Structure your business strategy
As I’ve grown my experience in business and the tech industry specifically, I’ve come to know how to navigate around complex teams, diverse cultures, multiple emergencies and lots of different offers & services. It can be daunting at first, thinking how on earth can I possibly be efficient in such a complex environment? I’ve found, the more I put structure around my day-to-day work life, the more relevant and productive I am.
Today I’m going to share with you the main steps I’ve put in place to address my business efficiently.
Set a tailored strategy
Often people will go through the exercise of QBRs or Development Plans because they have to, which will diminish tremendously the relevance and increase the likelihood of it just being a one shot presentation which they’ll never use again. Rather then that, view it as a map that will give you direction.
Be intentional about your strategy, take time to think about it and lay everything down:
What do you want it to achieve? What are your ambitions? What are the pillars you’ll rely on to move forward? What will be the resources you’ll need - financial, human? The activities you will drive, or others will drive on your behalf? How will you measure your progress? Set KPIs - Keep Performance Indicators - to easily know where you’re at: where you need to put emphasis, what’s left to do, what you’ve succeeded at.
All this helps you being super clear on what you need to do, on communicating to peers to onboard them with you, and on knowing who and what to leverage for your success.
Set a cadence
BE REGULAR! People you are interacting with are also drowning in complexity and work overload, if you are not consistent on your interactions, it’s very likely whatever you’re working on together will take longer to finish than it needs to, that you’ll miss opportunities and that you’ll loose their focus. Also, the more you interact with people the more you get to communicate with them, understand their problematic and build trust: which is critical to efficiently work together.
Set routines also for yourself: for example dedicate your Mondays to team meetings, every Thursday on pipeline reviews, once a month you sync with your marketing peer, your Friday afternoons to planning the week after and reviewing & updating your To-do, etc.
Plan in advance
Always. Be. Prepared. !!! The more you take time to prep the more efficient you’ll be: it’ll give you time to analyze the best approach to adopt, time to sink in all the aspects & details and be completely comfortable with whatever it is you’re working on. It will also give you a chance to prepare for different scenarios and to be even faster the next time you work on a similar project.
This is valid for presentations, speaking in public, projects, events - anything!
The more structured you are, the more you’ll be ahead of your work which will make it less likely for you to miss a deadline, an important email, or to have a fail on something.
The positive impact will be that you’ll be reliable and people will view you as such. Somebody who does what they say they will, who is responsive, and who knows their subject. Don’t we all want that!?!
Yes at first, it’s a lot of work, but once it’s done and set, having this approach can help you save time. That time can be used for networking, learning or participating in any separate activities.
I’d recommend building your business strategy in a slide deck without setting yourself limitations and going into as many details as you need to.
Then create a separate deck with 2 to 3 slides maximum, explaining that plan summing everything up and keeping only the essential.
This will be a wonderful resource that you can use when having short meetings with stakeholders and you’ll always have it on hand to present, create extra content from and share!
Try these practices and let me know the results you get!
Pauline