Everyone Can Do Strategy
A short story on how we accidently were strategic, and how you can too.
Strategy was always this intimidating thing for me. This thing that, for whatever reasons, other people seemed to be really good at. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it was just complicated. Maybe it was the shitty Power Points. Who knows.
But, here I am, momma!! I read a book and I learned that, damn it *dramatically slaps knee*, our team were strategic this whole time.
“What was the secret?”, you whisper in my ear?
We problem solved on things we saw was most important. We prioritised by gathering loads of problems and oppurtuinities (insight) and staggered them against each other.
It sounds stupidly easy, I know, but it takes a lot of work and few actually do it.
What is strategy, really?
Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, can sum this up in 2 min.
So, strategy is problem solving. To solve a problem however, you need to understand what the problem(s) are. To prioritise what the most important problem is, you need to prioritise against multiple problems.
For our case: when we looked at onboarding, we saw that it was multiple things we could do, but some issues stood out more than others. They stood out in both effort needed and potential results (or input vs outpot if you want to sound fan$y).
How do I get started?
Great question.
First, gather insight.
What’s good insight, you might ask.
The answer, at least in the start, is everything.
The more insight you get, the easier it is to stack up things against each other.
Once you start gathering insight, it’s extremely important to have it in a place where it’s easy to see everything at once. I’ve written another article about this, but tl;dr version is use Miro:
A tip from experince: Don’t hop on the first thing you see that looks interessting. It will be tempting, but continue to gather insight. Other things might come. In order to work on a problem over time, you need enough trust that the problem is actually important.
Secondly, once you’ve started to collect all the insight, problems and oppurtunities will hopefully appear. We didn’t use any elaborate teqhnique to look at all the choices.
We did however constantly discuss what we were looking at, and then eventually we could kind of categorise them.
This shifted the whole conversations within the team from “The onboarding needs to be better” to “The most important thing WE can do, right now, is to make it easy for the user to transfer money to us so they can quickly use us as a banking service”. We knew there were other problems too, but getting the user up to speed was most important at that moment.
Two major keys here:
🔑 We created a why within the team, with a clear story to tell others
🔑 We went from something needs to be fixed, to WE need to fix it
Seeing that the people is the business, I firmly stand behind Roger Martin’s “It’s your team, stupid!”, that should own the strategy (with you as a product manager in lead, of course)
Your product will never reach it’s full potential if the team is only asked to execute your ideas and actions. — Marty Cagan in Empowered
A tip from experince: I talked with stakeholders every other week about our insight. All we did was go through our Miro board (still do to this day). It created a much better conversation, because we could include them in our why, our story. I’ve written about that too.
Thirdly, once you’ve choosen a problem or oppurtunity, you can create an Oppurtunity Solution Tree (OST) that dives more in on what we as a team can do.
Under is an example of one OST we have. The text has been removed, I know, but it’s secret juice.
Essentially, you start with:
- A barrier: % of money in first month is low because…
- Yellow squares are for barriers we have seen from insight. One can be for example “Too much hassle moving bank”
- Green squares are “therefor we should”. For example, if a barrier is “Too much hassle moving bank”, a green note can be “make it easy to fetch money via PSD2”
- Pink squares are actual experiments (hypotethis) on this we should test. For example, under “make it easy to fetch money via PSD2”, you have a pink note that say “Fetching money in onboarding”
- On top of the yellow squares are some choosen insight that we can link to the barriers. It’s not everything, but some extra interessting insight.
Even in the OST we prioritise what to do next. As you can barely see from the picture, some post it has stars and some around marked with a grey circle.
OST is great for many reasons, but two are:
🔑 Everyone can see all the things you could do, which makes it easier to prioritise
🔑 It forces you to not only fix the obvious thing (ergo: make it easier to fetch money), but other aspects that can help the user journey.
If you want to get smarter at OST, I recommend following Sonja Sarah Porter.
A tip from experince: UX and PM might set up the actual OST, you don’t need the whole team for that, but the whole team decides where the focus should be.
Another tip from experince: Don’t go in a meeting with the team talking about “now we are going to be strategic”. It sets an unessecary pressure on the conversation. I’ve tried. Don’t do it. Just talk with your team on the things we can focus on (which in the end is taking strategic decisions)
Wrapping it up
Essentially, you start wide with insight, only to go hyper focused on one or multiple problems or barriars.
If you got to the end, damn… Thanks. This post got way longer than expected and there’s so much more to talk about.
Last tip from experince: Everything sounds easier in hindsight — and I think that was my biggest issue with strategy. My example with “money in” is a year old, so of course it’s easier to say baddabim-baddabam just do it! We work with other things today, but it’s so fresh so it’s harder to easily explain our decisions in an article. Because, even though we bath in insight, strategic decisions is in the end a chance you take. A risk — being it big or small.
So, if it doesn’t make perfect sense for you know what your team is doing, don’t worry. It will probably in some months. And if you take big risks, you should get nervous. That’s why it’s a team effort. More heads. Better decisions. Clearer why.
I am no “expert in strategy”. I do know however that our team is taking the right pivots and decisions, based on the path explained over. With that, we get the results to show for it.
In that sense, I’m content.
P.S. Thanks for recommending Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Ida Aalen & Thomas Allan Nygaard
Hey, you made it to the end! 🎉
P.S. If you want to read about how to create trust in a team, check out: Why focusing on psychological safety as a solution doesn’t create psychological safety in your team
P.S.S. You can of course follow me on Medium, and Linkedin or Goodreads.
If you would like more stories like these, check out Failing Forward.
