The Lean Approach to Strategy
By: Axiom Zen
Tags: Innovation, Business Strategy, Agile, Business, Startup

A strategy is the plan a business uses to achieve their guiding vision. Every successful business has had a good business strategy, at least at some point.

But what once worked is no longer a valid foundation for your business’ strategy. The world is moving faster than ever. A company strategy needs to be cognizant of the current landscape, not the landscape from a few years ago. And the beliefs behind that strategy need to be tested, proven, and acted on before they expire.

Going beyond the PowerPoint

In the past, a company would hand a set of problems off to a strategy team, and get back a comprehensive PowerPoint deck. They would hand that deck to a design team, get back some high definition mockups, and finally throw those over to engineers for implementation. And the thing is — that model worked.

The PowerPoint approach was popular because it was successful for so many years, and it’s hard to give up on something that’s worked before. People and businesses alike prefer to do the same old until something breaks — and in today’s world, you need to be proactive, not reactive. Your strategy can’t play catch up.

Companies who get stuck in outdated thinking end up creating products that are obsolete by the time they’re built, created for a market that has already moved on. Unless you can predict the future, the playbook that worked so well in the past is doomed to failure.

Photo by Justin Tietsworth

The agile solution

For years, software developers have been advocating a move away from traditional methodologies with high theoretical predictability to the aptly named “Agile” and “Extreme” programming methods.

The basic molecule of an Agile project is the collaborative “sprint,” which emphasizes empirical feedback and team self-management. The “inspect-and-adapt” philosophy aims to always have a version of the project to test and compare against design and need, giving creators the flexibility to adapt a project to the changing world. No need to be a fortune teller — Agile workplaces move with the times. This philosophy is one that can (and should) extend beyond programming, and indeed beyond the tech industry. Strategy, design, and marketing should be in the game right from the beginning, creating a workplace that’s agile — with a lowercase ‘a’.

Proving the worth of your strategy

Successful strategy is more than a roadmap; it’s philosophy put into a plan, flexible enough to adapt over time but concrete enough that it can never be misinterpreted. Its foundation cannot be built on untested assumptions or outdated data from as few as two years ago.

Because Axiom Zen builds businesses on the edge of emerging technology, we can’t depend on past successes to justify our assumptions. We also can’t expect a partner to invest based on untested assumptions. Research, core concepts, and vision may be valid, but none of these are meaningful until they’re tested. Any guiding strategy needs to be proven in a current, real-world setting. And, assuming our thesis proves valid, we need to act before those assumptions become outdated.

Navigating this tension of fast-but-proven requires a slimmed down approach to strategy. We’ve spoken about the necessity to bridge thinking and doing in the past, but in strategy, it’s necessary for these two concepts to occur in sync with one another. As assumptions are proven or disproven, actions need to follow pace and the project as a whole needs to be steered accordingly.

The lean approach to strategy

Lean Strategy isn’t strictly new, but many companies flounder when they set out to bring agility to their workplace. They simply don’t know where to start. Effectively implementing lean strategy requires a reorganization of the basic molecules of a business, from the size of teams to the length of project timelines.

A successful company is built on intelligent, opinionated, and driven employees. Making sure those strong personalities work in tandem is critical to the success of a new venture, and the key to that success is ensuring that everyone understands the product vision as a whole. It means they can claim ownership enough to make key decisions, on the fly, that can have profound impact on product vision. That’s why agility isn’t only about moving fast — it’s also about moving smart. The need to constantly make decisions that could change your product from the bottom up is a strategic hazard of agile development, one that most companies haven’t been trained to tackle.

At Axiom Zen, we keep each project team small (under twelve) and multidisciplinary: designers, marketers, and strategists join every sprint planning meeting and standup. We all plan, track, and manage our work in GitHub using ZenHub. This centralization and transparency allows each team member to respond to learnings and variations from the plan immediately, but also to contribute input into the product early — building a powerful sense of ownership that is taken into every part of their work.

To ensure momentum and agility, our teams operate on sprints no longer than two weeks. If a project requires a longer timeline, we break it up into two week intensive periods. Designers, marketers, and strategists all attend the Design Thinking sessions, and all continue to work together as the project moves into production mode.

Photo by Redd Angelo

Overcoming the traditional approach to strategy

If companies don’t want to be one of the 40% of Fortune 500 companies that will be gone in ten years, strategy is the only way forward.

Unfortunately, the larger and more established a company is, the more difficult it is to effectively implement concepts like lean strategy. Titans of industry have to move in degrees; they can’t restructure, reorganize, and then pivot in a bold new direction without upsetting a precarious balance.

Traditional strategists focus on research and thinking, but once they come up with a strategy they hand it off to the doers and walk away. Lean strategy, on the other hand, provides a compass for the entire company. Through daily standups, transparent project management solutions, and a team that is constantly in communication from design straight through to implementation, teams can move in lockstep towards a goal they all share and understand.