Strategy: Creating effective guardrails for empowered teams
Strategy is a concept a lot of people struggle with. What is it? And more importantly, how the heck does it work?
It might be helpful to start by describing what happens when strategy doesn’t work since these are scenarios that should sound quite familiar. When strategy isn’t working, we lack a shared understanding of the outcomes and impact we want to drive as well as what problems we’re trying to solve and for whom. We get lost in implementation detail, we move slower, we risk building the wrong things, we increase the chances of duplicating our efforts with other teams, and we can’t measure our progress meaningfully.
It’s easy to see how all this can add up to feelings of frustration, ineffectiveness, and potentially even disengagement or disillusionment. Why even put in the effort if our work can’t make the impact we’re striving for?
At Northshore, we work with clients on creating alignment and autonomy with a comprehensive approach to connecting high-level vision and strategy to the everyday work teams are doing.
Here’s an overview of the core elements.
Let’s take a closer look at each aspect.
Vision: The what and why
The vision paints a picture of where you are trying to go in the long term. It defines the what and why. Vision is focused on an ambitious future destination, generally a few years out from where you are today. It’s focused on the impact you want to make on your customer’s life and it gives your work meaning and purpose. While vision generally exists at the organisational level, many teams find it beneficial to draft their own vision as well.
Strategy: How you will realise your vision
The strategy answers how you will achieve that vision, including what you will prioritise and what you will say no to. Strategy is also a long-term perspective that covers several years. Establishing a strategy requires answering the following questions:
Where are we today? (based on company internal data and customer metrics)
What can we learn from our market/competitors (through benchmarking, differentiators, or changes in requirements)?
What can we learn from macro trends and other sectors?
What are the most valuable customer opportunities/needs/problems to address in alignment with our vision? (that also provide value to customers and the business)
Because “strategy” is a word that’s often misused or misunderstood, it’s worth pointing out a few things to look out for and avoid. Bad strategies aren’t based in current reality and don’t address challenges. They don’t communicate customer and business value. They don’t make it clear what you aren’t going to do (something that’s critical for prioritisation). And they’re simply a list of tactics or features to build as opposed to opportunities to explore and validate.
Opportunity backlog: All outcomes and priorities for how you will execute the strategy
The opportunity backlog is when you start looking at things on a granular level. It covers all the opportunities and priorities for how you’ll execute your strategy, and it covers the span of several quarters.
You define your opportunity space through discovery and answering questions such as:
What problem are we looking to solve?
For whom?
What is the desirable outcome?
What is the size of the opportunity?
What is the anticipated complexity of solving the problem?
You might measure your success through statements like, “We want to solve problem X for persona Y” or “We will know we have solved this problem when [change in customer behaviour] from X to Y.”
Generally, opportunity spaces are contained in an overarching backlog and need to be prioritised. The prioritisation process involves both understanding the size of the opportunity and alignment with the strategy as well as more detailed questions such as the complexity of solving it, the certainty/risk involved, and the cost of delay.
Roadmap: Outcomes and priorities for how each team contributes to the strategy
Similar to the opportunity backlog (all opportunities prioritised for the organisation), the roadmap contains outcomes and priorities, but it’s a trimmed-down version that’s specific to each team and zeroes in on a smaller time frame of several months rather than several quarters.
It’s worth noting that the term “roadmap” has often been used to describe a document that outlines exactly which features will be released on specific dates. That’s NOT what we’re referring to here.
Here are some of the key characteristics of modern product roadmaps:
They’re tools that create alignment by communicating the direction we plan to pursue to realise our vision and why.
They assume uncertainty and change and optimise for learning and responding.
They’re oriented around outcomes, not outputs.
Development backlog: The details each team needs to create the outcome
Now we’re into the actual work that teams are doing every day. The development backlog shares the details teams will need to achieve their defined outcome and only covers a span of a couple of weeks at a time. This allows you to leave space for discovery and experimentation so teams don’t get locked into doing work that’s not aligned with your desired customer or business outcomes.
Healthy backlogs contain lots of small stories that describe clear value, logical groupings of features into releases, and reflect the latest insights from your user research. Generally, product managers and engineers hold weekly meetings to ensure the backlog is in good shape, reflects current priorities, and all team members have a shared understanding of what the stories mean.
A few points to keep in mind
Now you’ve seen how all of these elements can fit together to foster alignment at every level of your organisation. Here are a few final points to keep in mind as you try to bring these concepts to life.
Strategy is a living, evolving artefact that should be updated with fresh learning, progress, and adjustments. It’s important to review your priorities and progress towards goals regularly, especially on a team level. And be aware that you may need to adjust direction, whether that involves re-prioritising opportunities or adjusting funding or resource allocation.
You might be wondering why bother with all this in the first place. Remember how we discussed what happens when strategy isn’t well executed? On the flipside, when your strategy is clear, it fosters connection with the work you’re doing every day. It helps orient your decision-making and prioritisation. And it gives you a clear point of view on what not to do. All this adds up to work that feels customer-centric and meaningful, which is motivating and engaging for everyone. And it ensures that the day-to-day work across teams adds up to achieving the overall organizational goals.
If you’d like to move towards a more comprehensive strategy and you don’t want to do it alone, get in touch to discuss how Northshore can partner with you!
