Your Strategy Blueprint
Writing your strategy so that other people can understand it & you don't go crazy
This is a newsletter I write to figure out what’s real… for founders who are trying to build something real.
Last week I wrote about strategy: Why it’s important but misunderstood
And I got some great questions from you:
“Can you give examples of what good strategies look like?”
“How do I balance the strategic work with the day-to-day work getting stuff done?”
“How do we compete with an incomplete product while we’re pursuing our strategy?”
And then, I spent a few hours trying to explain our strategy to an advisor and ran face-first into the challenge of communicating a coherent strategy.
So this week, I’m writing about knowing and communicating your business’s strategy.
What does a strategy look like?
How do you communicate it to assess whether it’s good?
What does a strategy look like?
Reminder from last week:
We all know the results of a good strategy:
Meaningful differentiation
Lasting profitability & business value
But we seem to misunderstand the inputs to a good strategy - and what a strategy actually is.
Strategy simply diagnoses the market challenge / opportunity. Then it prescribes an approach to that market challenge / opportunity that enables your business to win.
So, what does a strategy look like?
If you asked me, “What is the essence of your business strategy in 30 seconds or less?” I would probably use the following words:
We are building a marketplace for hourly jobseekers and jobs that has cost and quality advantages over existing options. We “acquire” hourly workers at a disruptively low cost through employers’ past applicants and former employees. And we enable employers to directly market their job opportunities to hourly jobseekers using (1) more specific hiring needs than possible on other job marketplaces, and (2) marketing messages that build the workplace’s brand.
If I’ve done it well, you can see the logic.
Inputs: A set of our core actions and decisions
Past applicants and former employees
Direct marketing from employers to jobseekers
More specific hiring needs & marketing messages
Output: Business differentiated in a meaningful way, with a lasting spot in the market
Jobseeker marketplace with cost and quality advantages
And, critically (but not described), existing market participants wouldn’t be able or willing to do this themselves
“WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU SHARE THIS PUBLICLY?”
I haven’t articulated it well, and there’s a lot of context required to understand it even if I were to articulate it well
We’ve built up a ton of tribal knowledge on what actually works & doesn’t to be able to execute this strategy
It is inherently different and risky; it’s not clear if this is a GOOD strategy
Execution is hard; sticking to a strategy is hard
Existing market participants aren’t able / willing to do this themselves
I have like 50 subscribers and personally know the 3 people who regularly read this
The problem: Communicating it so people understand it
I intuitively know the strategy. But then we play the “telephone” game from my brain to yours, as I try to write the strategy down and explain the nuances and the context. We walk away with different views of the strategy; we’re unable to engage on it in a meaningful way.
And, the strategy morphs and evolves as I engage with people who glimpse different parts of it. As I learn what is real and what isn’t.
But if the strategy is only in my head, then every decision must come through me. And that’s a recipe for overwork, frustration, and loneliness.
I am working on how to communicate the depth of our strategy in a way that anyone else can easily understand, then engage with.
Right now, it consists of three components that give the paragraph above its context:
What’s happening in the buyer’s life that causes her #1 priority to change, and causes her to look for solutions (and the underlying trends that cause a LOT of buyers to experience this)
What alternatives she considers / her “alternatives ecosystem” (and the underlying market structure that creates an opportunity space for you)
Why she chooses you / your unique value (and the underlying reasons why you stay ahead of alternatives & she keeps choosing you)
This is probably wrong; if I’ve learned anything over the past week it’s that I don’t yet know how to effectively communicate strategy. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.
I’ll think more, test more, and report back next week.
As always.
Rob