Crafting Winning Strategies - Part One

Insights and their practical application: from Rumelt, Martin, and Blue Ocean Strategy

As product leaders, we often grapple with strategy development. Having facilitated numerous strategy workshops, I've found Richard Rumelt's work to be an invaluable guide. It’s at the core of the multi-day workshop, Strategy Sprint, that I recommend for product and business strategy. And yet the devil is really in how well can facilitator guide the team to stay critical. Guiding questions and exercises are invaluable here. Today, let's explore the "hows" from two influential works: Roger Martin's "Playing to Win" and Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne's "Blue Ocean Strategy". And then next week, let’s review how these insights can be put into a workshop that will guide a team to design a winning strategy!

Roger Martin's Five Strategic Questions

Last week’s interview with Roger Martin on Lenny’s Podcast reminded me of his work and his desire to create a practical framework. Martin defines strategy as "an integrated set of choices that compels a desired customer action." He proposes five key questions:

1. What's your winning aspiration?

2. Where will you play?

3. How will you win in your chosen field?

4. What capabilities do you need?

5. What management systems are required to support and sustain your strategy?

Any business team can have two options: differentiate or be a cost leader. Martin acknowledges that while cost leadership is an option, it often requires significant scale. For most, the path to success lies in differentiation.

Blue Ocean Strategy: A Framework for Differentiation

Blue Ocean Strategy offers a repeatable framework for differentiation:

1. Analyze competition factors in your industry

2. Understand their importance to customers

3. Map these factors on a strategic canvas

4. Use the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid to:

   • Eliminate or reduce factors overserved or unimportant to customers

   • Raise or create factors underserved or missing in the market

5. Discover the non-customers

6. Reconstruct market boundaries and increase your market

This approach helps you establish a unique competitive position and potentially redefine market boundaries to expand your total addressable market.

Synthesis

By combining Martin's strategic questions with Blue Ocean Strategy's differentiation framework, you can:

1. Blue Ocean Strategy essentially answers Roger Martin’s first three questions:

   1. What's your winning aspiration? (your aspiration is essentially what you are going to Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create)

   2. Where will you play? (Blue Ocean Strategy expanded market)

   3. How will you win in your chosen field? (Blue Ocean Strategy’s newly redefined positioning)

2. Identify necessary capabilities and management systems (Martin's questions 4-5)

Next week, let’s explore how you can craft a workshop around answering these questions and guiding the team to leading a winning strategy.

Meanwhile, please do share what have been the most successful frameworks for you? What are your favorite books on strategy? Have you ever experienced a truly transformational workshop that helped you and your colleagues craft a winning strategy? That’s really my goal - so I am all ears! Let’s grow together!