Strategy and Vision
Strategies are grounded documents which explain the trade-offs and actions that will be taken to address a specific challenge. Visisoins are aspirational documents that enable individuals who don’t work closely together to make decisions that fit together cleanly. (Larson 2019, 3.3.1)
| Strategy | Vision | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Approach to a specific challenge | A gentle, aligning pressure |
| Character | Practical | Aspirational |
| Time Frame | Variable | Long-term |
| Specificity | Accurate, detailed | Illustrative, directional |
| Quantity | As many as useful | As few as possible |
(Larson 2019, fig. 3.4)
A strategy recommends specific actions that address a given challenge’s constraints. A structure that I’ve found extremely effective … has three sections: diagnosis, policies, and actions.
The diagnosis is a theory describing the challenge at hand. It calls out the factors and constraints that define the challenge, and at its core is a very thorough problem statements. … Before you’ve even finished reading a great diagnosis, you’ll often have identified several good candidate approaches. …
The second step is to identify policies that you will apply to address the challenge. These describe the general approach that you’ll take, and are often trade-offs between two competing goals. … When you read a good guiding policies, you think “Ah, thats really annoy Annay, Bill, and Claire” because the approach takes a clear stance on competing goals.
When you apply your guiding policies to your diagnosis, you get your actions. … When you read good, coherent actions, you think “This is going to be uncomfortable, but I think it can work.” (Larson 2019, 3.3.2)
If strategies describe the harsh trade-offs necessary to overcome a particular challenge, then visions describe a future in which those trade-offs are no longer mutually exclusive. (Larson 2019, 3.3.3)
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A good vision is composed of:
- Vision statement: A one-or-two sentence aspirational statement to summarize the rest of the document. …
- Value proposition: How will you be valuable to your users and to your company? …
- Capabilities: What capabilities with the product, platform, or team need in order to deliver on your value proposition? …
- Solved constraints: What are the constraints that you’re limited by today, but that in the future you’ll no longer be constrained by? …
- Future constraints: What are the constraints you expect to encounter in this wonderful future? …
- Reference materials: Link all the existing plans, metrics, updates, references, and documents into an appendix for those who want to understand more of the thinking that when into the vision. …
- Narrative: Once you’ve written the previous sections, the last step of writing a compelling vision is to synthesize all those details into a short – maybe one-page – narrative that serves as an easy-todigest summary. In your final document, this is probably the second section, following the statement. (Larson 2019, 3.3.3)