Strategy Clarity

Circle 1 — What can you be the best in the world at? Not best at many things — best at ONE thing. The discipline is in the 'world' constraint: would your best customer genuinely agree you're the best option they've encountered for this specific thing?

Circle 2 — What drives your economic engine? If you had to pick ONE metric whose improvement would most directly drive sustainable revenue, what would it be? This is about what actually makes money, not what should make money.

Circle 3 — What are you deeply passionate about? As a company, not individually. Be ruthless about separating genuine passion from 'things we believe we should care about.'

Find the overlap, then stress-test it. Draft a one-sentence Hedgehog Statement, then run your Failure Map against it — does your Hedgehog prevent the top failure modes?

Tips:

Write one paragraph: 'The main challenge we face right now is…' If the diagnosis doesn't reference at least two of your top failure modes from previous sessions it's not honest enough.

One paragraph. The guiding policy is a constraint that channels effort — it should deliberately rule things out. 'We will focus entirely on X segment before expanding to Y' is a guiding policy. 'We will pursue excellence' is not.

List 3–5 actions that are direct consequences of the guiding policy. If an action could exist without the guiding policy, it's not coherent — it's a task.

Read the Kernel aloud.

Notes:

✍The final step. Write here the following:

Three paragraphs maximum: Diagnosis (the real challenge), Guiding Policy (how we'll approach it), Coherent Actions (what must happen as a result). Readable by any new team member and immediately actionable.

"What is the real challenge we're facing — and what approach will we take to it?"

Lead only: Share the document here and add it as a pre-read before the session, or run this asynchronously so people have more time to think.

This is a pre-read for the meeting or session that must be reviewed before starting.

What does winning look like for you as a company — not financially? 'We want to be the tool teams open when their most important work begins' is a winning aspiration. '€5M ARR' is a financial target.

Write two lists. LIST A: specific markets and customer segments you will pursue in the next 12 months = 🔵

LIST B: markets you will explicitly NOT pursue — even if asked = 🔴

If LIST B is empty, you haven't made a choice yet. A LIST B (where NOT to play) that is empty or purely theoretical. If you can't name a specific segment you're refusing, you haven't chosen yet.

In the places you've chosen to play, what is your specific competitive advantage? This should be grounded in your Hedgehog — the thing you can genuinely be the best at.

What must you be great at — not just good at — to win? List 3–5.

Check each: do you have it, are you building it, or are you missing it?

What processes, meetings, and metrics must exist to reinforce choices 1–4 daily? Strategy that lives in a document but not in the calendar is decoration.

! Treating the five choices as independent. They're a system. Every choice should reinforce every other choice.

One paragraph per choice. The 'Where to Play' must include both LIST A (we will) and LIST B (we will not). All five choices reviewed together to confirm they form an integrated system.

When done, add the output from this session to the document; this will help you translate everything into Objectives.

An Objective is a high-level statement of what you want to achieve. It should be aspirational, qualitative, and time-bound.

What needs to be true for a good Objective:

How to Write Key Results (The "How")

Key Results (KRs) are the benchmarks that track your progress toward the Objective. They are the "yardstick."

What needs to be true for a good KR:

Example of a KRs for a "Product Excellence" Objective: KR 1: Increase Day-30 user retention from 15% to 25%. 📈

An Objective is qualitative, directional, and inspiring. Pull directly from the Kernel's coherent actions — if an Objective doesn't connect to at least one of those actions, it's off-strategy.

Quarterly Commitments (The "What")

While OKRs are the outcome, Commitments are the specific activities or projects you promise to finish this quarter to move the needle on your KRs. These are the "train rails" we discussed earlier. [ Commitment 1: [Enter your goal here]]

How to list them:

Ex. Project Alpha: Redesign the signup flow landing page. [Owner: Sarah]

When you present this to your team, use this hierarchy:

Pro-Tip: Remember, setting the goal is the easy part. The "real work" is ensuring your budget, leadership, and processes actually allow the team to hit these numbers!

The "real work" of OKRs isn't setting the goal—that’s the easy part. The challenge lies in deeply understanding our current reality, our strengths, and our procedural weaknesses to build a supportive system. 🏗️

Also keep an eye on:

Trade-offs. What are we not doing this quarter? Make this list explicitly. Write it down. The list of what you're not doing is more important than the list of what you are.

How does this get to teams in the next two weeks. Who tells whom. What artifacts go to the all-hands.

It is non-negotiable for leaders to turn company objectives into individual responsibilities. Every team member should know:

"This is my role, and this is exactly how my effort moves us from [Point A] to [Point B]." 🚀

"What does this strategy mean for every dimension of our business — right now, in 1–2 years, and in 3+ years?"

OKRs capture what you're optimizing this quarter. The Clarity Table captures what your strategy means across every dimension of the business and across every time horizon. Blank cells are the most important conversations: they are the strategic blind spots.

! Filling the table in a group, live, from scratch. It becomes a performance rather than a diagnostic. Always start with independent completion. Ask 2-3 people to participate and share their input before scheduling a meeting or run a workshop (2-3 hours)

Customers don't buy products — they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding the real job your customer is hiring you for often reveals who your true competitors are, and why customers switch.

Nine dimensions across three horizons

🔍 Problem we solve

🎯 Who we serve

🔥 Focus & priority

⚔️ How we win

💰 Pricing

🌍 Distribution

📋 Brand & narrative

🌿 Product & differentiators

🤝 Partners & agreements

It becomes real when your team knows what they own, what to ignore, and how to make decisions without asking for permission. (Find excel file > View Project Board)

Ownership

What does each department or person own? If everything belongs to everyone, nothing gets done.

Priority filter

What are you explicitly not doing? Name it. Write it down. Otherwise every idea becomes a priority.

Habits & systems

What recurring processes will keep the strategy alive? A strategy that depends on individual heroics is wishful thinking.

Decision criteria

When no one is watching, how do people know what to do? What principles guide them at the edges?

This is a checklist with all the steps that you and your team will have to follow.

💥💫If this strategy works exactly as planned — what happens next? And what happens after that?

Success creates its own constraints: capacity, positioning, competition, customer expectations.

AVOID: