Quotes About Strategy

For startups, the role of strategy is to help figure out the right questions to ask.

A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions. It lays out a strategy that takes those assumptions as a given and proceeds to show how to achieve the company's vision. Because the assumptions haven't been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup's early efforts should be to test them as quickly as possible.

All innovation begins with vision. It's what happens next that is critical. As

When startups start to run low on cash, they can extend the runway two ways: by cutting costs or by raising additional funds. But when entrepreneurs cut costs indiscriminately, they are as liable to cut the costs that are allowing the company to get through its Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop as they are to cut waste. If the cuts result in a slowdown to this feedback loop, all they have accomplished is to help the startup go out of business more slowly.

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Entrepreneurship is a kind of management. No, you didn't read that wrong.

Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business.

Every business plan begins with a set of assumptions.

Once a team is set up, what should it do? What process should it use? How should it be held accountable to performance milestones?

Compare two startups. The first company sets out with a clear baseline metric, a hypothesis about what will improve that metric, and a set of experiments designed to test that hypothesis. The second team sits around debating what would improve the product, implements several of those changes at once, and celebrates if there is any positive increase in any of the numbers. Which startup is more likely to be doing effective work and achieving lasting results?

Departments too often spend their energy learning how to use data to get what they want rather than as genuine feedback to guide their future actions.

Startup productivity is not about cranking out more widgets or features. It is about aligning our efforts with a business and product that are working to create value and drive growth. In

Startup productivity is not about cranking out more widgets or features. It is about aligning our efforts with a business and product that are working to create value and drive growth.

are we making sufficient progress to believe that our original strategic hypothesis is correct, or do we need to make a major change?

speed and quality are allies in the pursuit of the customer's long-term benefit.

The true measure of runway is how many pivots a startup has left: the number of opportunities it has to make a fundamental change to its business strategy.

identify the elements of the plan that are assumptions rather than facts, and figure out ways to test them.

But everything changed when they made one small tweak to the product. They added to the bottom of every single e-mail the message "P.S. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail" along with a clickable link.

It was time for a pivot or persevere meeting.

Startups also have a true north, a destination in mind: creating a thriving and world-changing business. I call that a startup's vision. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, which includes a business model, a product road map, a point of view about partners and competitors, and ideas about who the customer will be. The product is the end result of this strategy (see the chart on this page).

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution