How to Build a Cohesive Strategy-to-Execution Process

You have a Management Operating System – do you know what it is? Is it effective? In today’s fast-paced business environment, an effective Management Operating System (#MOS) is no longer a luxury - it’s a necessity. As a leader aligning strategy with execution, ensuring enterprise-wide collaboration, and driving continual improvement are integral to success and can all be achieved through and effective MOS. To drive success, a leadership team needs to have the right conversations, at the right time, at the right level, to facilitate decisions based on the right information. So how do you put a system in place to achieve that? Here are the steps: 1)      Start with your purpose: As Simon Sinek states, you have to #startwithwhy. You can’t solve for what is important until you know where your organization is trying to achieve. 2)      Define what success looks like: use measurable objectives and key results (#OKRs). Define what success looks like for your organization in the current period. 3)      Identify your external requirements: every team has a set of external requirements that you don’t control.  Board meetings, your boss’s meetings, reporting to the street. What are the deliverables required to meet those deadlines? 4)      Identify your internal requirements: your team has its own requirements. A business has to focus on daily operations, contracts, employee engagement, 1 on 1 meetings, etc. 5)      Schedule your routine: build a meeting cadence to get alignment on your external and internal deliverables ahead of their due dates. Build reviews of your OKRs into those routine meetings to drive execution. 6)      Adjust the routine: your plan, do, check, act review of the routine will drive adjustment as you better understand and flush out additional deliverables. 7)      Tighten up your meeting hygiene to elevate performance: pre-meeting agendas with pre-reads, and post-meeting summaries with defined actions / decisions will drive efficiency among the team. 8)      Increase Accountability: have an action list that is tracked with due dates assigned that gets reviewed regularly with the team. #Leadership #ChiefOfStaff #Management #BusinessStrategy #ContinuousImprovement #OperationalExcellence #EmployeeEngagement #BusinessGrowth

Senior leaders carry a silent burden: Strategic responsibility. Most strategies don’t fail in the planning phase. They fail in translation. Not just setting vision. But aligning execution. Building leaders. Sustaining momentum. And here’s the insight most overlook: Strategy only works when your people carry it. Not understand it. Not agree with it. Carry it. 🧠 72% of strategic initiatives fail (McKinsey). 🧠 Only 16% of frontline employees understand company strategy (HBR). That’s not a communication issue. It’s a leadership one. If your business strategy isn’t backed by a leadership strategy, it’s a gamble. Want it to stick? Do these 5 things: 1️⃣ Translate goals into behaviors. Don't just say “prioritize innovation.” Clarify what innovation looks like at each level. 📌 Tip: Use behavioral anchors in strategy rollouts; tie each priority to 1–2 observable team behaviors. 2️⃣ Build leaders who can make decisions under pressure. Strategy means nothing if your managers freeze in the fog. 📌 Tip: Run “battle drills” (what if) leadership scenarios, practice decision making with time pressure, tradeoffs, and limited info. 3️⃣ Make ownership obvious. When it's unclear who’s driving what, execution slows. 📌 Tip: Assign one clear owner per initiative and review progress in weekly team check-ins, not quarterly reports. 4️⃣ Incentivize behaviors, not just outcomes. You can’t drive strategic change by measuring the wrong actions. 📌 Tip: Tie performance reviews to behaviors that reflect your priorities, not just deliverables or numbers. 5️⃣ Audit alignment quarterly. Most organizations revisit strategy once a year. That’s too late. 📌 Tip: Schedule quarterly strategy audits to identify misalignment early and recalibrate execution. The best leaders don’t just talk strategy. They engineer execution. Comment Below: How do you make strategy real for your team? ♻ Repost if you want to lead with more clarity and less chaos. I’m Dan 👊 Follow me for daily posts. I talk about confidence, professional growth and personal growth. ➕ Daniel McNamee

Frequent shifts in focus can lead to a company's downfall. Chasing new ideas without a clear strategy results in a scattered and overworked team.    Having a new direction every week leaves the product development group in a loop of constant adjustment, leading to burnout and eventually, key staff departures. The root issue often lies in the absence of a clear, well-articulated strategy that guides decision-making on new opportunities.    Breaking down the overall company strategy into a three-layered stack - business strategy at the top, followed by product strategy, and supported by technical strategy, ensures a well-coordinated approach towards achieving company goals. Each layer provides critical inputs to the one below, forming an interlocking sub-strategy stack. Simplify the business strategy focusing on specific, measurable goals and resource allocation. A good business strategy is simple, clear, and can be explained to a new employee in a few minutes. Translate business milestones into a product strategy tailored to product development. The product strategy takes business milestones as its goals, with resources and constraints modeled in a product development context. Develop a technology strategy to support business and product milestones. The technical strategy outlines the people, tools, and technologies needed to achieve product milestones.    Treat the strategy stack as a living document, iterating and improving it over time with real-world feedback. Regular collaboration between the CEO, CPO, and CTO to compare goals and progress ensures the strategy remains aligned and effective in navigating the startup through resource depletions or new constraints.

I'm working on my 2024 Strategic Plan. Eye-opening. 👀 Being a product of the product is so healthy. It's become my second nature to step into other companies and lead their strategic plan. However, I didn't realize how hard it is to stop the day-to-day to think and plan the future. Hence, I've been doing it in the early mornings and the weekend. A strategic plan is the greatest superpower to create clarity and alignment. It makes leading easier. 💡 Here are 7 #StrategicPlanning Tips: 1️⃣ Start thinking and ideating for at least 2 weeks. Great ideas don't show up in the moment. You need your subconscious mind to be whacking at ideas long before you come to consider and vet ideas. 2️⃣ You have to get out of your surroundings. If you want inspired thinking, get to inspired places. If you stay in your office, you'll likely get the same thinking associated with your day-to-day. 3️⃣ Confront the brutal facts in the rearview mirror. You can't accept mediocrity in parts of your business only to expect outsized growth. Makes no sense. Then, commit to making those changes as you create your plan. 4️⃣ Create the future in this way: Goal -> What -> How -> Vet Start with the top-level GOAL. (Usually top line revenue) Then, figure out WHAT needs to happen (Objectives). Then, drill down to figure out HOW to execute the WHAT (Projects). Then, VET the operational, financial and human capital to execute your plan. Ask: Who do we need to hire, and what gaps do we need to close? Fact-checking the plan enables you to lead more effectively because you are convinced you can achieve the plan. 5️⃣ Write the plan. I'm serious. It doesn't exist if it's not in writing. Share the plan across the company to create clarity, alignment and the opportunity to ask questions. 6️⃣ Load your Objectives, Projects, Tasks, Owners and timelines into a Project Management board. This drives transparency and accountability. It also creates asynchronous communication that accelerates the achievement. (I call this the Clarity Code) 7️⃣ When you create the plan, include the metrics and guardrails for the HOW. If your hypothesis is wrong - or the execution is poor, you need to know quickly. Otherwise, you'll be far into the plan with subpar performance - and not even know it. If you're working on your 2024 plan or want to see the framework I use to vet your plan, comment "Strategic Plan," and I'll send it to you directly.

Recently, I've been reviewing various methodologies for company alignment, goal setting, and execution. With an endless number of approaches available, and everyone having a personal favorite, one key takeaway stands out: the specific methodology is less crucial than the discipline to consistently apply the methodology you select. Select one, adapt it to your business and style, and establish the rhythm and discipline to use it consistently. A methodology that resonates with me is "The 4 Disciplines of Execution" (4DX), from the book written by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling. 1️⃣ Define your Wildly Important Goals (WIGs):  Focus on a few high-impact goals rather than being spread thin across numerous objectives. 2️⃣ Act on Leading Measures: Identify the leading indicators to monitor daily or weekly that are pivotal in achieving your WIGs. 3️⃣ Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: Notice it refers to a "scoreboard", not a "scorecard". A scoreboard drives transparency across the team and is a key element of driving behavior and accountability. 4️⃣ Create a Cadence of Accountability: Regular check-ins and transparent conversations ensure you're on track and on pace for achieving your WIGs. Thomas Monson once said, "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates." I like the 4DX methodology as it's simple and effective in driving alignment, execution, and performance. But, I'm always looking for new methodologies and strategies to consider. What's your go-to methodology for creating alignment, driving execution, and increasing performance? #saas #leadership #4dx #execution

This is your friendly planning season reminder that if you are ONLY using some sort of effort/outcome score to prioritize your roadmap, you’re only part way there. Effort/outcome scores are a great way to identify the most efficient things to do – but they don’t account for: ❌ % of goals met ❌ Goal distribution across your portfolio ❌ Key foundational levers ❌ R&D/Innovation ❌ Run the Engine / Care and Feeding ❌ Timing factors ❌ Competitive threats ❌ Changes in the market ❌ Changes in technology Almost invariably (YMMV), your outcomes will suffer BUT it won’t be clear why since you prioritized your roadmap! Better is to: ✅ Create a goal-oriented roadmap so that every effort is aligned with a strategic goal (this is the O from your OKRs, if you use those) ✅ Develop clear success metrics and manage to those metrics, not just perception ✅ Determine what % of your team’s efforts should be applied to each objective across your portfolio, including things like Innovation (fun!) and Care and Feeding (oft forgotten) ✅ Use MOAR - Metrics Over Available Resources - as your scoring tool, as this will help you align efforts with those goals and account for outcomes in addition to monetization (I know, but leading indicators, trust me) ✅  Implement Responsive Product Portfolio Management, where you align, allocate/re-allocate, and adjust in an iterative cycle based on the metrics you’re seeing, and changes in the market/tech/competition. We all end up in annual planning, and the New Year can be a great time to kick off excellent new product habits. See if you can get your team aligned around these and watch the magic happen 🪄 ______ I’m Lisa Schneider. As a fractional CPO, I help founders and CEOs identify the right things to build to align with business goals, provide frameworks for prioritization and cross-functional alignment, build outcome-based roadmaps, and streamline teams and processes to deliver faster. Reach out any time if you’d like to learn more or just brainstorm. 🔔 Follow me and ring the bell on my profile to get notified of new posts. #startup #fractionalcpo #roadmap #productmanagement #strategicplanning

Building a security program without being aligned with the business occurs when teams get disconnected and start operating outside the context of the business goals. It’s like a ship navigating without GPS - it might be moving, just not necessarily in the right direction. Understanding where to focus your efforts means understanding what will drive the outcomes that make the most meaningful impact to our business’s goals. 1️⃣ Learn how the business’s goals map to the work of other leaders across the company. Business-wide goals rarely map directly to security efforts. “Prevent hacking” isn’t likely to be a business goal anymore than “Ensure employees get paid” or “Make sure the logout button works”. As a leader, you’re expected to take company-wide goals, your knowledge of the security domain and the context of the business and operations to synthesize them into a strategic plan. 2️⃣ Educate others on the importance of resilience to business goals. A narrow view of “security” doesn’t cut it anymore. We need to ensure resilient systems, able to adapt to failures regardless of whether they’re from security incidents or something else. Kelly Shortridge has done tons of amazing writing on this topic. The shift involves adopting a holistic perspective that encompasses the interactions between the systems that make up the entire organization. 3️⃣ The bread and butter - Risk assessments and threat modeling. Based on what you learn about how the goals relate to the various systems, processes and work, you have a higher fidelity feed for whatever framework you use to assess the risks to those goals, how they might happen and how you can reduce their impact. 4️⃣ Mapping to projects and efforts - You’ve learned the goals, how they map to work and priorities, and you’ve thought through how they could break or fail. Now’s the time to translate it into your strategy and plans. Look for ways to address upstream root causes and don’t fall into the trap of attending to symptoms. What are the leading indicators of success and how will you move them? 🔁 Repeat! Incentivize ongoing communication and circular, free flowing feedback between the security team and other parts of the business as a top priority. Alignment is a continuous process, not an endpoint. Teams need to always be considering what they’re building, how they build it and why in the context of the business at large. An aligned security program is not just a set of generic best practices but a tailored strategy that best supports key business goals. ❓ How do you keep your teams aligned with business goals?

Leadership competency refers to the combination of skills, knowledge, behaviors, and attributes that enable individuals to effectively lead and influence others toward achieving organizational goals.   We all want and need competent leadership throughout our organizations. It encompasses qualities essential for successful leadership in various contexts and can be developed and refined over time. Leadership competency happens faster in organizations that utilize an operating framework. This is because it allows their people to learn and lead others while remaining steadfastly focused on needed business outcomes. The right operating framework provides the structure that creates discipline within the organization, providing a way to align, lead, and direct people as they execute the business. Leadership competency means that individuals on the team will be managed individually. When an organization performs at its highest level, it is always performing three activities; it is clarifying, deploying, and achieving organizational initiatives. It's getting done what needs to be done while monitoring, measuring, and tracking everyone's contribution along the way. This is strategy execution at its best as it provides leaders with a complete understanding of their roles and responsibilities. It gives them the competency they need to succeed. Having an agile execution discipline informs everyone on the team what they need to do and by when. It is meticulous in detail and has the ability to be adjusted or change at any moment. Within an operating framework for execution: * Everyone on the team is aligned and has a clear understanding of where the organization is going and why (vision), * Strategic Initiatives are written, collaboratively developed, and assigned to those teams and areas most capable of accomplishing them, * Individual goals and tasks are also clearly written and link directly to one or more of the key company initiatives, * Progress against the initiatives is measured and monitored consistently (every 30 days at a minimum), * The framework provides data and information in real-time allowing leadership "line of sight" into everything happening in the organization. The discipline that comes with working within this level of detail develops your people, who always know what is expected of them. It surfaces and exposes those on the team that can be counted upon to deliver needed results and those who are not a good fit for their position. Getting results and developing your people requires direct investment in your people. An investment that develops in them the right leadership competencies. Are you developing your organization's leadership competencies? #ceos #leadership #competency #execution To learn more on this topic and other areas of leadership, subscribe to my newsletter at: https://lnkd.in/gKaqqhPC

🤔 Is your team truly optimized - or just going through the motions unaware how their roles interlock and contribute to the broader strategy of the business? Want elevated synergy across your organization? Invest in a KPI Tree. 🌳 Navigating complex businesses demands a multidimensional view of interconnections of the building blocks of the business. Yet all too often, team efforts operate in silos without clarity on their place in the bigger picture. KPI Trees clarify connections between efforts throughout the organization. They ensure everyone knows: 📊 Key metrics that propel the business 🔗 How their work contributes up and down the chain ⚙️ Interdependencies between departments To build your KPI Tree framework: 1️⃣ Start by defining your core outcome metric –  growth, margins, satisfaction? 2️⃣ Break that outcome down into key components using a logical and mathematically connected structure 3️⃣ Attach clarifying questions to each metric to ensure understanding. Who does this metric and why does it matter? 4️⃣ Engage teams in the process so the KPI Tree represents operational reality. Adjust as you gain insights together. A KPI Tree shows the full picture by: 🔗 Mathematically linking KPIs to illuminate interdependencies 🗣️ Providing a common language to discuss the business 🌐 Surfacing connections between domains that once seemed distant 🔍 Clarifying each role's fundamental impact in the greater scheme Are you ready to cultivate next-level execution? Invest in a KPI Tree to maximize your potential through organization-wide alignment. #metrics #analytics #strategy #KPIs #execution https://lnkd.in/gu7nuSqh

Maximizing Product Launch Success: My 8-Step Method (With an actionable, step-by-step example) BACKGROUND: Launching a new product to market is complex and filled with challenges. Common Product Launch Challenges: → Unclear market needs → Misaligned product features → Inadequate go-to-market strategy → Poor stakeholder alignment → Ineffective launch planning → Limited customer feedback integration A successful launch requires a strategic and methodical approach. Here's how I ensure success: PROCESS: Understand Market Needs → Conduct thorough market research. → Identify gaps your product can fill. → This step is crucial for aligning your product with market demands. Example: Identifying a need for a user-friendly project management tool in small businesses. Define Clear Product Goals → Set specific, measurable objectives for your product. → Ensure these goals align with business strategy and user needs. Example: Aiming to acquire 10,000 active users within the first six months. Develop a Robust Go-to-Market Strategy → Plan your market entry meticulously. → Consider pricing, distribution channels, and promotional activities. Example: Leveraging social media and professional networks for targeted marketing. Align Internal Teams → Ensure all departments (development, marketing, sales) understand and support the launch plan. → This unity is key for a coherent and unified product launch. Example: Conducting cross-functional workshops and (bi)weekly check-ins to align goals and responsibilities. Create a Detailed Launch Timeline → Develop a comprehensive plan with key milestones and deadlines. → This helps in tracking progress and ensuring timely execution. Example: Setting specific dates for beta testing, marketing campaign launch, and official release. Incorporate Customer Feedback → Use beta testing or early access programs to gather user feedback. → Make necessary adjustments to the product based on this feedback. Example: Tweaking features based on beta tester input to enhance user experience. Execute the Launch → Implement your go-to-market strategy. → Monitor the launch closely for any immediate issues or opportunities. Example: Coordinating launch day activities, ensuring all teams are responsive and engaged. Post-Launch Review and Optimization → Analyze launch performance against set goals. → Identify areas for improvement and plan for continuous product development. Example: Using customer feedback and performance data to plan the next feature updates. CONCLUSION: Successfully navigating these steps ensures a strong product launch. And sets the foundation for continuous product growth and success. // Summary: * Understand Market Needs * Define Clear Product Goals * Develop a Robust Go-to-Market Strategy * Align Internal Teams * Create a Detailed Launch Timeline * Incorporate Customer Feedback * Execute the Launch * Post-Launch Review and Optimization