a-great-product-strategy/