Has anyone ever asked you to “be more strategic”? Here’s what that means
Strategy for beginners, how Starbucks lost its soul, and a food safety pointer (Issue #274)
“Being told you need to be more strategic is common feedback for senior engineers,” writes CTO and technical advisor Dan Pupius on Medium. (He was Medium’s Head of Engineering a decade ago.)
It’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot throughout my career, and it’s usually thrown around without a precise definition. The gist seems to be to work smarter, not harder, but it’s unclear how to apply that phrase to the messiness of inbound emails and Slacks, some of which might simply require hard work.
For some background, I dug through the Medium archive and found this story by product designer Stephanie Irwin. Irwin draws a clear distinction between a plan and a strategy. A plan is basically a to-do list, but a strategy is a set of choices that position you in a way to win. Or, in the words of Pupius, strategy is “a framework that guides decision making.” If you’re doing it right, you’ll have defined your priorities in advance, giving yourself permission to say no to work that doesn’t serve your goals.
And if you’re not strategic? As Irwin explains, “You may feel incredibly busy, yet months pass… and that dream or goal you have still hasn’t happened.”
Pupius’s example: You’re an engineer whose product seems to be getting buggier (that’s not great) and you want to catch issues before they hit production. An easy, not-super-strategic solution? Simply add more tests and/or a manual QA phase. A better, more strategic path: End-to-end automated tests of critical user flows. This gives you a framework for understanding what kinds of tests you want to add, and how you’ll prioritize them.
For a far deeper dive into the decades (centuries, even!) of meaning hidden behind that “be more strategic” comment you might hear during a performance review, I recommend spending some time with Roger Martin’s Medium archive. He’s written a book on this topic (Playing to Win) — and, in this brief history, traces business strategy all the way back to a 1911 Harvard Business School course on military strategy. In both military and business contexts, as Martin points out, the art is to achieve a sense of equilibrium (peace, basically) between yourself and your competitors. You want to “get your desired positioning and have your competitors largely satisfied with theirs — to create as positive-sum a game as circumstances allow.”
☕ Your responses to our newsletter about “third places” (and Starbucks)
Last Thursday, we sent a newsletter about Starbucks’ attempt to reclaim its position as America’s go-to coffee shop and “third place” (a zone of connectedness and community between work and home). Many of you responded thoughtfully, on both Starbucks’ business prospects (it’s not doing well lately) and the importance of “third places.” Here are a few responses that stood out to us:
I lived in Seattle when Starbucks was in its early days. It still had a “3rd Place” vibe then, but I had a front seat to the changes. IMHO, the two biggest things Starbucks did to ruin the brand:
1) Replace skillful baristas with push-button, automated espresso machines, eliminating the art and know-how of pulling espresso. This created an army of “fake baristas” and removed the craft from the coffee. […]
2) Centralized and standardized food offerings. This is the biggest reason I tend to avoid Starbucks. Their food looks anemic, generic, and totally unappealing. In the old days, they contracted with local bakeries and vendors and had quality items that varied somewhat among stores. Now, it all comes in shrink-wrapped from a central hub.
[…] As with so many businesses they let “efficiency” and the bean counters steer decisions that have impacted their brand for the worse. — A. Wyatt
Trying to reclaim the community/coffeehouse vibe is a big lift for a corporation whose actions have consistently degraded that experience over the years. Actions need to align with that aspiration and should be directed within first. Get your house in order before inviting company over. Improving the barista experience will improve the customer experience. — R. A. Jones
🥬 Some practical wisdom
Food expiration dates are confusing because there’s no national system. A rule of thumb someone should have taught me in elementary school: “Use by” is a safety threshold (don’t cross it unless you’ve frozen the item beforehand); “Best before” is a quality threshold (fine to cross if you’re okay sacrificing flavor or texture).
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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