Strategy Formulation
Turning research into a small set of explicit bets
About this workflow
Defining the product’s strategic bets — which customer segments, problems and capabilities the next cycle will back, and what it will refuse. The work runs from the sponsor’s blind apportionment of intent, through market and competitive research that ends in candidate bets rather than description, and on to a review sheet marked up offline, a placed matrix and the decision paper.
Its purpose is to keep the reasoning visible after the decision has been made. The selection happens in one place, by a named person, in a spreadsheet no agent may fill in — because a bet nobody can trace back to a judgment is indistinguishable six months later from a bet nobody made.
The recognizable task
- A new planning horizon needs explicit bets rather than a list of initiatives
- Two research reports disagree and someone has to arbitrate between them
- A competitor move needs a response and the options have not been laid out
- Every rejected option carries a specific reason, never that the team chose to focus elsewhere
- Set aside pending research and rejected on merit are visibly different statuses
- Each bet has a kill criterion with a number and a date, or is marked as not supplied
How the workflow runs
Select an agent to see what it does, what it needs and how to run it.