Testing strategy: avoid the waterfall strategy trap with iterative refinement (Category Management)

Another interesting one. article Will Larson is writing his new strategy book. This chapter is about flexibly testing the strategy and improving it based on feedback:) As usual, Villa is very structural.

1) When should you test your strategy? When you want to understand how achievable it is and how much it will cost. In fact, the author suggests before its finalization to do ala PoC (proof of concept)This will allow you to collect the missing information. But sometimes you can't do that, for example, with a permissive strategy. (Its implementation is not expensive.)Waiting too long for feedback (Employment issues in different regions) Or when we’re pretty confident in our strategy.

2) How do you test strategy? Identify a narrow and deep element of the strategy, on which further iterative work

• Further on the metrics to assess the impact of changes Act on the assumption that people are well managed, and the failure of strategy is due to excess freedom and poor ergonomics Continue to improve your strategy until you are sure that the details of your strategy are working in practice or that it needs to be changed. Don’t be too broad at once, don’t push too hard to adopt a strategy, and don’t get too attached to your approach.)

3) Roles to test strategy The author highlights the role of sponsor and leader (guide). In fact, one authorizes the strategy and helps it happen, and the second implements it, monitors the implementation and excalates in case of problems. It's funny that I've been to both during my career:) It is important that this couple can make difficult decisions quickly rather than going into paralysis of analysis.

4) Meetings & Metrics The only requirement for the strategy testing phase is that the sponsor, the manager, and all key people working on the strategy must meet each week. During this meeting, you should look at indicators that reflect the current areas you are trying to improve, discuss what you have learned from previous indicators or data, and plan one-time checks to make sure progress.

5) Identifying strategies that have not been tested While not all strategies need to be refined during the testing phase, essentially all failed strategies skip the testing phase to move directly to implementation. Strategies that skip testing sound right, but don't achieve much. One of the most common patterns of failure is “pressure without a plan,” where the strategy is just a “sounds right” aspect with no details. ||I've seen a lot of these strategies.||

6) Recovery after missed testing After finding a hanging strategy that missed the testing stage, the author proposes to write a new strategy and this time include testing there in a separate step, and then start implementing it.

In the end, the author says that testing will not help to understand whether the strategy can be good. But it will reveal the missing details needed to bring the strategy to work:)

#Management #Strategy #Leadership #Software