Building trust in Strategy and succeeding with Survival metrics
Interviewing a B2B expert on how to build trust and focus in complex organizations, and how to validate your strategic investments
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Strategy in B2B has serious power dynamics. There often seems to be a fight between PMs and Sales, when in the end, hopefully, they are trying to do what's best for the company.
In this episode, we interviewed Adam Thomas, who has used multiple hats in the past and brings some advice on working with the different sides of the organization to create a trusted and focused strategy and how to keep validating your strategic investments with survival metrics.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
My takeaways from this episode
Scale-ups usually grow trying to figure out what products stick. They donāt have a āportfolio strategyā thinking or a defined previous strategy. So the new set of products needs a new cohesive strategy.Ā
This lack of strategy results in āFrankenstein businesses,ā which canāt run. There is no agility or speed to get results, which is risky for a highly competitive market.
Sales should be a partner, and we need to invest in helping them understand your way of working and build trust. If they are pushing and asking for the roadmap, it is the Product team's fault for not having ātrained themā and built the trust to work more healthily.
The but, therefore rule: you can create your storyline by saying, we want to do this and that, but we have X problem (the villain); therefore, we will take Y action.
Strategic Selection: base it on your strengths. In the Smart recruiter example, it was integration. So the actions for the strategy needed to focus on building an integrated product and experience.
Survival metrics are operation metrics that help you evaluate when to Stop, Pivot, or Invest. When teams use it for strategy, they help avoid sunk cost fallacy and decide if your strategy should keep going or change it.Ā
When implementing your strategy, you can build internal metrics on how teams work together: for example, āProduct Marketing should know and understand 75% of the prototypes we are buildingā. This helps ensure product managers collaborate early on with marketing to ensure the go-to-market strategy.
A problem of a Strategy department or Product Strategy function working with product leaders: on the one hand can be a real problem, like a SAFE model in which someone else is in charge of strategy, not the team. In a helpful scenario, it can help with tough and time-consuming aspects of strategy, like communication.
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