When do you call in the SWAT team?
A while back, I wrote a brief intro about the ambiguous world of business strategy to explain what Strategy does. Realistically, for a fast-growing company like Slack, there are always more projects happening across the organization than our 2 person team can take on. And, many of these projects should be (and often are) run by the capable functional teams and leaders that we’ve hired to grow the business.
So, how do teams decide when to pull in Strategy to support? What types of projects make sense?
Strategy Projects: Unusual and Difficult
“S.W.A.T. is a small group of highly disciplined officers utilizing special weapons and tactics to cope with … unusual and difficult attacks.”
LAPDonline.org definition
There are generally two categories of projects that most of our work falls into — the unusual and the difficult.
The unusual project is the work that no one is thinking about right now. We either don’t have the right team or skillset in place to launch the program, or it is an idea that is too new and greenfield for the rest of the organization to focus on. Often called pilot programs or market assessments, this is where Strategy can more independently do research, size the opportunity, and pilot and test the program before the company makes a decision on what to do — to scale or not to scale!
Some projects we’ve helped launch at Slack include:
- Piloting our professional rollout services program until we hired our head of customer success to build out the team. I learned how to run an engagement team and teach Slack 101, a skill I still volunteer today to help onboard non-profits and communities onto Slack.
- Creating and running the analyst relations program for Slack until we hired an analyst relations manager within the product marketing team. We created the first analyst briefing presentations, and learned what analyst briefing days were all about!
The difficult project is the very cross-functional, complex, and hairy project that sometimes can feel like it just isn’t moving forward fast enough. The difficult project has the opposite issue — often too many teams or stakeholders are involved.
While we all agree that we need to move forward, there is ambiguity about what the first step should be. There are a lot of different reasons for why projects become difficult projects. Sometimes it is the first time a cross functional group of people have worked together. Sometimes a company grows too fast and responsibilities feel like they are shared across too many teams. Sometimes you just have a very passionate group of people who care deeply about the problem or opportunity, and just want to get it right.
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
Difficult projects are where Strategy can be the neutral third party in the room. In these cases, it is rarely about coming up with the right answer. Actually, it isn’t about the answer at all. Our role on difficult projects is to find the right question.
How are we framing this problem? You’ll hear us say that a lot.
Framing matters because your problem defines your possible set of solutions (from simple hack to extremely technical). That solution set drives how quickly or slowly the team is able to execute on the work to solve this problem. The classic example of framing is The Slow Elevator Problem. There are many ways you can define the slow elevator problem. Two of these are:
- The elevator is too slow
- The wait is annoying for tenants
These are two very different ways to define the problem with two completely different solution sets that impact how quickly and how feasible the work is going to be. The first would suggest larger construction work needs to get done. The second opens up non-technical ideas to address the wait (e.g. music in the elevators).
The reality is that difficult problems are multi-dimensional. A team can get stuck because the current solution set just feels untenable given their full set of priorities this year, or the technical capability just isn’t there in our product. That doesn’t mean that the work is impossible.
And that’s where Strategy can help. We’ll dive in deep with you. We’ll seek to understand. We’ll ask questions. And we will work to find different ways to frame the problem with you.
We (business strategy) aim to support the company’s highest priority initiatives.
So, you have an unusual or difficult project. Awesome. And you want Strategy to help. Even better! What now?! I’ll get to that part soon in a next article.
