Strategy
Strategy is the thinking part before the work begins. It tells you what to do, what not to do, and how you will win. It is important because strategy creates work, and work consumes resources. Resources cost money. If your strategy is good, you are spending money on the right things. If not, you are wasting it.
A good strategy should answer two basic questions: what work are you going to do, and how will you measure progress. These two questions give clarity and direction to your daily work.
To decide what work to do, start by studying your competitors. If they are doing well, it means they are following a better strategy. You can learn from them. For example, streaks work well for Duolingo. If you are building a language learning app, you can consider adding streaks. Borrowing what works is not copying. It is smart strategy.
Measuring success is equally important. The goal of a business is to make money. That’s it. If you build a new product that users love but it doesn’t generate incremental revenue, it is not successful. In games, we track LTV, or lifetime value of a user. If a user pays $1 over their lifetime, their LTV is $1. This is a clear and measurable way to track success.
Your strategy should include details about the market and audience, who you are building for, how you plan to win, and what you are not going to do. It should also define your KPIs and timeline. These details make your strategy real and not just a set of ideas.
Your daily work should reflect your strategy. If something is not part of the strategy, you should not be doing it. Strategy is not a document to be written once and forgotten. It should guide your actions every day.
Strategy is built on insights, and insights come from reading and research. In gaming, one of the best ways to find insights is to play games daily. Over time, you will see patterns in how features are built. Write them down with screenshots. Writing helps you think clearly. You don’t write to revisit, you write to understand better. Talking to people can also give insights, but only if they have experience or have read enough.
Failing fast is a part of good strategy. Not everything you do will work. That’s fine. The key is to do things quickly so you can find what works and drop what doesn’t. This saves time and resources. Strategy is useless without execution. If your execution is slow, your strategy won’t succeed. Speed matters.
You should only revise your strategy if you find new insights and the current one is not working. If your strategy is working fine but you discover something new, you can include a few elements without changing everything.
Keep your strategy simple. Communicate it to your team, stakeholders, and investors regularly. Even if it sounds repetitive, do it. Over-communication is not a problem. Not knowing the strategy is. And if you can’t explain your strategy in simple words, you are not clear yourself.
In the end, strategy is about making the company grow. And, for most businesses, growth means making more money.