Killing Big Strategy

Killing Big Strategy | Teehan+Lax.

Great article about digital strategy and how we need to think a bit different and break away from what might work for traditional strategies.

So what does a new model for digital strategy look like? There are two key parts.

The first is getting to a minimum viable strategy that will focus the team’s creative energy in the right direction. I always ask myself: “What is the minimum amount of work we need to do up front to get to an informed working backlog?”

Our team has a series of tools that we use to do this. The one we like the most right now is the jobs-to-be-done framework. It’s a fairly simple idea to understand, but more challenging to execute. The premise is that your customers have functional, emotional and social jobs in their lives that they might hire your product to do. Uncovering and understanding these jobs is the best method we have found to make product design decisions that will lead to something that solves problems real people have.

The second part is to start making things. If you started with 360° that you could potentially start walking in, you’re now able to focus the team in an informed direction that you can start exploring. Start small. Experiment with different approaches. Test your assumptions in code and refine your understanding of the problem as you go. Instead of conceiving in a vacuum, you will discover new problems and opportunities that you only could have uncovered by exploring, experimenting and testing.