Jeanette Cajide

The best way to learn business strategy skills is to do the work. For example, take a company you love. Analyze their website, messaging, blog posts, social posts. Analyze their management team, their backgrounds, their social media posts. Ask websites for competitors and then do the same. In your own words, what are they doing well, and what could they improve? Then, research the industry. What is its growth trajectory? What are its micro- and macroeconomic indicators? For more details, visit public companies in this space and read their 10K/10Qs. Understand their revenue sources and cost components. The point of business strategy is to win. Where does the company have the right to win? You have to think out of the box.

I could write a book on this topic. The same way you would never drive a car without a gas gauge, you should never operate as an entrepreneur without a wearable device that monitors your biometrics. Signs to look out for: 1. Increase in resting heart rate 2. Decrease in heart rate variability 3. Too long or too short sleep onsite time 4. The balance between your REM and Deep Sleep 5. Sleep efficiency %, should be 90%, anything lower means you are not efficient in bed 6. Weight gain (or weight loss) 7. Increase (decrease) in appetite 8. Your eye twitching for no reason (stress/caffeine) 9. Your skin looks ashy & hair texture changes 10. For women, painful or absent menstrual cycle. Should I continue?

How you listen to and act on feedback is critical to turning around any business strategy. Leaders will say they have a learning culture, until they don't like the feedback they hear. This makes it nearly impossible to learn from feedback and without the humility to learn from past mistakes, any attempt to "pivot" will fail. There needs to be a culture of trust and an open feedback environment that is 360.

The framework I use is as follows: 1. The story of self - why you were called to what you have been called to. Focus on challenge or outcome to achieve or overcome. 2. The story of us - shared purposes, goals, vision. Similar to story of self, focus on big aspirational vision. What do people fear, love, want? 3. The story of now - the choices we MUST make, and the hope to which we, as a whole, can aspire. I learned this in Public Narrative taught by Marshall Ganz and if you look at how impactful it is in politics (Obama's speech in 2004 at DNC which put him on the map is textbook example), you can apply this to writing, pitching & storytelling.

Ensure that the entire team, from most junior to senior, are aligned on the business outcome targets of the project and know what success looks like at the biggest picture. Gone are the days where you can be a designer and not know the business outcome objective you are designing and building for. You must know the why. This will serve as a compass for the entire team to march in the same direction. Then everyone is aligned on vision, strategy and outcomes -- not just the senior team. Often times, development teams go from sprint to sprint without understanding the why. This leads to misunderstandings and unhappy stakeholders in the end.

In 2012, I launched the first meme creation app in the marketplace called Blurtt. I was a non-technical founder raising a seed round. Venture Capitalists were weary of my background. I reached out to Arianna Huffington after I was featured in several news publications and asked to be a contributor to The Huffington Post as a way to amplify my own voice. I wrote about topics like the impact of IoT on education and monetizing social media. My articles were frequently quoted by other thought leaders and researchers. This helped me establish my own voice as a non-technical founder. You don't need to know how to code to know what you are talking about. Don't let the opinions of others hold you back.