Is your strategy opinionated?

An opinionated strategy is an easy way to ensure you craft a good strategy, a hack if you will.

Have you ever been told your strategy isn’t opinionated enough? I have. In fact, many times at Meta. But I was always dumbfounded, not knowing what it meant for strategy to be “opinionated” (especially when I was told that I was opinionated) or why it was important. I learned that if you have an opinionated strategy, you’re doing it right. You’re setting your team up to succeed. You’re being an effective PM. As I dug in further, I realized that this mindset to always have an opinionated strategy is an easy way to ensure you craft a good strategy, a hack if you will. So here’s what I learned and how I changed my approach to formulating strategy:

What is an opinionated strategy?

All strategies focus on identifying and solving problems. But an opinionated strategy makes deliberate choices, saying no to a 1000 things and saying yes to 1. It chooses a segment of the market to focus on and lets the others go. It chooses that segment’s critical problems to solve and ignores the rest. It chooses one path to take to solve these problems and eschews others. An opinionated strategy is one where choices have been explicitly made, what to do and also what not to do.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs

An easy way to understand what an opinionated strategy is by looking at luxury products. These products explicitly choose to not cater to an audience below a certain income bracket. They don’t open stores near the Walmarts or Targets. They often don’t produce goods at volume. If they did any of this, they would stop being luxury products and likely lose out on the high end consumer market.

Similarly, AirBnB explicitly decided to offer unique stays and not cookie cutter chain experiences around the world. Intel decided to move away from producing dynamic random access memory (DRAM) to one focused on microprocessors. Apple decided to not fragment software and hardware. Each company lost out to a certain market while making these decisions but also won a market that was untapped or underserved.

All of the successful businesses are making explicit choices that help them focus their resources towards some ends and away from others. They have an opinion about what it will take to succeed. In contrast, unopinionated companies’ strategies are often laden with buzz words without any specificity that is needed to make choices (e.g. many strategies often just say they are “customer-centric”).

So why do opinionated strategies result in better outcomes?

1. They lead to effective discourse that ensures that the strategy is sound: having an opinionated stance (e.g. we will do X but not Y) ensures that different options have been thoroughly considered because it’s easier to debate specific choices versus an abstract idea. It is much harder to debate something as obvious as customer-centricity but it’s much easier to weigh option X with option Y. This back and forth discourse leads to a more sound strategy.
2. They ensure execution is focused, leading to higher chances of success: execution has higher chances of success when there is explicit focus because trying to do everything results in failure. The choices made in the strategy also serve as guardrails to prevent drift and distraction and keeps the team focused on what’s critical to win.
3. They minimizes pivots which prevents resources from being wasted: if you don’t make explicit choices, they will often be made for you in much more painful ways through the lack of resources or shifts in the market. It is then much harder to react and react quickly to unforeseen changes than it is to keep them in mind during strategy. And when a pivot is needed, it can be more intentional and thoughtful versus reactionary.

“Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes” — Good Strategy Bad Strategy

But focus is not a new concept so why did I have a eureka moment?

Yes, much has been written about the importance of focusing on some things and not others but I have found that it almost always gets lost amidst all of the other tips surrounding strategy. In fact, I’ve found that it’s also easy to forget this during the chaos of execution or when we are faced with opposing opinions and sound contractions. Not only this, but making an explicit choice is so hard and difficult that we actually don’t want to make it and therefore, sometimes settle on doing everything. As Richard Rumelt writes in Good Strategy Bad Strategy, “But the essential difficulty in creating strategy is not logical; it is choice itself.”

So this word “opinionated” now serves as a trigger and reminder to not only formulate a strategy that makes explicit choices but also to stick to it. A reminder that while I can get a ton of input and iterate a thousand times, the main thing I need to do is to make a choice. Figure out the thing that is of utmost importance and bring laser focus to it. Remove the noise, for myself and others, and bring to light what is truly important to win or solve right now (recognizing that this can change over time). The “can’t fails”. The “must do’s”. This word is now a constant companion of mine that helps me get better at strategy, one of our core competencies as PMs.

What specifically do I do now?

I ask myself the following questions for every element of the strategy:

1. Goal: every strategy starts out with a goal. But I now clarify not only the goal we’re trying to achieve but also which goals we are not trying to achieve (i.e. non-goals). Do we want to grow our user base or retain them? Do we want to increase our monetization or do we want to increase our DAU? Sometimes we can affect multiple goals at the same time but despite this, we must separate out the one that’s the most important to achieve from the one that’s a nice to have and laser focus on the important one.
2. Market Segmentation: which segment is the most important to achieve our goal? Which segment are we okay to lose? And which segment are we likely to win? Before we build for the world, which market do we want to win in? Remember that AirBnB initially targeted travellers wanting unique stays. They did not go after luxury experiences or address the familiarity of traditional chain hotels. They leaned into a segment they could win with the resources they had (i.e. not enough money to build hotels). Of course, the target segment can change and evolve over time based on the market, product, and company dynamics. But even then, we need to choose who to serve and who not to serve.
3. Problem Identification: what is the chosen segment’s critical problem to solve? Which issues are truly important and which are secondary? Which problem are we uniquely positioned to solve that others can’t solve just as well? And finally, which problems are addressable or solvable given the resources we have? “To be a strategist you will have to develop a sense for the crux of the problem, the place where a commitment to action will have the best chance of surmounting the most critical obstacles.” — The Crux
4. Solution: out of all the options, how can we solve this uniquely with the resources and strengths we have? Which paths won’t we take?

Making these choices is difficult and painful and the desire to do everything has a strong undercurrent. But there are countless examples of how doing everything leads to winning nowhere. So to be an effective PM, we have to get comfortable making difficult choices in our strategy. We have to get good at calling out both what to focus on and what not to focus on, ensuring that the strategy we set out is truly opinionated. Because if your strategy is to do everything, then it’s not a strategy. As the book The Crux puts it “This narrowing down is the source of much of the strategist’s power, as focus remains the cornerstone of strategy.”