Product Answers #10: In which formats can we work on vision and strategy?
Working with a client that is growing slowly but steadily, the founders see the need to articulate their vision and strategy much more clearly. As more people join their company, they want to make sure that (1) everyone is inspired by the company's purpose and (2) the teams are as well aligned as they were when they were just a handful of people. They asked me what formats they should use when working on vision and strategy.
The vision is the purpose for which you have started an organisation. A target state in the future - usually 5 to 10 years away, depending on the industry. The strategy is the path to reach the target state. In the form of the key problems you need to solve along the way. Usually 2 to 5 years away.
We need to craft a vision and a strategy, communicate it and align it with reality as we move forward.
The most important thing in crafting a vision and strategy is to actually doing it. Too few companies have a coherent, inspiring and fact-based vision that aligns everyone to the big goal of the future. Use all the qualitative (anecdotes) and quantitative knowledge (data) you have. You should especially involve those people in your organisation who might have relevant insights. Once you have gathered all the relevant information, sit down as a leadership team and sort it out. This is not a 30-minute meeting over lunch. It will require a longer back and forth. You may even need to pause to gather more data. Ultimately, it is an educated guess about the future and the role you will play in shaping it. It should be (at least somewhat) realistic, but also ambitious. It is the job of the leadership team to define it and articulate it convincingly. In any case, the CEO must have a strong opinion on it and be present when the strategy is created. The strategy follows a similar approach, as it is the way to realise the vision. Don't save it for later, because one of the first questions you will be asked when talking about your vision is how you are going to achieve it.
Once you have defined a great vision and strategy, you need to communicate it. This is an ongoing task. If it is new, invite everyone and introduce it. Talk about the inspiring part and why you think this is a great goal. Everyone in your organisation needs to understand it and be able to relate to it. Give people the opportunity to critique (not in a public meeting, but in 1:1 conversations). Start every all-hands with the vision and the strategy behind it. Put them up on the wall and talk about them again and again. Repeat it in 1:1 conversations and let staff hear it as part of the recruitment process. Start the onboarding of new employees with the vision. Take every opportunity to repeat your vision and the strategy to achieve it.
Once you start working on solving the problems your strategy focuses on, you will gain new insights. Teams may discover a great opportunity, or you may encounter hurdles you didn't see before. Changing a vision or strategy is not necessarily a bad thing. However, if it happens regularly, you should review the facts on which you based your vision and strategy. In particular, the vision should remain stable over a longer period of time. It is important to make a change deliberately to avoid teams implicitly chasing new opportunities and everyone losing focus.
At the very least, you need to take time regularly to sit down as a leadership team and review your strategy and decide whether or not it needs to change. What I think works well is to have a quarterly meeting for a couple of hours to determine how far along you are in the key steps of your strategy, whether you need to add or change things, and to identify the next problem to focus on (for those thinking of OKRs now, OKRs is what follows after you have reviewed your strategy). Do not confuse this with a list of features. Strategy is about the problems you need to overcome to achieve your vision. A set of features (e.g. in the form of a roadmap) is a set of potential solutions to those problems. This is a different level - at least for those companies that believe that their product teams are the driving force in finding new solutions that others have not found.