From Data to Strategy

Who is this for?

You are a team, division, or business leader who recognizes you could be doing more with data and strategy to lead your teams to the outcomes you seek. You know there’s more to customer research than focus groups, more to business metrics than revenue, and more to understanding your employees’ experience than engagement surveys. And you know strategy is one of many tools in your toolbelt to help your organization stay focused, excited, and engaged in continuous improvement. You haven’t been able to connect the dots between the data insights you gather and the strategy you need. If this sounds like your experience, this series is for you. 

Learning to ground your strategy in data insights takes time and energy. Often, the steps will feel easy - a bit of homework, a sticky note exercise or two, some exciting debate over ideas, more workshops, and lots of presentations. As with any discipline--language, singing, martial arts--it only feels easy once you’ve practiced well and for a long time. I will lean on over two decades of experience with firms of many types and sizes, from Google to five-person fintech startups and from the U.S. Navy to international non-profit organizations. As reflected in the works referenced throughout this series, I draw from the fields of finance, strategy, marketing, statistics, psychology, organizational behavior, computer science, human-computer interaction design, and even acting, improvisation, filmmaking, and music. I don’t expect everyone to engage with every reference; they are here for your further exploration and to ground this series in the work of established thought leaders in these fields.

Chapter 1 is a deep dive into my own evolving approach to gathering the necessary inputs to develop effective strategies. Chapter 2 covers translating strategy into objectives for teams and delivering results through continuous discovery. Finally, Chapter 3 tackles engaging management and employees in the ongoing process of sharing, iterating on, and putting into practice the strategy the first two chapters guide you to develop.

The Strategy Discipline

Strategy is often one of the more challenging disciplines for organizational leaders. It’s difficult to prioritize the time away from day-to-day operations and ongoing projects to slow down and think deeply. There is always a fire to fight, an emergency to solve, or an important customer meeting to take. It’s overwhelming to think about making sense of the unending streams of data at our fingertips. However, if you are disciplined in your approach to strategy, you will prepare your mind and the minds of your employees to reduce the number of emergencies, to handle the fires with ease, and to make the data sing to a tune everyone can carry.

I view strategy as the hypothesis or set of hypotheses management believes will add value for the customer and to the business and I consider four inputs into the strategic planning process:

Input Owners Example data
Customer insights Design, CX, Product Needs analysis (jobs-to-be-done), behavioral analysis, interests trends, segmentation analysis
Industry/Market insights Marketing, Product, Engineering Porter’s Five Forces analysis, Industry trends, market sizing, country and global trends, technology trends
Competitive insights Marketing, Product Product comparative analysis, VRIO analysis, V-C analysis
Business insights Finance, Marketing, People Ops Vision & mission statement, brand assessment, financial reports & forecasting, budget requests, employee engagement analysis

That’s a lot of inputs. A common issue confronting many firms is how to incorporate all these insights into the corporate and product strategy process, especially customer research insights. Assuming you are generating customer insights, and methodological sophistication aside, there are two categories of customer data we need as inputs to strategy: how users behave (quantitative) and why they behave that way (qualitative). As a firm matures, the sophistication of the inputs improves. Financial inputs upgrade from basic cash flow analysis and forward-looking estimates to statistical modeling and forecasting. Customer insights move from simple customer interviews and surveys to observational research and behavioral data analysis.

Once we have the inputs available, we need a process to incorporate the inputs into our thinking, generate ideas, refine those ideas, and engage employees and customers in bringing the strategy to life. I typically aim for a 3-5 year strategy, yearly reviews and updates, and quarterly objectives and key results. I use a five-step approach that can take a day, or a week, depending on how much time the strategy team needs.

  1. Synthesize: Review in-depth analyses of the customer and business needs, market/industry context, and current business capabilities to prepare for generating ideas

  2. Generate: Ideation sessions in small groups, individually, and large groups to generate as many ideas for solving the customer needs as possible

  3. Refine: Select the ideas with the most potential impact for the customers and business

  4. Hypothesize: Articulate selected ideas into hypotheses that can be measured and tested

  5. Engage: Present the hypotheses in approachable language as strategic initiatives and engage management and individual contributors in creating execution plans

In the next several posts we will go deeper into each stage. Next up is a strategy and operations playbook: a deep dive into gathering the inputs and putting them to use.

Coming soon: