Reference visits to the company and thoughts on strategy (Category Management)

Over the past week, I’ve learned the beauty of visiting other companies. Such excursions are different - sometimes you have excursions and tell different stories. Focusing on a specific product

• Pure marketing. Global, where the stages of company development intersect with digital changes at the state level Strategic, where a company’s strategy is described as some path within its industry

From such visits, I realized that I like strategic reports, when the speaker can clearly tell about the situation. - Evolution of the company and the steps it has taken up to the present moment. - Current worldview.: What do we do and why? What don't we do and why? How are we different from our competitors and why is it difficult for them to replicate their business model? - What plans for the future?: Where are the efforts focused? Why bet on them? How these plans will be implemented: How does the company feel about innovation? How do you test hypotheses? What is the organizational structure and division of areas of responsibility between business verticals, product and IT, cash cows and investment projects? Of course, you can add a lot of interesting topics for discussion, but as Antoine de Saint Exupery said.

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing to remove. As a result, if I hear a talk put in such a framework, I understand that the company has a strategy and the employees understand it and can explain it easily. And this, I think, is the key to the success of the strategy.

I would also like to point out that reference visits allow To see with your own eyes what is happening in the company: in HQ, production premises (They will only show the public part.) Get first-hand information: in reference visits, the speaker can often be asked additional questions to clarify details (However, not all of which they answer.) Make a comparison: your company and the one you came to visit (You have to be careful and remember the joke, “Well, you say that too.”)

In any case, after such a reference visit, it is very pleasant to sit down in the evening calmly with Perplexity and Chatgpt and continue to cross-validate information, ask clarifying questions, collect the necessary statistics to test hypotheses and so on. And on the way out, get in your head an understanding of how the company works and what is useful from this can be derived:)

#Management #Processes #Leadership #BusinessStory #Engineering #Software