Strategy

The Five Hour Strategy Sprint

Published on
May 26, 2018

Starting a meaningful company takes superhuman effort. Founders often find themselves with far too much work to do and not enough time to do it. This will always be the case.

However, many founders make things much harder on themselves and dramatically increase their risk of failure by not effectively prioritizing work. For example, because they believe so much work needs to be done at the same time, they hire more people to get it all done at once, which forces them to burn through their runway faster, leaving less time, money, and energy to complete the initiatives needed to get to their next funding round or achieve their growth target.

According to CB Insights’ 253 Startup Failure Post-Mortems, around 70% of funded startups fail, usually around 20 months after raising an average of $1.3M in total funding. Twenty-nine percent of these founders reported running out of cash as a significant reason for their failure. While some of these companies probably would have failed under any circumstance (e.g. weak value proposition, wrong timing, etc.), how many could have avoided failure had they focused their energy, time, and capital on achieving clearly defined goals that were aligned with their business and product strategy and delayed a lot of work that might have been important but didn’t warrant attention until later?

The goal of a Strategy Sprint is to rapidly define where you are going, what you need to do to get there, and how you’ll measure your progress. Equally important is to provide a framework to help you decide what you can safely ignore, at least for now. By following this approach, you will not just define your strategy, but you will build a shared understanding of it, get buy-in from your core team, and establish a habit of continuously measuring your progress and refining your plan.

How It Works

The Strategy Sprint borrows heavily from several proven practices. Start by framing your business vision using elements of Brand Sprints, from Google Ventures. Then map out your business model, either with a simple flow chart or a more comprehensive business model canvas. Finally, define an initial set of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

Your agenda will look like this:

Vision (90 minutes)

  • 20 Year Roadmap
  • What, How, Why
  • Top 3 Values
  • Top 3 Audiences

Break (15 minutes - longer if you want to break for a meal)

Business Model Risks (90 minutes)

  • Review how you deliver value to our customers. Sketch a flow chart or generate a business model canvas.
  • What assumptions have you made?
  • What could go wrong?
  • How could you fail?

Break (15 minutes - longer if you want to break for a meal)

Objectives & Key Results (90 minutes)

  • Identify up to 5 ambitious objectives that work towards the vision and mitigate any risks
  • Identify up to 5 key results per objective that measure the degree to which each objective is met

Initiatives (90 minutes)

  • Identify the major company initiatives that may need to be completed to impact the key results and achieve the objectives

Covering this much territory in just five hours requires a lot of individual preparation, careful time management, and skilled meeting facilitation.

Even with the most thorough preparation and meeting execution, your Strategy Sprint is likely to surface new questions that require follow-up. Further, there’s a good chance that you won’t have all of the information that you need to define targets for all of your key results; and some of your initial target metrics might need to be refined. Make sure to tie up all of these loose ends as quickly as possible, after completing your sprint.

Finally, all of the hard work that you just went through to articulate your strategy will be meaningless if you don’t actually use it to guide your daily work; so enter your OKRs into tracking system (e.g. spreadsheet, Trello, etc.). Identify initiatives to help you achieve your objectives. Review progress against OKRs each week, refining your tactics as needed. Each quarter, review progress against OKRs, refining and re-defining them for the next quarter in another Strategy Sprint. This time, since you won’t need to revisit the Vision exercises very often, plan on reallocating this time to reviewing the last quarter and understanding how your business model risks have changed.

Who Should Participate

Make sure that you have the right people in the room for the entire session. This usually includes all founders, with one designated “decider,” usually the CEO. Depending on how far along you are, you might have more stakeholders. Consider including other employees, as well as advisors whose expertise would help. Ideally, you want up to six participants, most of whom will have a significant role in executing your strategy.

Getting Ready

To make the most of the Strategy Sprint, each of your participants should try to prepare independently. Don’t worry: this is mostly reading and thinking time, with some light sketching, just to help you form your point of view. If you write anything down, you won’t be expected to share it with anyone. During the sprint, you’ll share your individual ideas and make decisions as a team.

You’re probably already at full capacity with important and urgent things to do (i.e. tactical), so prepare for your Strategy Sprint as best you can, with the understanding that the Strategy Sprint is designed to provide a framework to help you more effectively prioritize work, which will make it easier moving forward to focus on what's important without being concerned about what isn't getting attention. It's important but not urgent (i.e. strategic).

To get started, review the Resources listed at the end of this article.

Think about your business vision, which is nicely covered by the first four exercises from the Brand Sprint:

  • Consider where you envision your company now, as well as in 5, 10, 15, and 20 years. Don’t worry about whether this is achievable or realistic; no one will hold you to it. You only want to identify a star to steer towards, so you can answer questions like how big do I want to get, how quickly do I plan to get there, and should I even raise venture capital in the first place?
  • Consider why you are doing what you are doing. If you haven’t done so recently, watch Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle” Ted Talk. I feel inspired every time I watch it!
  • Think about your core values. Having a common set of values will help you more effectively navigate the many ambiguities inherent in early stage companies, including making many of these strategic decisions. Remember to use your values to help guide your decisions on an ongoing basis, long after you’ve finished your Strategy Sprint, including being willing to fire employees and clients over them.

Once you’ve thought about where you’re heading, make sure that you can articulate how you envision your business working. This should be your current, working hypothesis, at whatever level of validation you have achieved.

  • Think about who your customers and your broader audience. How would you segment them? Why would they care about you? How would you reach them?
  • Think about how you deliver your product or service to your customers. How does your business work? If your business model is simple enough, try to map it by sketching a flowchart (nothing fancy) that depicts how you deliver value to your customers. If you find your flow chart is getting too complicated, perhaps because your business involves multiple channel partners, customer segments, revenue streams, and cost centers, try generating a business model canvas. You want to understand your business well enough to identify the key risks that still need to be mitigated.
  • What alternatives do your prospective customers have to buying your product? Remember to include DIY solutions and maintaining the status quo as options for your prospective customers.

Formulate some ideas about what your company will need to look like in 3 months and in a year. Now imagine what you need to do to make that happen and how you’ll know that you were successful.

Finally, take a moment to consider the impossible: what could cause your business to fail? Think about the fundamental assumptions upon which your business model is based. What evidence do you have that those assumptions are true? Think about most likely things that could go wrong and what you could do today to prevent that from happening.

Running a Meeting that Doesn’t Suck

Ok, now that you’ve all prepared, who’s ready to spend most of the day in a meeting? If we were in the same room, I probably wouldn’t see many hands go up.

"Meetings want to suck...  But meetings don’t have to be that way."

-- Jake Knapp, Google Ventures

To help ensure that your Strategy Sprint doesn’t suck, keep your team focused, engaged, and energized.

Start by making sure that you have a comfortable room and that you don’t have to struggle with distractions like loud noise, interruptions, uncomfortable seating, and out-of-control HVAC.

Manage your team’s energy. Encourage all of your participants to start the sprint rested and in a position to focus on investing their full attention in your strategy sprint, instead of feeling like they have to respond to tactical issues throughout the day.

Limit use of computers and mobile devices to break times and to capture output (you’ll want to take pictures with your phone instead of typing complete notes).

Schedule breaks and actually take them. This gives everyone a chance to quickly deal with urgent situations, or to just relax and clear their mind.

Provide light, healthy refreshments. Encourage your team to avoid heavy or high-sugar foods before and during the sprint.

Most importantly, try to ensure that your team sees that they’re making progress and getting value from their participation. One key to making progress is to timebox everything and don’t let yourselves get stuck on conversations that aren’t productive. Be strict but fun. Use techniques like Note & Vote to quickly make difficult decisions without groupthink but with buy-in from the team.

To keep your Strategy Sprint on track, make sure to designate a facilitator. Ideally, the facilitator should not also be a participant; each role requires one’s full attention. If you do not have another team member to facilitate your Strategy Sprint, ask one of your advisors or hire a consultant to facilitate.

About Growth Science

At Growth Science, I help you realize the full value of your innovations by optimizing how you work to make the most of your runway, to accelerate learning cycle time, and to reach your milestones. Having a clearly articulated business strategy, objectives, and a set of metrics to measure your progress towards meeting your objectives is critical to prioritizing work, which will allow you to maximize your focus on meeting those objectives.

Resources

I provide advisory and consulting services that accelerate your growth by streamlining strategy, marketing, sales, design, engineering, and operations.