Playing to Win
Hello and welcome to Small Batches with me Adam Hawkins. I’m your guide to software delivery excellence. In each episode, I share a small batch of the theory and practices along the path. Topics include DevOps, lean, continuous delivery, and conversations with industry leaders. Now, let’s begin today’s episode.
Hey everyone. I’m feeling a bit sick with a horse throat, just so you known why I sound a bit off. But, the show must go on.
I’m going to continue on the concept of flight levels the previous episode.
Today, I’ll cover one of the preconditions for flight level three. This episode also sets up the next guest interview.
Let’s begin with a recap of the flight levels concept. Flight levels divides the organization into three levels with different time horizons and levels of granularity.
Flight level three is strategy. It has the longest time horizon. This is the synthesis of vision, mission, and strategy by top-management. It’s the company’s direction and focus. More importantly, there is an understanding on _how_ to execute in the lower flight levels.
Flight level two is coordination, between levels and across teams.
Flight level one is operation. It’s where the work gets delivered, the product made and customers helped.
The model assumes clear direction and focus from the top of the organization. This is typically the executive team. If this not there, then there may a “shadow” or latent focus with activities like OKR setting and initiative creation masquerading as strategy.
This brings me to the topic of today’s episode: the idea of strategy and Deming’s two questions, “to what aim?” And “by what method?”.
I did not realize how uneducated I was on strategy until reading “Playing to Win” by Lafely and Martin. Reading it opened a door to another area of deep study. Now, I try to develop the strategic thinking leadership muscle each chance I get. This is because leaders, at all levels, have a role to play in strategy.
Lafely and Martin define strategy as a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: what’s our winning aspiration, where to play, how will we win, what core capabilities are required, and what management systems do we need?
These questions cascade downward. The first question, “what’s our winning aspiration?”, or as Deming phrase it “to what aim?” Drives the next question, “where to play?”.
That answer bounds the organization or team. It’s a focus point. The “where” could be a market, a country, or a given channel. The real value is understanding where we are _not_ playing. For example a company deciding on a B2B instead of B2C. Those a different playing fields drastically change the downstream choices.
Consider the next question: “How will we win?”. Winning with consumers versus businesses is so different. Consumers and businesses want entirely different things on different cadences with different financial commitments and different supporting services.
You can envision how the upstream choices drastically change downstream choices. This short example is just the tip of the iceberg.
The book covers strategy at Proctor and Gamble with numbers in the millions of dollars, company offices across the globe, and coordinating multinational product rollouts. Don’t let the scale fool you. Strategy applies to the big and small.
Here’s a short example of using this strategic cascade to lead my SRE team at Skillshare.
Our winning aspiration was: We know Skillshare is working for students and teachers as measured by dot dot dot. Skillshare has web apps and mobile apps. Where would we play? Product features on Web and infrastructure level service metrics. How would we win? Apply standard work for creating feature and service level telemetry, and put the whole effort through visual management and kanban. What capabilities would we need? Service tiers to sequence our efforts and an APM tool. What management systems would we need? Weekly ops reviews, core measurements to track progress, and a way to surface problems when we learned Skillshare _is not_ working for our students and teachers.
This is distilled version of an hour long presentation, so I cannot cover it fully on the podcast. Instead, I’ll write an annotated walk through of the deck for Patreon supporters and paid Software Kaizen subscribers.
Building this vision and supporting strategy was the best time we had in the team. Everyone was involved. Everyone knew what to focus on and what to ignore. Everyone knew how to track progress. It was pure flow, and an example of how a clearly articulated strategy that works with the team’s constraints leads to better outcomes.
Alright. That’s all for this batch.
This month, I’m giving away a copy of the book “Playing to Win”. Get entry details at SmallBatches.fm/113.
I’ll have Alex Nesbitt on two weeks from now to talk about strategy and developing strategic thinking.
I hope to have back again for the next episode, so until then, happy shipping.
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