The ambiguous world of business strategy

I joined Slack’s strategy team a little over a year ago now, knowing only that I wanted to work on challenging and crucial business problems with a team that I really respected. And honestly, not much more than that.

Along the way though, I kept getting asked “but what does strategy do?”. How do you describe the thing you do when that thing changes all the time?

When I look around at other companies, there are a lot of different names used for this role: Business Operations, Corporate Development, Business Strategy, Chief dot-connector etc. A lot of different names with the same goal. Here at Slack, our team charter states that we aim to support the company’s highest priority initiatives.

Dan Yoo, COO at NerdWallet, once wrote about BizOps “The team’s job was to get him access to whatever levers he needed to move the company forward.”

That’s pretty ambiguous.

It’s also really ambitious.

So, let’s break that down and try to tackle what that actually means…

• Access to whatever levers: That means building and having influence. I’m not talking about the kind of influence a title like “Head of” gets you. I’m talking about real street persuade-you-to-jump-off-a-cliff influence. Okay, not that crazy, but you know what I mean. That kind of informal influence is built on trust and deep relationships with your business partners. We do a lot of that by listening, and by helping with the small things — especially the tedious tasks.
• Move the company: Remember our team mission? Highest priority initiatives. The catch here is that sometimes you are told what the highest priority initiatives are. And many times, it’s up to you to use your business intuition, your own hustle for information, and your ability to ask good questions to prioritize and help the rest of the company (aka your business partners) see the larger picture. It’s up to you to ensure that the company takes that step back and always question — is this right? are there other things we hadn’t considered here? is there a better way?
• Forward: And this is where the magic happens. This is what makes business strategy inside a company different. We aren’t consultants who drop in, provide a theoretical recommendation, and drop out as our business partners figure out what to do. Being able to move a company forward means being able to internalize the context of where the company and your business partners are at today, amplifying the right things at the right time, and adjusting your communication and recommendation depending on the audience and the need. It is often not about coming up with the right answer, but coming to an aligned decision that everyone is bought into…that fits what is happening already across the team. This piece is, in my mind, the hardest. It requires deep empathy, adaptability, and persistence!

Tactically, what this means for us as a team is that we spend most of our time digging into new or greenfield ideas and opportunities (my significant other likes to call that “getting paid to daydream”), and helping to connect people and projects to craft a unified recommendation and path forward.

Some of the types of projects we’ve supported:
Should we go international?
Should we do something for EDU?
What, how, and when would we do any of those?

Our job is ultimately to make sense of the ambiguous.

We are the dot-connectors. The information brokers. The problem-solvers. The generalists. The hustlers.

We jump into the unknown, first.

As a personal add…This role is extremely stressful sometimes. It is 100% challenging all the time. And it always finds a way to stretch me in a direction I didn’t know I could or should be stretched.

I love it :)