#2 The strategy Memo
On the second edition of your favorite — or hopefully, soon to be favorite — strategy newsletter we cover quite a broad range of topics, that might seem disconnected, but trust the process and you’re gonna see soon enough all the light bulbs clicking:
A) What the hell is strategy and what those people do?
This week I’ve tried out a few different networking apps (promise they’re not build for dating ahah) and during my first catch-up in Lunchclub a guy from the UK just asked me straight: “So you are a strategy manager, right? As the word its quite broad and vague, what exactly is that you do?”.
And for those that work with strategy, I’m pretty sure this time wouldn’t be a first, as for me certainly it wasn’t. Business strategy as a field is old-school, and has been there in any Management Course since the begging of times — or at least last 1–2 centuries. What happens though is that a lot of buzz was created around the world strategy — perhaps because it sounds fancy, and it moved from a description of an action plan, or a vision, to an untouchable concept that all teams are always working on. I’m pretty sure you heard at least 5 times today — ” the strategy for this quarter is, the content strategy is, tomorrow the strategy we need to run is….”
This is why I’ve started giving Business Strategy classes, to clarify some of the concepts to people and ensure we can get back the control over the whole subject of strategy itself, removing it from the buzzwords realm and actually understanding what it actually means for people, business and even governments.
One of my favorite definitions is that strategy is nothing more than the direction you want to move to, and how you want to get there.
“So, growing my business by 10x is a strategy”, categorically nope. A target is a target, or in this case wishful thinking, strategy is the how to get there and what “there” means. Of course everyone wants to grow their business by 10x, but if you’re strategy doesn’t decouple to you the levers you need to pull to get there, or the different opportunities you have to tap, it’s just a beautiful number in a dashboard. And if that’s the case, why not make it 100 so that it gets more exciting?
Bottom-line here is that not only people with the role “strategy” need to think and structure strategy. Given the fact that strategy is the compass of a company, for most early stage ventures this whole department is already expressed through the CEO which at these startups have a few top jobs to be done (and please pardon my french here) — Map the vision, Ensure everyone is moving towards this vision, and finally ensure the company doesn’t run out of money.
Also, hoping that someone knows everything about all areas and job functions + the market and the product is as well wishful thinking — even the best CEOs I’ve met cannot have it all on their regular human brain. If you want someone to absorb everything, then we build a ChatGPT or a Confluence. This means that in order to ensure the Leadership Team or CEO — depending on how big is your company — can define the right strategies, they need to be empowered with the best data and context, and here is where all of us help building up strategy.
And this is how most Strategy teams in startups are given birth: to organize the whole process of building up a Strategy. Alignment is “easy” when you’re 5 people, but when you become 500 or 1k maybe a bit less. And this folks is how one of the most famous family realms of strategy in tech companies are born — the Strategy & Planning one.
Of course there are a lot of different caveats and other areas, but I’ll cover it on the next newsletter 😉
B) Why putting the work “strategic” in titles and projects doesn’t make a strategy
I decided to call this one out explicitly — even though it could have been a paragraph of the previous one, so that you can get a sense of how relevant I rank this one as an issue!! When the word strategy per se starts losing its meaning, many teams and areas start to add “Strategy” to whatever they’re doing to take it to the next level.
A good exercise to be done to ensure we’re using the right angle of Strategy is to think “if you chose the work strategic by the word key, does the meaning stays? If the answer is yes, then you can just call it out what it is a key area, a key partnership, and so on… you can have as many keys as you want — even if I don’t recommend it, but strategy is one (or it should be one), and this strategy is broken down across multiple levels so that each and every one of us knows what is our contribution to it.
Moral of the story here, every time you see “strategic” somewhere, ask yourself is it really strategic, or we’re just using this one because it sounds better?
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C) Customer Support, and why you’ll keep seeing me complaining here
I try my best to bring some kind of order to my LinkedIn Content, even though my ADHD brain tends to always push me to chaos. Buttt, you most likely have seen me here and there doing some posts about Glovo , WordPress CAIXA , Path Social and so on.
This happens because I’m quite a vocal person when it comes down to Customer Support and this got even worse (or better depending on your angle) when I’ve started to manage Strategy for this team at Preply . Until then — and yes, it was a long time, I always looked into Customer Experience as cost line, even though I’ve read all these case studies and books about Zalando and Nubank .
One of my favorite metrics in this area goes a bit beyond the standard Customer Happiness / NPS or CSAT that teams usually track: Contact Rate. Here we’re looking into from all of the user interactions with your product, what is the % of that lead users to reach out to you — most likely with a problem. This one is amazing because, rather than simply ensuring that Customers issues are resolved in a timely manner, you start working on how to ensure that customers don’t have these issues in the first place, through policies and product.
Here its rather a mindset and cultural change than a simply re-adjustment of the team’s metrics and/or OKRs. I’d say this is of course the ideal world, which as you can imagine — and hopefully also knows — we’re quite far from there, yet.
Currently we see many situations where A) Reaching out to Customer Support is impossible, as the company are deflecting and “automating” all issues, but simply hiding how to reach them out ; B) Customer Support is outsourced to so many players, that the agents are simply more manual automatic responses, and are unable to fix out of the box to deliver an awesome user journey; C) Omni-channel means nothing, a huge buzzword a few years back, now we see many companies with multiple unconnected channels, and poor E2E experience, D) Efficiency vs Quality, of course we want issues to be resolved fast, but the HOW we do it impacts a lot long-term retention of the user.
D) Random insights/reflections
This edition we don’t have many because I was sick, but I still got some spicy content to share with you
Vida de Expatriado: my blog for brazillians who want to live abroad has a lot of new valuable content, so check it out
Mentorship & new branding: I’ve decided to finally embrace my cyber-punk vibes and launch my new website for content & mentoring focused on these Professor Fitti new path!
My 3 GPTs: check them out 😉
Approved to join adplist.org and have 2 mentor session this week 🙂
Listen to a podcast of the strategy memo instead of reading it 🙂
Using Preply to talk to my girlfriend family and friends!
Selected to Top50 on Business Continuity on Thinkers360
How I became an expat: video in portuguese
Any questions/feedback, drop me a comment bellow or write me a DM! See you in a couple of weeks!!
