Strategy is all about choices that compel customer action.

It's like choosing the right dance move to get everyone on the floor, and buddy… you can never go wrong with the Electric Slide.

9 Tips to Craft a Winning Strategy

Why Read:

• Gain insights on developing and implementing effective business strategy, from differentiating your offering to building sustainable competitive advantages.

Featuring:

• Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan), Author at  Lenny’s Newsletter and Lenny’s Podcast interviews Roger Martin (@RogerLMartin), Author and Strategy Advisor

• Link: 

  “5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker)”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

1. Focus on compelling desired customer action: 

   • "Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action."

2. Use the strategy choice cascade to develop your strategy: 

   • "You have to have answers to five questions. What's your winning aspiration? Where to play? How can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't? And then, what enabling management systems do you have to put in place?"

3. Aim to either differentiate or be the low-cost provider: 

   • "You have to be either differentiated or low cost, there's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two."

4. Practice strategy regularly to improve: 

   • "I have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist. Great strategists have all one thing in common, they just practice."

5. Frame your winning aspiration in terms of customer benefits: 

   • "I just think those tend to be stronger, strongest, if there's a link. Because remember, what is strategy about? Compelling desired customer action. So, everything ties back to that."

6. Develop capabilities that are hard for competitors to replicate: 

   • "You have to ask yourself the question, can I serve a particular customer need with a set of capabilities that are going to be hard to replicate by my competitors? They either can't do it, or they won't do it."

7. Build a moat through complex, multifaceted capabilities: 

   • "The more nuanced and multifaceted your capabilities and management systems are, the more likely they're going to say life's too short."

8. Don't wait to work on strategy: 

   • "People say, well, I've got all these operational concerns right now, and then I'll get to strategy later. You'll never amount to anything. Nobody who says that ever amounts to anything."

9. Recognize that maintaining a competitive advantage requires ongoing effort: 

   • "Capabilities and management systems are what both build and maintain the moat, and the maintaining is an important part because if you are the most successful, people are going to say, I want to do that too."

The Power of Default On Features

Why Read: 

• Learn an effective strategy for increasing feature adoption and user engagement.

Featuring:

• Jaryd Hermann (@jarydhermann), Creator at How They Grow

Link:

• “Is this thing on?”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Understanding the Challenges of Opt-In Features:

  • Point: Recognize the difficulties in getting users to adopt new features that require active discovery and activation.

  • "As product builders, we so often fall into the trap of creating features that require users to discover and adopt them actively. Having polished and useful features that are mostly ignored isn't all that uncommon. We build features we believe in, but there's always the uphill battle of getting users to actually try them."

• Implementing the Default Adoption Trick:

  • Point: Consider making new features automatically enabled for all users to increase adoption rates.

  • "Build products like a microphone at a concert or comedy show. When performers step on stage, they just grab the mic and start their thing. Unless ironically, they're not tapping their mic saying, 'Is this thing on?'. Of course it's on, and it's not something they even think about because they're on stage to get something else done."

• Recognizing the Power of Default On:

  • Point: Understand the benefits of defaulting new features to "On" for immediate impact and faster learning cycles.

  • "95% of users keep their default settings. That could be the end of this essay. 🤣 But to go deeper, defaulting new features to 'On' clearly has a lot of potential. You get immediate widespread impact (since your reach is 100% on day 1). You save yourself the need for adoption campaigns. There's a far higher likelihood that your users experience value."

• Validating Before Implementation:

  • Point: Spend more time in discovery to ensure the feature adds value for most users before defaulting it to "On".

  • "Validate!: You want to spend more time in discovery to make sure you're right that the feature adds value for most users. This is an emphasis on assumption testing before building. The extra time spent here is fine because you're accelerating your time to impact on the other side of the release."

• Monitoring and Iterating Quickly:

  • Point: Closely track usage and feedback immediately post-launch and be prepared to make rapid changes.

  • "Monitor closely: This should go without saying, but it's almost more important to track usage, performance metrics, and feedback immediately post-launch when you have 100% adoption from the get-go. Iterate quickly: You'll be learning a lot faster, so have resources at the ready to make any changes based on early data and user reactions."

• Creating Seamlessly Integrated Features:

  • Point: Aim to design features that feel like natural extensions of your product's core functionality.

  • "While defaulting features to 'On' can drive rapid adoption, the real magic lies in designing features so seamlessly integrated that users don't perceive them as separate entities to be turned on or off. You want to build things that feel like natural extensions of your product's core functionality, enhancing the user experience without disrupting it."

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