2022/03/24 - 03:05, at home.
I originally wrote these thoughts over the course of 4 days, while I was facilitating strategy discussions where I was working. It was a challenge I set for myself - each morning I would spend no more than 30 min creating a short 2-pager describing the arc of thought for that day.
While the sessions were successful, when summarizing for this blog, I realized there was a lot missing, and a lot to be desired in this line of thinking. I’ve left my thoughts up, and I may edit these in the future, or give a more reasonable summary of my thinking on technology strategy; however, there are others with better, more fulsome thinking on the same topic.
I hope you’re able to get some value out of these notes, regardless!
Introduction
Strategic thought broadly consists of three phases:
Analysis (in two parts)
Developing the strategy (in two parts)
Communicating the strategy (in two parts)
Wrapping up
This document is the first in a three part series.
The series
Day 1 - Analysis I - we’ll discuss what analysis looks like, and how it relates to strategy definition / creation
Day 2 - Analysis II - we’ll show an example of a complete strategic process, and some examples of an analytical process
Day 3 - Developing the strategy I - we’ll align on what our goals, vision and mission are: What are the options we want to consider?
Day 4 - Developing the strategy II - we’ll discuss how to turn our into artifacts you can reason about and use to make decisions
Day 5 - Communication I - we discuss how to develop a communication strategy - and what good communication looks like
Day 6 - Communication II - how do we create the necessary artifacts? and how do we execute and manage a communication strategy?
Day 7 - Wrapping up - where do we go from here? This was an example of a process? We will give links and references, and suggestions for what might help next.
Before we start - Focus
You should find a focus for your strategic analysis. Usually, there is a reason for looking at your company or group’s strategic direction. Perhaps this is routine planning for the next year. Perhaps you have recognized an opportunity for your business or a threat. Before you start your strategic exercise, you should anchor yourself with a starting point - this is the focus.
Out of scope for this document is identifying and managing focus. Perhaps we’ll cover focus explicitly in a different series.
Analysis - establishing context
Alignment - frequently, we are asked to tie our thinking to something else. This can be a wider business strategy, a larger problem statement or some other external driver. This may or may not be tied to the focus you’ve identified as your starting point. An example might be an engineering or research department tying their strategic thinking to an ask from the company level.
Analysis is the foundational basis for our strategy. It informs our thinking, but may not be communicated later, at least not in its entirety. Why is this? Because our analysis will go into detail potentially irrelevant to the conclusions we reach. Because our analysis may be too granular. We want our analysis to be open and exploratory in nature. So we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves by worrying about how the analysis may be communicated to the wider team.
For our purposes, we should:
Figure out what success looks like - the problem and what a successful outcome or outcomes might look like
Develop foundational thought - explore the situational aspects surrounding the problem
Think long term - we want to understand all possibilities, without being constrained by the immediate. While we want to take into account the potential shortfall in our sales this quarter, for example, when we are thinking strategically, we want to make sure we are looking at the long game. If you feel you can’t commit to this, you might want to consider delaying the strategic thought exercise.
Think deeply about your principles and values - this one is frequently missed. As we’ll see, once we start making decisions (The next phase of this exercise) we’ll have to make some decisions.
When defining the problem, we may choose to leverage a particular framework or frameworks to frame the problem. For example, we may use Michael Porter’s five forces, or John Mullin’s seven domains of attractive opportunities.
Develop foundational thought - what are the related problems to the area you’re working on? Are there adjacent areas? For example, when we look at the aspirations, are there foundational elements - like security, data infrastructure, etc. Do we nderstand the attributes of a solution or solutions to the problem? Do we understand the trade offs implied by those attributes?
Think long term - frequently, the ambition of a strategy can be overwhelmed by immediate problems. We should be able to think about how we get there first - then address the length of time / effort needed. When we develop strategy, the investments / costing are going to be key.
Think deeply about the principles and values - For example, if your team cares deeply about inclusiveness and about supporting each other, these are fundamental principles and values for your team, and they will allow you easily to do some things, and not others. For example, you don’t want to have a strategy naively collecting data for models introducing bias into a key decision. This will also limit the things that you are prepared to do - this might seem like a disadvantage, but frequently, this will allow you to focus in ways your competition cannot. And focus is, more often than not, what allows strategies to succeed.
Being able to articulate and take into account what your team’s values are will help when (a) prioritizing what you will (and won’t) do and (b) if you’re aligned with your wider team, your strategy will be aligned with and authentic to your team. This will make their understanding and aligning with it much easier.
Developing a strategy - what we will do… and what we will not
The output from your analysis phase should be a set of definitions, assumptions and initial theories
You should have an understanding of the context you’re using: the current industry, market and technology landscape, how you want it to evolve, your customers / users, your competitors and your team.
You will use these to develop a series of strategic options.
These options should eventually be concrete actions, but in the first should be guided by a small set of strategic principles, findings or values.
For example,
In order for us to succeed, we will need to have an efficient, predictable development team
A predictable development team has the following properties: ….
We are currently stopped from doing this by: ....
And so on
One final word
This document series is an effort to bring clarity around technology strategy. A couple of things:
All strategy is difficult; however, technology strategy is frequently very different from business strategy, as is operational strategy. If you've been a part of a non technical strategic exercise, some analogues may apply, but most will not. Business strategy is more holistic and focused on what you deliver to your customers; Technology strategy is focused on what you can enable; Operational strategy is focused on recognizing value from how you deliver. This difference is crucial and can trip up many a leader
The boundaries between the phases described above (Analysis, Definition, Communication) are not clean. There will be overlap. However, you should make sure to have crisp boundaries between the artifacts produced, even though you may bounce back and forth between, for example, Analysis and Definition.
Have fun with the process
If you do a good job, you should expect to be met by deafening silence.
Hopefully, this article has seemed obvious as well :)