Strategic planning is not something that all of us do. Reading market trends, visualizing the bigger picture, taking risks, or being willing to let go of a short-term gain to focus on a longer-term impact is not easy. Placing a title on a person does not make them an overnight strategist either!
A great deal of disconnect can happen between teams that execute plans and teams that strategize. This is because the former doesn't get the big picture, and the latter doesn't see the devil in the details. Even when teams have ample freedom to frame and execute their plan of action, they are limited by the brief given to them by someone else who is thinking about strategy. They are essentially working on partial information, and with limited collaboration:
The Investment Game and the business value scores establish a forum for the strategic planning teams and the executive teams to align on common outcomes. In an evolving early-stage product, having all hands on board about strategy and execution can be great. Empowered teams can now enjoy complete freedom on how to execute their plan to deliver outcomes, while fostering collective ownership of what by collaborating with other business functions and understanding the constraints and aspirations of the business, and thereby committing even if they disagree on the why.
As illustrated in the preceding figure, empowered teams may be teams specializing in one aspect of product building (infrastructure, core engineering, and so on) or a business function (marketing, customer support, and so on). They are empowered to decide on how to execute their plan to meet desired outcomes. There is an organization-wide consensus about key business outcomes, and every team is working collaboratively towards meeting those goals. Each team has representatives who will share the detailed insights from tracking analytics, customer feedback, execution blockers, and other nitty-gritty constraints. Anything that can influence business outcomes will be bubbled up to forums where business outcomes are planned and tracked. This works only if this is a two-way street.
The leadership team must share, with equal rigor, blockers on the larger strategy. They must be able to rationalize a change in vision or business outcomes. At the beginning, teams can be quite uncomfortable when it comes to finding a balance between a five-year vision and a three-month delivery. Relating product strategic goals to day-to-day execution has to become an integral part of how product teams work. Cross-functional collaboration cannot be a luxury. It must remain an essential aspect of how we work. Teams should be enabled to focus on delivering outcomes. They can achieve this by working closely with other business functions. We need to move away from directives to maximize throughput. We need to stop blindly following requirements dictated by strategy teams.
This will require a change in how teams work. Higher collaboration on strategy and execution requires a higher level of Agility in teams. This also means that outcomes, deliverables, and key metrics are shared and easily accessible within the organization. Teams need to be able to adopt and leverage tools that can offer them the flexibility to share information and make goals visible.
Visibility (transparency) and accountability go hand in hand. When everyone is aware of the bigger picture, and the outcomes to pursue, not just success stories but also any failure to meet desired outcomes can be accessible by everyone. Once failures are visible, then fixing accountability ensues. This is another culture smell: when teams think about who to blame instead of what went wrong, and what can we learn from it. The problem is that in such a culture, it is easier to fix accountability on the implementation team rather than on the strategic planning team. It is easier to find fault when you have detailed specs with limited variables. It is hard to define what went wrong when looking at a high-level vision with many variables, many of which seem to not be in our control. This is one of the reasons why teams find it easier to measure output (productivity) instead of outcomes (success metrics). However, the framework of using impact scores enables us to quantify outcomes by comparing actual success metrics with desired outcomes. Unless there is ownership of the why, what, and the how of an Impact Driven product and high collaboration between stakeholder and business functions, then delivering impact will be at best ad hoc, if not impossible.