Now that we know what strategy is and how to identify a good strategy, you may want to make one of your own. If you’re starting from scratch, what are the components of a solid strategy you want to include?
1. North Star Vision. This is your Shark Tank pitch. One minute, max.
What’s the customer problem?
What’s the aspirational future if you solve it?
2. Current State Assessment. The goal here is to understand where the organization stands today. A common pitfall I see with this step is that organizations try to include EVERYTHING - all facts, market trends, CAGRs, every single competitor, every single customer comment - in the current state assessment. Part of the exercise in this section is figuring out which facts and data are relevant and synthesizing the implications for your org.
Where are you in the market?
What trends matter, and which ones are noise?
What does the data actually say?
It’s really easy to spend a lot of time here, because this often this section is the one where you know the most, and it’s easy to talk about what you know or just keep doing analyses. It can be helpful to timebox this work to 1-2 weeks or aggressively push to the “so what?” implications and synthesis.
3. Key Initiatives. Three or four “Big Rocks” that you would actually do. Usually, a long list of initiatives will come up as part of brainstorming. We could … change our pricing, target a competitor, make some acquisitions, hire new talent, build a new product - the list can be very long. A tough part of this section is pruning the initiatives down. You have to say no to some things, otherwise you’ll be spread too thin. 3-5 is a good target number of initiatives to end up with.
4. Three-Year Roadmap. Usually this follows a 1/ build the foundation 2/ scale 3/ expand arc.
5. Financial Projections. Last piece: money. A lot of organizations miss this part or leave it for last. What is the revenue goal? How much does each initiative contribute to the revenue goal? How much investment is needed?
That’s it! A good strategy document can be a pretty short document - sometimes 10-20 pages - but a lot of thinking goes into it. Strategy doesn’t win on length. It wins on clarity. Ten good pages beat a hundred messy ones every time.