 All right, so let's dive right in. So this presentation starts with a story. Allow me to share that with you. It started with when I was hired to work with a small financial company to revamp their customer experience. What does that mean? There was a small community bank. They serve, right now, the majority of their customers are over 50. 15, 20 years? Imagine that a lot of those people will start pulling out of their money, or they might not be around to even spend their money. So now the big question is, so who were brought up to answer that question? And when I was brought up on what their strategy is, right away, that depending on what department they worked in, they had different goals, different objectives, different understanding about where they want the business to go next. Now, this just showed by then and there that they weren't really in harmony about what their strategy really is. They had a sense of what their business is, but they didn't know where they wanted to go or what they want to become. So now I had to really figure out for myself, OK, how do I get these guys aligned around the strategy? So I had to get all of them starting to think like strategists. So now what is a strategy? Now, I know a lot of us probably are familiar with this concept. It's just really someone that's skilled in planning the ways to get things done. But what does that mean, get things done, especially when you're talking about building a digital business? Because that is what they were trying to do, something more digital. Well, I had to really train them or educate them in understanding that the ways to get things done is to define goals, actions, and tapping resources in order to make things happen. It's more than just setting goals. So the person that actually tapped me to do that job actually pulled me in. They sent me this diagram. I know you guys are familiar with this diagram. And I did not make this up. This is something that a lot of big corporate people used to try to explain how they want to craft their strategy. But here was the problem. Each person in that, how many people on that team? About 10 people. They all had different ideas about how this would work. So now we had to really set a baseline for them about how they needed to have their strategy. Because in the meeting, people were asking, so what does this all mean? And what they're really asking is, what does this all mean so that I know how to do my job? Project managers, business analysts, how can I use something like this so that we can start building digital products? So we needed to start crafting context around how to use a model like this. Because if you're really trying to do product strategy, it's not about trying to control the strategy itself. It's about establishing some clarity so that all your stakeholders will be actually inspired enough to move forward on whatever it is you're trying to build or whatever type of business you're trying to create for the market. So let's get clear on a few things. By the way, this deck will be available on that Meetup page. I'll be sure to post the link to the deck so you can get all these details. But I'm going to run through these really quickly, because I'm sure some of you guys are reasonably familiar with what these things are. Now, I had to really reduce the definitions of things, especially for this team, because depending on where they got their information from, they had different ideas about what these things were. They weren't wrong. They just weren't aligned. So it was about getting them aligned. So I had to get them aligned around what is a vision, what admission, and what is the values. Something simple as a vision being the ideas you must have in mind, and a mission as the desired outcomes you want to have, and values, the things that matter to you as important. They had a reasonable idea, but they didn't know how to get them all aligned. But let's just run through the rest of them. Let's get clarity around what goals are, and there's a reason why these are not highlighted, because when we got to the goals part, when I asked people to, all right, share with me your goals for the year. They all had pretty good ideas when they were sharing their goals, but here's the thing about goals. Of what I should say, here's the thing about ideas. Ideas that are not well thought out are nothing more than just unclear goals. So you can sit and write a nice laundry list of goals, but if you don't have a way to measure their progress, then the goals are not clear. So any idea that you come up with that you're trying to put into a strategy as a goal, you have to have ways to measure them, which include plans, tactics, objectives, and strategies. Now you saw those terms back from that earlier diagram, but you will see how these components all come together to form a relationship, which is the overall strategy. So I want you to just pay attention to these for a moment, and you can see how these tie into each other. When you're talking about crafting a plan, you're talking about steps you take so you can meet objectives. And when you're talking about tactics, you're talking about tools, techniques, and resources. And if you really think about it, this is where a lot of people, this is where a lot of people on their job exist. This is where a lot of project managers exist. This is where a lot of business analysts tend to exist. They tend to focus on the tactics, but not necessarily looking at the desired outcome. Now here, I know I talk about the overall strategy, but an overall strategy actually is a collection of strategies. And the strategy itself is the decisions you make based on the available tactics in order to meet the objectives. And once you've met the objectives, that's when the goals are realized. So I had to teach them that you're not trying to work towards a goal. You're trying to meet a set of objectives so that the goal can come into effect. And that's when they really started to realign where to focus their energy. But in light of what I just said, what's missing here? Someone said it, who said it? Thank you. That's the thing that was missing here because when I went through the exercise with these people at the bank, they were sharing objectives, but they didn't have the objectives aligned with any of the goals that the boss had in mind. So we have to now try to get everyone to align around what an objective actually is. And why do we have to do this? Because if you're trying to communicate these things to your team, you need to now try to explain to them why these are the things you need to have in order to achieve your goals. So now that we went through all the components, now they want to know, okay, how can I use this on the job? So I figured the best way to explain them how they can use these things is to use an example of a product that they all know and love, or at least I love it. So now we used a case study from Grubhub about their food delivery app. We had some partners that we worked with in Grubhub, so we went to them just to ask a few questions around the strategy behind that app. And we also, we read a few case studies, which is why I asked you guys just to read this particular study. But we used Grubhub as a sample to say, how would Grubhub use a model like this for their digital product strategy? So this is how they would flow through it. Now what is their vision? Now just remember, Grubhub is more than just an app, it's a company. So when you talk about what's their vision, it's not about the vision for the app, it's the vision for the company. So what's the vision here? To be the best on-demand food delivery service in the world. They didn't say to be the best on-demand food delivery app. They want to be the best service in the world because remember, Grubhub is more than just an app. They have a network of partners and restaurants that work with them. And that's what makes Grubhub Grubhub. So that's the vision that they strive for. So whenever you're writing a vision, when it's time for you guys to work with your team as far as crafting a vision, here's some tips that I actually tried to share with them. Write it in a way where it inspires people. It shouldn't be too long and don't include all of the details that you would have under everything else in that triangle, the missions right down to the plant. It needs to be succinct. Now, what is their mission? Now with Grubhub, their mission as a company is to connect millions of customers with restaurants in their locations. And while they're doing that, they want to help restaurants improve their efficiency and deliver more orders. Why? If they don't deliver orders, then they're not going to make business because a lot of their business is commission-based. For every order that a restaurant sells, they make a commission. So it is in their best interest to make sure that enough people who use their app connect with customers and it's in their best interest to make sure restaurants have what they need to deliver orders. They do more than just build an app. They actually provide the hardware and the support around creating that order processing process in the restaurant. So that's why I try to tell people, whenever you're trying to build a digital business, don't just think about the app. Think about the business to support the app. So that's how you would craft a mission for a company like this. And if you're going to do that for your own company, when you do build digital products, write your mission in a way that tells others why the service exists. Tell them why this thing is here. You built this thing, why did you build it? And keep it short. And like I said before, keep out the other things within the elements of the triangle because you don't want to conflate your communication at this level. And when I get lower down, you'll see what I mean by you don't want to conflate things. Now, what are their values? What is important to them? What is important to Grubhub to ensure that they adhere to their mission so that their vision is realized? They want easy and hassle-free food process. They want large restaurant selection for diners, more orders, more deliveries, and reliable customer service for all of the partners that are involved. This is what means the most to them. If they stay focused on these important things, then their mission is realized and their vision will be in effect. So that's why I say here, when you're writing values, be specific and make them easy to do. Well, should I say easy? Just make sure that they're able to do them. Because if they're not able to do them, that's a quick way for them to realize, well, this is not important to me because I can't do it. So just make sure that the values behind your business that you're building this digital product for is aligned in that way. Now, with goals, there's a specific context around goals. Because yeah, you can pull up a dictionary and find out what goals are. You can talk to any professional around what goals are. But if you're talking about goals within a product context, what is it? Is what you want your customers to recognize about that product? What do you want them to know about it? What do you want them to think about it? What do you want them to feel about this product as you're putting it on the market? Well, as you can see here, their goal is for everyone to recognize that the Grubhub app as the best food delivery app on the market. These are the things that they tend to reiterate to different people whenever they're talking about Grubhub, whenever they're evangelizing. And they also want to ensure that the Grubhub Courier app works successfully for couriers and they want to make sure the dashboards work well for the restaurant. Because if these things don't all work together, then their values are not upheld, their mission is not being accomplished and their vision is not being seen. You see how I keep rolling back up because you need to make sure that that relationship is in effect as you're coming down. So when you're writing goals, notice I say here, you want customers to recognize what your product is about. What I mean by recognize? What do you want them to know about it? What do you want them to think when they see it? How do you want them to feel when they see it, when they interact with it? And be mindful of acceptance criteria. Now what is acceptance criteria? Just be mindful of what are the details that need to be in place for you to consider that something is done. That's really more of a business analyst term, but that term can be applied in the situation. Just try to keep in mind of what those details are to make sure that something is done so that you can move forward in your timeline. And I'll talk about timelines later on. And also when you're writing your goals, focus them on performance. Because you're competing in a market here. So if you're going to be competing, then your goals have to be along the lines of, well, what do we want the product to do well? Or what do we want it to do best? If you're not focused on what it can do well or do best, then why are you existing? Now what are the strategies? Like I said here earlier, these are the decisions that you want to make based on the tactics that are available to you in order to meet certain objectives. So now look at how these objectives read. They want to make decisions around making sure that they provide diners, couriers, and restaurants with easy to use apps and dashboards. And they also want to make sure that diners have a large restaurant selection. And they also want to make sure restaurants have an easy and affordable and reliable delivery service through providing software solutions. And they want to make sure all the diners and their partners have quality customer support. These four decisions that are being made here are now going to drive all of the tactics and everything that falls below it. So any decision that you're now going to make, whether you're trying to buy a new project management tool or you're trying to buy a prototyping tool or anything around that, the question you need to ask yourself is, will this tool support any of these strategies? And when it's time for you to go to your senior manager or even the CEO to get that money to pay for those tools, keep in mind that senior manager, this is the world he's going to be in. So whatever you want him to buy, you want to make your arguments towards these strategies. We need to get Adobe XD because we need to make sure we're doing these prototypes properly enough so that we can make sure that all our diners and partners are getting quality customer support. That will resonate with him because this is where he lives. He or she lives. So when you're writing your strategies, be mindful about how you distribute resources. When you're coming up with those strategies, there is an implication about how you're going to organize resources, which means there's an implication around how money will be spent. And while that money's being spent, be mindful of the acceptance criteria. Because sometimes when you're buying, if you want to, it's like saying the difference between buying the full product suite of Adobe versus oh, I just want Photoshop and another editing tool. Be mindful of the trade-offs. Now what does that mean? When you're crafting your strategy, I'll go back. When you're crafting this strategy here, you're also suggesting that a certain amount of resources will go towards accomplishing these strategies. But when that happens, if you put resources towards something, what's going to happen? Something else will not get enough resources depending on your budget. That's a trade-off. So you got to look at things from an economical perspective. So when you're crafting your strategy, be mindful of the trade-offs and inform people. So if you want X amount of dollars to go towards a certain experiment, then you know that means, okay, well I need to let finance know that X amount of dollars is going towards this experiment so we might not have that money allocated for something else. That's a trade-off. You want to let finance know so that finance can now decide, okay, if this money is going to go towards this experiment, then I probably need to let event management know that we might not have that party next month. It's, be sure to inform the larger team around whenever you're crafting your strategy. Now, once you're done, once you understand what the strategies are, now you have your marching orders. You need to now go craft all the objectives to make sure that you are successfully, you know, following through on these strategies. So in Grubhub's case, what are the objectives? They want to establish the right company operations and communication channels. The right partner communication channels, hardware, software. This is where most of us tend to live before you even make it to like a real executive level. We're trying to do all of the company organization work here. This is where a lot of the conflation happens because what I was noticing on the job with these clients is that they were talking strategy when they were really talking objectives. They were talking wishless when they should really be thinking about understanding where they want to go, which is really what the strategies were for. What they should be doing is they should keep these in mind and then figure out here what kind of, what are the objectives that we need to meet to ensure that those strategies are successful. So now when you're doing that, when you're crafting objectives, here's a rule of thumb that I tried to give them. Objectives are physical. They're not abstract. The abstract idea I would argue is division. That idea that they set at the top, that is the abstract idea that they want people to be inspired around. But when you get here, this is where the rubber meets the road. So for objectives, they need to be physical, not abstract. And they need to be so physical that you need to be able to identify ways to measure progress. So if one of the objectives is to make sure, we'll need to make sure that we need to have 1,000 tablets to ensure that these 1,000 restaurants have all the hardware they need for their dashboards, then that number alone, you use that number to measure your progress. That's just a simple way to put it, but that's what I mean by objectives of physical, not abstract. Be able to quantify how you can measure an objective. Think of the things that you need to complete, build, and or buy. This is where you can sort of get into the wish list piece, but just make sure that they are aligned with achieving that objective itself. So if you need to complete whether it's building teams or building inventory or setting up processes, that's what completing things means. Same thing here for building. And it also means if you need to build software or if you need to buy software or even hardware as well. But when you're crafting these objectives, you will need to think about these options because these will then determine how deep your pockets are. And be mindful of the cost. And that's where also the trade-off comes in, like I talked about earlier. Because when you get here, this is where your credit card bill is gonna really go up. So you really need to understand how you're allocating money or at least talk to the people who are managing the money so they can understand the impact of the things that you're suggesting that we need to now achieve in these objectives. Tactics, this list is much longer than what it suggests here. But the point is here, this is where depending on the size of the company trying to build what types of resources do you need at your disposal to make this company successful. In the Grumthub case, on a high helicopter view level, this is what they would typically need, access to designers, developers, tools, and not just the tools themselves, but sometimes the methods, whether you wanna use agile methods or waterfarm methods or a hybrid method, that's what that bullet means. So everything that you see here, these are all the kinds of discussions that they're going to need to have to now figure out how are we gonna meet our objectives so that we can meet, so we can make sure our strategies are successful so that we can achieve these goals to make sure that we're on task, we're on mission so that we are still focused on what the vision is. That's how you're able to roll these things up. So now when you're talking about tactics, make sure you have your strategies on hand. If you're in any meeting where you start talking about tactics, whether it's tools or methods or how many meetings we need to have, have those strategies on hand. Those will strengthen your argument towards the decision makers. You can't just decide on buying a tool because it's cool. Instead, you should say we should buy this tool because it will help us target a particular objective or it will help us target a particular strategy. They can speak on that level. What else? Like I said, think about again who or what you need to complete, build, and or buy. And I also mentioned pretty much at this level, you might need to hire people. So when people are talking about oh I need another designer for my team or I need to create a new office, that's a tactical decision. That's not a strategy decision because if someone wants to create a new office, then the next question, if you're a very, very high-up manager, you need to ask yourself oh you need to create this office? You need a new designer? Okay, for what reason? What strategy are we using this for? Did we change the strategy? What's the goal? If you're trying to hire this person, what goal will they help us to achieve? As a product manager, this is how you'll be able to communicate with the decision makers to gain influence. And once again, be mindful of the cost and trade-offs and let them know. You don't need to be in charge of the budget but let them know the budget will be impacted. And now, here we are now, action plans. Once again, this list can get really long but I'm pretty sure that these things are familiar to you guys. This is where people start to really start crafting their plans over how they're gonna design the product. In the office, as far as running the office, who will hold certain management roles and what will they be responsible for? Key points are contact. Just why do we have key points of contact? Because like I said on the earlier slide, we need to open up communication channels. These are one of the plans that you need to draft to make sure that your communication channels are open. So if we were to do this in reverse, matter of fact, if we were to do this in reverse, your action plans are supposed to help support these tactics so that you can meet these objectives to make sure these strategies are successful in order to meet these goals because this is what the company values and this is the mission that they agree to because they are clear about being successful in this way. So now when you're drafting your plans, when you're in that meeting or when you're in that strategy session, have your goals and objectives first so that you can then decide how are we gonna lay out these sequence of next steps and then identify tasks to be completed and I think anyone who's a project manager will understand this. Identify tasks to be completed regularly, periodically or specifically. Attach a schedule and I'm not advocating for any particular project management tool or any product management tool. I'm just saying no matter what tool you get for this, just make sure you're doing at least these things and most importantly, make sure you keep your schedule updated. So that's pretty much how I went through this entire triangle with this team and then they really needed to start. It made the team really do some soul searching as far as what kind of business did they wanna be within the next five years? And that helped them to even look at some of the ideas that they had for products and then they started asking the questions, okay, these products that we might wanna build, does this fall in line with where we wanna be as a company? The things that we want to do as a company, will it align? These are the questions that they started to ask themselves based on establishing the definitions upfront in context with their business. It wasn't just about grabbing random definitions, they had to do it within context of the business that they were doing. But that's how a strategist, or at least in that situation, that's how we managed to get them thinking more like strategists so that they can then understand not just what they needed to build, but how they wanted to go about doing it, how they needed to be mindful of the trade-offs and ultimately how they can shift their business towards being digital. I really hope this all lays out things pretty well. But I will say this, I've been listening to this a lot lately because it has a lot of really good stories and anecdotes around what is good strategy and bad strategy. I will give you some advice when you're listening to this book, pay attention to the differences between strategy and goal setting. Because if any of you guys have been sitting in strategy sessions in the past, you might notice that when people have strategy sessions, they're really doing just listening to a lot of goals. And that's true. And that's why I'm not saying pay attention to the framework. I'm not saying the framework is bad. I like their framework from a philosophical perspective because there's no one good way to craft a good strategy. But what that guy talks about as far as, he talks about three things. And in this book, he talks about three things, but it's very philosophical in how he talks about those three things. That's why I'm saying the stories, the stories that, the interviews that he does, because you know he interviews different people, including Steve Jobs and some other people and some military leaders and what have you, they all look at strategy ways. But one of the things that does show up in this book is that when they are strategizing, they do decide on what do they want to tackle and what they don't want to tackle. That's the key thing here. And what do you want to be and what do you want to be? Exactly. Whereas the examples of bad strategy in this book were the people who were just thinking goals upon goals and bigger goals. And yeah, no, that's impossible. You know, no one can do that. So that's why I say when you listen to this book, if anything else, pay attention to the difference between strategy and goal setting. Because when you really get the distinction between the two and you start working with your product teams and crafting a strategy, you wanna be able to get them to explain these things as simple as possible. Because if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. With that being said, I wish you guys the best of luck in going out there and helping product teams craft their strategy.