Technology closes the gap.
I was recently reading a great book called “No Bullsh*t Strategy” by Alex Smith. It contained a brilliant framework on this topic, but it was missing a technology layer.
In this day and age, technology is absolutely fundamental to translating strategy into reality.
“Every company is a tech company” is a phrase I use all the time.
My sketch is designed to show the pace at which the layers tend to change.
If any layer moves to quickly, or two slowly, you end up with major issues.
STRATEGY: At the top you’ve got organisation strategy – your direction, or what you do. For most successful companies this should be pretty fixed, flexing only occasionally as the market requires. Pace of change: 10-20 years.
BRAND: Brings the strategy to life in a compelling way. Pace of change: 5-10 years.
TECHNOLOGY: Bang in the middle sits technology. It’s an enabler of your strategy and the brand. It needs to be flexible and agile enough to support both product and marketing that sit below it. Pace of change: 1-5 years.
PRODUCT: Whether it’s physical or digital, it needs to keep up with market trends, but if it moves too fast, you won’t have enough time to sell or ship it. Pace of change: Quarterly.
MARKETING: At the bottom you’ve got marketing – how you reach your prospects and customers on a daily basis. This needs to be evolving and reacting all the time, in real time, to work as hard as possible. Always in line with the layers above. Pace of change: Weekly, daily, hourly and realtime.
If you treat technology as a utility, or worse still, an afterthought, your strategy is doomed to stay in a presentation and never see the light of day.
Technology is in fact the bridge.
Stable enough for people to be able to adopt it, and hold the weight of strategy, agile and flexible enough to support the ever-changing demands product, marketing and your people.
At 7DOTS we help brands navigate this complexity. We take the commercial objective (the direction) and build the digital infrastructure that supports our work helping product and marketing teams to deliver results.
It’s about translating “We want to grow” into the digital tools and experience that actually make growth happen.
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