The biz of Biz Ops (2) — constructing an actionable strategic “argument”

In a previous post I discussed what a Biz Ops department can do to supercharge a company. One of the building blocks of the work that supercharges the company is developing strategic arguments. This is why having a Strategy/Biz Ops function in an organization is often equated to having an “internal consulting team.”

There is a key difference between hiring an external consulting firm to reassess and recommend e.g. a pricing strategy for your new product, and doing it with an internal team. The difference is that you have an internal team of experts that know your business and can drive long term change.

In a basic form, I like to structure arguments in three segments:

• WHY — why the context and challenge call for something that needs doing / examining / changing?
• WHAT — what is the action / research / initiative that we will undertake?
• HOW — how are we going to do it for our organization?

The Why and What of the strategy we tend to call the “brain” work. You need to be good at it, otherwise you can’t even begin. So, if you are good at it, that’s great. But below the “brain” you have got to have “legs.” This is why I believe the biggest value a Strategy/Biz Ops team provides, is not in the Why and What. Let’s be honest, this is typically something a senior executive already suspects, or knows, and can direct themselevs.

The biggest value a Strategy/Biz Ops team provides is prepping for, and often carrying out the execution of the How.

Here is what I mean.

Let’s take the pricing example. You have a simple 2-tier pricing structure for your product. Do you know you need to tailor your pricing in more tiers? Possibly. Do you know how many tiers? You can always hypothesise and begin with 3. Any Director (should be) is able to do this with their eyes closed. But How are you going to do it? What are the exact value drivers at each tier? How do you test for these? What underwater boulders are there that might trip you over, might stall the implementation, and might push an increase of revenue by a few months (aka “eternity” in start up world)…

A member of the Biz Ops team needs to go into the weeds and hypothesize, and test, and find the interdependencies operationally, impacts on financial models, product changes, etc etc etc. The list goes on. Once they do that work, can they feedback into What needs to be done actually, and what will it take. This is learning from the bottom up. This is building a scale up.

In other words, the biggest value is the execution — exacting how a new initiative needs to happen, and then making it happen!

What I have done, and like to see from my team, is to take this a step further and think through not only the next step, but the step after. In fast scaling organizations you need to think through the scalability of the solutions and drive change prepping for going from 10 to 100, and from 100 to 1000. So key questions to ask:

• what are the limitations of the solution you want to implement? (under what conditions would it break; then stress test if you can)
• what additional capabilities would your company require to scale? (think automation, and integrations)
• what is the cost to the company for handling the change? (people / software / time)

This is how you construct an argument, and plan the follow through. At the end of this, when you hand it over to the Finance team, or Product, or Sales, these teams will know exatly what the rationale is, what the cost is, and what needs to be done.

And you supercharge these teams; and you supercharge your company.

[if you have questions about this article, please connect with me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignatova/]