On Julie Zhuo’s ‘How to be Strategic’

It was a grey, foggy morning, only nine days into Q4, when a LinkedIn post by Nikos Pappas, Digital Product Designer at Home Run, caught my attention…

A LinkedIn post that I actually bothered to click and read — these don’t happen often.

The particular words that grabbed me were: “Prioritize. And cut.”

As a manager, a family man, a foreigner in the country where I live, and someone with a lot of hobbies and interests, I am typically overwhelmed by all that I have going on (a condition that I possibly bring upon myself as a type of sport), so I definitely clicked through to read more, especially on this final point of prioritization and deletion.

I am glad to report that I encountered real value in “How to be Strategic” (original post). The author, Julie Zhuo, is a VP of Product Design at Facebook, so it makes sense that she is probably also overwhelmed at times, which can naturally prompt one to consider potential breakthroughs for such a breakdown phase.

When I dug deeper into the three core elements that Julie prescribes, I realized that it would make a great exercise for my Marketing team (myself included) if I would send them the first two points as questions and ask them to answer individually, without consulting with each other, as an exercise to see how much we are all aligned as a team.

Responses from four of us on the MyQ Marketing team, when I asked Julie Zhuo’s questions:

1. What would our wildest success look like to you?

(If it’s easier, think about where we could be 3 years from now.)

· Working remotely, from wherever we feel that we can be most effective

· Regularly contacted and asked for our expertise

· Acquire one or two competitors and be recognized globally as an invaluable software application

· More companies requesting to work with our marketing team

· Social Media followers in the 100,000s (and proper analytic tools for it)

· A thriving website from visitors driven by our blog and SM pages

· A bigger office, bigger team with more specialists (and ideally people with whom we could share our knowledge and skills)

· To have real measurement that what we do is affecting MyQ in a positive way; to get people to say, “I’d love to work there!”

· MyQ known as №1 around the world and we all will be happy, famous and rich

· After two years spent in an Indian ashram, one of our founders decides to redefine the goals and priorities of the company. Instead of just telling people that they should not stay in queues, he will start searching for the most praiseworthy activities that they can do in the time they save with MyQ. MyQ becomes the world-leading company in the motivational speaking industry.

2. What problems is our team trying to solve and for whom?

· Bring MyQ out from relative obscurity (this can make the office experience better for everyone)

· ‘Cut through the noise’ to support the efforts of our HR and Sales teams

· Serve our sales people’s needs (which will ideally get routed through our new website)

· Generate leads for the sales team

· Doing too much without enough people — a bigger team would free up time for others to write, create, design, etc.

· Drive people to our social media pages and further engagement from our social media followers

· Finish our new website, which would help with some of the things already mentioned

· Obtaining relevant and useful case studies from the sales team to better our marketing materials (which in turn help the sales team)

· Better communication between our team and Devs regarding software updates and release dates

· Have and be ONE communication channel

· Addressing mostly organization and communication topics — for the better good

· Improve processes in the company and establish a functioning way of communication between the MyQ departments

Take time to be contemplative.

After aggregating the responses, we went through them as a team and discussed how similar or dissimilar some of our aims are, depending whether we are looking at things from a team perspective or from our individual specialist areas (e.g. technical documentation vs. social media).

I found these insights to be extremely valuable, as it shows me — as the team lead — where I am doing well and where I may be falling short in terms of making sure that we have a unified vision.

As I am currently working on our Marketing team’s priorities and budget for Q4 and beyond, the above exercise should also prove useful in helping to set our team goals for coming months.

Next, I just need to… “Prioritize. And cut.”