The Missing Link Between Strategy and Delivering Exceptional Customer Value
How do you connect organisational strategy with everyday work? I often hear from companies where there’s no connective tissue between where they want to go (the strategy, mission, and vision) and what people are currently working on (the day-to-day work of delivering a customer experience).
This gap can lead to all sorts of trouble. If our teams don’t understand the strategy, how will they know what to say yes (and no) to? How will they know what to prioritise? How will they determine where they should direct their energy and attention?
In short, they won’t. And this is why we see some misguided focus on the concept of outcomes and objectives. At the moment we’re seeing a lot of buzz around the concept of OKRs (objectives and key results). There’s nothing wrong with OKRs in and of themselves, but without that deep understanding of strategy, teams will set OKRs that are not connected to what the organisation wants to achieve.
This disconnect can happen at the strategic level, too. All too often, strategy is disconnected from the most valuable customer problem to solve.
Why are these missing links so common? I see three main ways that organisations can go astray.
Problem #1: Too much internal focus
Organisations are usually great at focusing on what the business wants, but there’s rarely any focus on customer needs within that. Whenever setting your strategy or vision, be sure to ask, “What’s the value we bring to the customer in service of this business goal?”
Problem #2: Teams aren’t involved in setting business strategy
All too often, executives decide on the strategy and solutions and hand it over as a brief to the team. If you ask people why they’re working on something, they’ll say, “Because my boss told me to.” They have little insight or input into why they’re doing something. Instead they’re focused on the what. They define success as delivering a specific output rather than delivering value to a customer.
Problem #3: Outsourcing strategic work to agencies
The other common mistake is to hire an agency to define your organisation’s strategy and vision. The problem with this approach is that these agencies never have the context or organisational understanding of your business and customers that you do. Hiring an agency to do strategy means you’re essentially giving away the most strategic and valuable work you could be doing.
The key elements of cohesive strategy and execution
Creating cohesion involves connecting your organisational goals with customer goals (another way of putting this is “connecting business value to customer value”) and incorporating the learning the whole organisation is doing.
To achieve this, you need a framework for creating products and services (the customer experience) that connects from company vision all the way to shipping the product into the hands of customers. You need cross-functional teams that align around shared customer outcomes and success measures. Everyday work needs to be grounded in experimentation and a learning mindset.
Here are a few key elements of this approach:
Opportunity discovery: The process of defining the most valuable opportunity spaces (customer problems or needs) that are aligned to our strategy.
Prioritisation: The process of deciding which opportunity spaces we focus on and fund. How we articulate objectives and success measures based on customer research that contribute to achieving the overall business goals.
Solution discovery: The process of identifying how we best solve this customer need with our organisational goals and constraints. There are many ways to solve the problem and many ways to design the solution. It’s up to the team to find the quickest path to value through rapid experimentation and iteration.
Each of these steps is iterative, collaborative, and rapid. They can be broken into small increments so teams can learn and change course as necessary.
The goal is to remove enough uncertainty from how to solve the problem and how to design the solution to feel confident about starting delivery of a first user journey, not a fully designed system.
And, it’s important to note that each step in this process is based on discovery: research, insights, and data-driven decision-making. Not opinion.
This is where you unlock the full potential of agile teams. They not only create solutions quickly, but iterate to the right solution that delivers customer value and contributes to business objectives.
What comes next?
Now that I’ve outlined some common mistakes and shared a vision of the ideal way of working, you might be wondering what’s next. How do you get closer to creating a connection between business strategy, customer value, and everyday work?
If you’re overly focused on business strategy without connecting it to customer value, spend some time on opportunity discovery. Your goal is to identify valuable customer problems to solve.
If you’ve been telling teams what to do and they define their work by outputs, give them time and space to focus on solution discovery. Rather than starting with an answer, pose them a question and let them explore how to best answer it.
And if you’re outsourcing strategic work to an agency, consider what other work you may be able to give them instead. How can you keep the strategic work in house and involve agencies more when it comes to tactical execution?
This type of transformation isn’t easy, but it can happen. If you’re interested in learning more about how I might be able to help, please get in touch!
