Strategy

The 'Strategy' element of Ecosystem Team management focuses on researching the market to understand customer needs, creating an ecosystem vision and strategy that will guide the work of the aligned Product, Internal Product and Enabling Teams, and tracking the outcomes to ensure the strategy is effective.

Principles and Practices

Effectiveness

Principle	Context	Practice
The goal of a business is to create and keep a customer	We need to solve real problems for users and not just build features.	By understanding market trends we can create a strategy based on real problems that need solving.
Some goals take time to achieve	We need to help teams understand the long-term ecosystem goals to help drive short-term progress.	By creating and evangelising an ecosystem vision that focuses on the customer we can align and inspire teams with how our ecosystem will improve people's lives.
A list of goals is not a strategy	We need to understand the conditions that are preventing us from achieving our goals.	By diagnosing the current state we can more accurately identify our target markets and the value propositions that will resonate with them.
When everything is a priority, nothing is	We need teams to focus to avoid spreading too thinly and failing to achieve any of the targets	By documenting an ecosystem strategy that makes the difficult choices about what not to do we can ensure that teams are focused on the most important things.
Fail to plan, plan to fail	We need to identify the key ecosystem goals so we can align the work of the aligned Product, Internal Product and Enabling Teams.	By running an annual planning process that identifies the key business objectives for the year we can ensure that all of the teams are aligned and working towards the same goals.
Trust, but verify	We need to ensure that the work that the Product Teams are doing is delivering the expected value.	By implementing a Weekly Business Review between Product Teams and Ecosystem Teams we can identify variance from the expected value early and take corrective action.
Strategies are not always the most effective	We need to enable people across the company to challenge strategies that are failing to deliver.	By automatically triggering a strategy contest for Ecosystem Teams that are failing to deliver the expected value we can encourage people to share their ideas.

Efficiency

Principle	Context	Practice
There is never enough information	We need to move forward with our strategy based on the information that we have at the time.	By documenting an ecosystem strategy based on the information that we have at the time we can move forward. We can always adjust the strategy as we learn more.
Gathering information from teams takes time	We need to ensure that the ecosystem team does not become a bottleneck for information flow.	By collating a ecosystem roadmap based on the work of the Product Teams we can quickly maintain a high level view of the ecosystem with minimal overhead.
Analysing ecosystem data takes time	We need to ensure that our ecosystem reporting is automated and self service	By instrumenting our products we can enable quick and efficient reporting on the core metrics aligned with the ecosystem objectives.

Sustainability

Principle	Context	Practice
We need ecosystems to outlast leaders	We need to grow everyone into high quality decision makers by giving context instead of orders	By sharing the diagnosis of the current state that has led to the ecosystem strategy with the Product, Internal Product and Enabling Teams we teach people key decision making skills and enable them to make high quality decisions without needing to escalate to the Ecosystem Team.

Criticisms

Criticism	Description	Mitigation Strategies
Lack of Alignment	Failing to align the Product Teams with the ecosystem strategy, leading to misdirected efforts and wasted resources.	Regularly communicate the ecosystem strategy to all teams and ensure they understand how their work contributes to the overall ecosystem vision.
Doesn't Help Teams Make Decisions	The strategy is too high-level and doesn't provide enough guidance for teams to make informed decisions.	Make the hard decisions in the strategy about what not to do and provide clear objectives and constraints to guide teams in their decision-making.
Siloed Strategy Development	Developing the ecosystem strategy in isolation without input from other departments.	Involve representatives from impacted departments in the strategy development process to ensure it benefits from diverse perspectives and expertise.

Anti-patterns

The Laundry List: Compiling a list of desired outcomes or initiatives without prioritising or explaining how they will address the core challenge.
The Blue Sky: Proposing a vision or goal that is completely disconnected from current reality, without a feasible path to get there.
Template Thinking: Relying heavily on generic strategies or frameworks without customising them to fit the unique context and challenges of the organisation.
Skipping the Hard Choices: Avoiding difficult decisions about what not to do or where not to compete, leading to overextension and lack of strategic focus.