These decisions come from 5 simple questions:
- Where are we going?
- How will we get there?
- What matters right now on that journey?
- What actions do we take to move forward?
- How do we do the work?
Vision / Mission
Strategy
… which is why I like to lean on giants of strategy (because why try to reinvent the wheel?) like Michael Porter, Richard Rumelt:
- To be effective a strategy must first and foremost be completely honest about your current state – strengths and weaknesses
- Your business and product don’t exist in a vacuum – your strategy has to consider your competition and how you can differentiate yourself to them
- Strategy is about making choices based on those insights and taking action to overcome your challenges and capitalising on your opportunities.
Objectives
- Objectives are qualitative, translating your strategy into actions
- Key Results are measurable signs that the objective has been met
- Key Results must be outcomes, not outputs, because features, stories, bugs, or lines of code are all worthless if they don’t achieve an outcome
Opportunities
Finally I strongly encourage you to map all of this using Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree : “Mapping the opportunity space is how we give structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome.”