Greg Coquillo

Before generating solutions, one must identify the different stakeholders and user personas that are impacted by the defined problem(s), whom may later be impacted by solutions. This allows you to prioritize users who are the most in need, while aligned with your available resources and capacity to solve a problem (ex: budget, time, talent). After all, during strategy execution, companies almost never sponsor all of the brainstormed solutions you’ll present in your business strategy.

Your strategy should include building for product stickiness. Your customers’ needs will evolve over time, and like change, they are the only constant. The way you deploy a product experience today will affect how you will change it to fit your customer’s needs tomorrow. So plan accordingly through strategic lenses.

Very few companies master the concept of a push vs pull system in the context of understanding and serving customers’ needs. Most companies focus on and excel at pulling the needs out of customers and develop the best experiences to solve problems on their behalf. But the companies who excel at anticipating customer problems in addition to solving “the obvious,” stay ahead as innovators.

A great competitive advantage also lies in the ability to surface and address the shadows of your strengths. Those are different and more subtle than weaknesses, which are often obvious. The shadows of your strengths are for example, the blind spots that cause you to ignore new disruptive ways of solving problems, hurting your business in the long run because you were too busy being strong and dominant.

Here the strategy will need to be slow to change, as it is directly connected to the company’s mission and vision. However, the tactics will need to be flexible, ready to learn from wins and loss, and quick for launching trials. Tactics should allow you to iterate fast, as new data is acquired, digested, and analyzed for continuous improvement and continuous deployment.

I would also assess the risks of not initiating change, and what the outcome of not taking action would lead to. In addition, I would evaluate the current position of competitors and how likely they are to implement this change, if market trends are leading in such direction. Lastly, I would take stock of all stakeholders (internal and external) of the organization, whom be instrumental to implementing this change, as their alignment would be key to deploying change.