Vision & Strategy: Balancing Aspiration and Execution

Having a vision is the easy part. Making decisions that consistently move you toward it? That’s where most organizations struggle.

Video Transcript

Mike Cottmeyer

The other thing that you said that I thought was interesting was the difference between vision casting and strategy. Tell me about that.

Andrew Young

In my stack, the way that I translate language or facilitate some of this is at the work level, you have an execution engine system of delivery, if you want to label it that. Above that system of delivery either needs constraints or guidance or factors to make decisions within. I would call that strategy. How are we going to create simple rules and patterns so that you can push autonomy? Are we a three point shooting basketball team or are we a layup basketball team? That could be a part of our strategy.

That’s different than the vision casting that says, I just acquired this basketball team for billions of dollars and I want them to be the best basketball team. I’m going to throw all the resources at them and I expect grand things like the Mark Cuban Dallas Maverick story. That’s a vision casting thing where I’m going to put the resources and the people and the things, but it’s less about the, I believe it’s to be done through the strategy. I think the strategy, actualizes vision, and too often I see we’re going to change the world and do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s our strategy and then a whole bunch of work product to connect it. That’s what I was meaning by that is mission, vision, values is not your strategy. That’s your foundation that your strategy is trying to help actualize.

Mike Cottmeyer

So, I could have a product strategy, or I could have a product vision that basically says, we want to take over this market. We want to have these kinds of customers. We want them to be able to do these kinds of things and to produce this kind of revenue.

Whereas turning that into maybe a roadmap, a series of bets, would the roadmap be the strategy for implementing that vision? What bets we’re going to make to realize the vision? Can I pull that thread? Is that a connection?

Andrew Young

Yeah, it’s a connection. I’m going to not use the word roadmap because it’s just a messy word. It’s probably because I think that there’s roadmaps at multiple layers. So sure, I’m with you on that. I think the strategy is the series of constraints and categories of bets we’re going to make. Even a layer below that is the collection of the near bets we want to make. And then the execution is how the roadmap of the things that make the strategy real, the tangibles.

Mike Cottmeyer

So, if we kind of agree what the level of vision is, the strategy encompasses the constraints and the categories of investment. So thinking almost like in our governance model, like an investment tier and the near term things that are in the roadmap to test to see if we are achieving what we need to within the constraints,

Andrew Young

Your strategy will have hypotheses and scale, and those are going to live at the same time, scaling moments and hypothesis moments, and your execution’s going to have to figure out how to do some hypothesis testing and a whole bunch of scaling at the same time. A part of strategy is hypothesis testing. It is not an input to strategy. The strategy identifies if we’re going to test it as a part of the bet,

Mike Cottmeyer

So, we have this vision of where we want to take the company, or we have this vision of where we want to take the product. We establish a set of constraints and areas of investment. I think that’s what I was hunting for. And then underneath that, not an input to that strategy, but derived from that strategy. We make a series of hypotheses or small bets that we then begin to execute on that start to inform whether the strategy is working. You see the connections I’m starting to make to multi-tier models in our system of delivery.

Andrew Young

And if I was to not try to use the same words that the layers we’re talking about, I think that we have vision casting and then we have a premise about a strategy the way we want to attack. If we stay in the sports metaphor, it’s we’re a three point shooting team versus a layup team or we’re a throwing team versus a running back team in football. Those are strategy premises for me. So I’m going to use the word premise there. We have a premise that given what we know about the things we have and the opportunities we have, we are best suited to be a throwing team. So we’re going to invest in good wide receivers and a quarterback with an arm versus a quarterback that can run and close any of the skills or practices or craft gaps to make all the other players realize what a throwing team looks like.

Cool. That’s our premise of it. And then what you said is, yeah, we’re then going to take a whole bunch of small bets and then this metaphor, that small bet is the name of this person as a wide receiver or this one play Xs and O’s move to left or to the right, and we’re going to learn from that small bet something quick, fast, incremental that we test contest in the market, test in our environment and say, oh, that doesn’t work at all to actualize that strategy. Our premise was right or wrong. So there’s two layers of feedback. There’s is the bet, right? And then if the bet was right, is the bet servicing the premise, you can have really good small bets that might not be in service of the premise of the strategy that we need to know early. So we stop wasting false positive information on bets that feel good but aren’t actualizing strategy.

Mike Cottmeyer

So, they’d have to be constantly tested to see if those bets are realizing our strategy. So we might say, okay, let’s see if we can pull the metaphors. So we’re going to be a throwing football team are over a running football team, or we’re going to focus on three point shots versus So in preparing to make that bet, we identify our players, we practice, we do the things, and then we go, we play the first game. Or maybe if we use the football metaphor, we’re in the first game, we’re going to exercise that through the first couple of plays, then we validate or invalidate that as a strategy and we may have to adjust.

Andrew Young

Correct.

Mike Cottmeyer

Just trying to see how hard we can pull the metaphor.

Andrew Young

Yeah, it was spot on. And I think in the way that you just told it, something that triggered in my brain was it is likely that your strategy is clear to others.

That’s not the differentiation. It’s how you actualize the strategy and the quality of the delivery of the strategy that we’re testing and responding to. Everybody knows that team’s going to throw it just because of the makeup of the bits and the bobs and the widgets, right? They’re a throwing thing.

And so would I change my strategy after one quarter of feedback loops, I don’t think I would say would change my strategy. I would say, oh, the bets we tested didn’t actualize the strategy. Do we need different bets to validate the how do I get more information that this strategy isn’t actually going to work right now? I have a hypothesis. It is working. I’m gaining early feedback that how is not actualizing the strategy and at what cycle do I want to revisit? Is the strategy needing to change or is the stuff that we’re doing to actualize the strategy need to change? That’s that investment tier relationship.

Mike Cottmeyer

We might get into a preseason game against a weak team and the strategy appears to be effective, but then we go into regular season play against the former Super Bowl champion and we realize that maybe the strategy was right, but maybe it’s the quality of the players or the quality of the plays that we set up that needs to be adjusted.

Andrew Young

Or if I stay in our metaphor, maybe the market shifted. Maybe everybody for the past three years has been moving to the strategy of throwing teams, and so all the defenses have adopted a strategy, learn to defend the throw. And so we get into our first serious game and we realize, oh, all of our competition and everybody from week one really built a strong capability to defend the past. Do we want to stick with that strategy or do we need to shift? Because there’s been a market shift in it two years ago, nobody defending in the past. That’s why we built this as a strategy. I think that that interface layer, you’re doing two things. Is it the quality of the competition or is it the market shift that represents a shift we need to account for?

Mike Cottmeyer

Yeah. Okay. So let’s connect the two ideas. I was intrigued by the notion of thinking about the world in bets and the idea of making smaller bets. We pulled that thread earlier. So let’s put the bet language in. So within our football frame, what constitutes a bet that we’d want to learn from and fail fast?

Andrew Young

Yeah. It’s also funny that we’re of the world of people who should be using sports metaphors. We are not the two. We’re probably not. Definitely. I think in this example,

Mike Cottmeyer

That’s why I didn’t pull the basketball metaphor. I can do a little depth in football, but not much in basketball.

Andrew Young

So, I think a small bet. So you’re getting into sizing of bets, and so I think about small bets in this scenario versus large bets. Spending all of your market cap on one Allstar wide receiver feels like a large bet. You’re committing to them for the full year. Okay, cool. Well, now I need to make smaller bets, and if my strategy was throwing, and I’ve got this one Allstar, what are small bets that I can test? And it’s how do you decentralize away from the Allstar? How do you decentralize away from the known player? So what’s a small bet? I can run a different play, run a play where that thing, whoever the Allstar is supposed to be, the one catching the ball is no longer catching ball, but doing the blocking as a disguise. So I think small bets could be in play strategy in our metaphor. I think you could then also put a small bet of the opposite to just validate the runnings, right? Or the throwings, right. Run a small bet to try and run and see what occurs. Yeah, I think it’s like the makeup of the plays would be the small bets, short passes versus long passes. Those are different variables you might want to do small bends against. We said throwing team, but we weren’t specific on the style of throwing.