Strategy time (Like Courtland suggests)
So I was listening to a podcast recently (I think Nathan from Convert Kit) and Courtland was talking about setting aside time each week for strategising.
Does anyone else do this?
And if so, what do you cover?
Hopefully @csallen can chime in!
What do you intend for strategising?
I define daily (before going to bed) the most critical task that I need to accomplish the next day. I divide the tasks in two areas: maintenece and growth. Unfortunately, there are things you have to do to keep your business functioning, things that usually don't move you forward but still needs to be done. Then you have growth, activities that will help your business improve. I dedicate 60-80% of my time on maintenece and 20-40% on growth (it varies significantly, usually when you are starting out you will have more growth, even 70-80% of your time).
Every week (sunday) I set up the goal for the next seven days and if I have accomplished the goals of the last. If I didn't I fibd out why. It's not a problem to miss goals, the problem is when you don't why and a lot of people (myself included) are happy to review a good week and avoid doing it for a bad one. That's the recipe for disaster.
Yes, I work from trello so I've now made a critical task for each day this week. Good tip!
I don't do this every week, but I do it after finishing a cycle of the feedback loop.
For example after I've released a new feature, got feedback from users, before jumping in and acting on that feedback, I do a little strategizing.
Based on my short/medium/long term goals which of this feedback will help me accomplish those goals. The feedback might be great, but if it takes me away from goals then it might not be good to act on it.
The feedback might also affect my goals, so keeping everything aligned is important for me.
A concrete example... After the launch of Pod Hunt I got feedback from users requesting a way to listen/preview the episodes on the website.
I thought about my long term goals of solving podcast discovery and my short term goal of increasing user engagement on the site, so it was a good feature to work on.
Had my short term goal been to get more submissions for example, this may not have been a great feature to work on right away.
I also strategize about how best to use my time. Right now for example I'm focusing on spreading the word about Pod Hunt. So rather than using the majority of my time on writing code, I'm spending a lot of time talking to folks, being a guest on podcasts etc. This feeds back into my short/medium/long term goals.
Channing and I strategize together every Monday.
We have some extremely high-level goals we want to hit over the next 2-5 years, which are represented by our north-star metrics. We start by looking at those. Recently that consists primarily of just making sure we're measuring them correctly. They're not metrics that change particularly rapidly.
Then we have our shorter-term metrics. These are carefully chosen to map to strategies that will drive our high-level metrics. We look at those in-depth every week, discuss where we're doing well, where we're lagging, and dig in to try to ensure we accurately understand the causes.
Then we have our roadmap -- basically tasks laid out over the coming weeks/months that we'd like to accomplish. We generally plan these out every quarter, but them tweak them weekly during the quarter. These are all tasks that are meant to drive the shorter-term metrics.
From this we extract our weekly tasks, and talk about what we want to get done this week. We also review the previous week.
Excellent, thanks for the explanation! It's interesting 2-5 year goals as I suppose for a lot of people here we need to survive the first few months/year first.
The founders of the company I work for have a weekly meeting to talk progress and strategy.
This is similar to my response to the thread about priorities, but there are different levels of strategizing.
There is definitely value in checking-in with your projects weekly. I don't do it every week, but I definitely try (usually Friday afternoon or sometime Sunday). Mine usually looks like a review of what I did last week (what went well, what didn't, why), a brain dump of everything I want/need to get done this week, prioritizing, planning large daily time blocks. It's potentially considered 'strategy', but it's pretty tactical for the most part.
It doesn't involve much of asking whether I'm working on the right project, using the right growth strategy, etc. That happens more at a monthly/quarterly level.