Practising Strategic Shrinkflation
“Don’t you just love how a small thing jumps to the top of the list?”
by Alex Stokes, 5 mins reading time
I said this in a workshop recently, I was facilitating an executive team as they talked through their roadmap of strategic work they wanted to get done next - thankfully this team is not too hung up on the “by what date” part of that conversation. They are a mature digital business and so, happily their obsessions tend to focus on superior outcomes for their customers rather than deliveries by arbitrary dates.
As they discussed various strategic bets in terms of trade-offs, complexity, and potential customer thrills, someone devised a way that one of them could quickly be tested with only a couple of hours of work.
“We can just DO that because it’s only a couple of hours” everyone agreed heartily, a couple of hours of a Designer and Developer’s time, in return for some real customer data to reveal whether this whole themed product direction was worth pursuing? That’s a no-brainer.
“Don’t you just love how a small thing jumps to the top of the list?” I said, almost in passing. I resisted the temptation to launch into one of my favourite topics - small things, which is MY obsession. I could easily have been there with a wagging finger saying, “And THAT is why we should only ever build small increments, run small tests, and get real data from the smallest possible experiment!” But I held back and thought, I will blog about this instead :)
When busy exec teams (is there such a thing as a non busy leadership team?) are faced with the mulling over of different options, it becomes a very opinion based discussion, lofty results are pitched, the amazing future is depicted, it’s all so very enticing and alluring. The beautiful profits and performing products that we could achieve, with these big beautiful programs of work. Drool, drool, pick my idea, no pick mine! And you umm and ahh about it for too long, because it’s big money, big complexity and big time to get these things done.
Stop Talking and Test it!
But as soon as you can come up with a very small way to answer a question with data, the conversation is absolutely over. Stop talking about it, every executive team second wasted not acting on this is ridiculous. Wipe it off the list, it’s getting done right now!
We can speed up all of our decision making, save all that time umming and ahhing and impressing each other with our big ideas and outcomes if we made ALL ideas go through that same “Strategic Shrinkflation“ treatment.
I love the Jeff Gothelf question “What’s the smallest amount of work we can do, to learn the next most important thing?” This question is an amazing unlock to stop wasting time on big idea discussion, make the ideas into small tests, and get those small things jumping to the top of the list.
You could swap your next executive level roadmap discussion with a session to devise small tests for each roadmap theme, giving you more time back in your day and even, start testing them straight away!
If you want to help your team move faster by finding the smallest, testable next step, to bump it to the top of the list, let’s talk. It’s my favourite trick for turning lofty plans into actual results.
This blog was written by me, a human, the images were created by Generative AI and I was also inspired by Jeff Gothelf and his post on The Truth Curve.