Strategy

Contents

Like product strategy, functional strategy (team, department, organization etc.) defines the highest-level of goals, what it means to achieve them and how they might be achieved. Strategy provides:

  1. Alignment. Everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.

  2. Clarity. Eliminate confusion.

  3. Focus. Signal, not the noise.

Adopt OKRs

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a conventional terminology for a simple concept, that’s lightweight in use and adaptable to changing conditions.

  • Objectives are your high-level, aspirational, one-liner goals.

    • e.g., "Improve product quality"

  • Key Results define what it means to achieve a particular objective.

    • They’re children of Objectives.

    • Objectives have a one:many relationship with Key Results. Contrary to orthodoxy, Mixed Management believes a key result can be defined as a metric OR can just be a task to be done.

    • e.g., "Provide user instructions", "Reduce known bug count by 75% from 100".

Adoption is simple:

  1. Author/revisit on a regular cadence e.g. schedule an annual/quarterly workshop, engaging interesting stakeholders.

  2. Track as tickets (Objective, Project for key results) in a backlog.

  3. Create a status dashboard/query in your ticketing system to provide at-a-glance status checking. Make it accessible to interested stakeholders.

  4. Monitor progress on a regular cadence e.g., a monthly meeting centered around the status dashboard/query results and what’s changed over the month.