THE TRIANGLE THAT OFTEN GO WRONG: STRATEGY - DATA - BUSINESS

THE TRIANGLE THAT OFTEN GO WRONG: STRATEGY - DATA - BUSINESS

For every company, despite its complexity & hierarchy structure, there are always 3 main core functions: Business stakeholders, Strategy team, and Data/Tech. Normally, when the company is growing sustainably, everyone is happy.?

However, for startups, everyday is like a new battleship: you don’t know what’s the right thing to do, you do things that almost little-to-no-one has ever done, or you try to search for documents from the Internet and figure out there are just so few of them.

And this is when the chaos begins. More often, company KPIs aren’t met: could be because you’re aiming too high, or you do not know what’s the right upper threshold to set., or worst-case scenario, you’re under-performing.?

Now, who’s the one to blame? You might ask…

There are 2 scenarios to play out here:

• #1 Find the black sheeps & blame it on them. This solution is fastest & easiest, isn’t it? If you decide to go with this, congratulations, you have successfully created one-hell of a toxic environment! Your startup will soon die out because of a lack of collaboration rather than the potential of the idea itself, or how capable your team is.
• #2 Identify the operation root-cause & help everyone work together. I admit, this sounds a little bit idealistic (lalaland) at first, and easy to say than actually execute. But once you’re able to slowly step back & look at everything as they really are (their fundamental nature), you will realize how each element plays out & what actually is the bottleneck - inefficiency of human resource allocation & bad operation procedures.

Sooo, how can we resolve the situation??

To be honest, there’s no absolute solution. You need to find the ones that work for your company culture. For the case of SoBanHang, I have outlined a little SWOT analysis comparing theoretical functionality of each core department.

Let’s take a look at it.

You see, after taking just a few minutes stepping back & view the components as they truly are: you adopt a new perspective & reframe the whole situation! The magic happens when you can bridge the gap between the 3 functions. And this is a reason why a love child is born within SoBanHang: the Strategy & Analytics team!

WHAT DO WE DO HERE - BASICALLY?

(1) Learn the operation from each department → design the working framework a.k.a SOP

For everything we do, we adopt a customer-obsession approach (cause what’s the point if the customers do not like your product anyway?). As such, every new process or breakthrough initiative must answer one single question: how does it serve the customers in their end-to-end journey? If the customer finds it meaningful, and the team is doing it right, you can immediately see the impact with Positive Monthly Retention (the mid- & bottom-funnel)

What if the customers love it so much, but there are just so little of them? And it cannot help sustain your business model due to a lack of awareness from your user pool, then, it signifies that something is going wrong with your Go-to-market (GTM) strategy - that is, the top funnel.

(2) Set KPIs & success metrics to monitor performance

Once the SOP has been adopted by the functional departments. Now, how can you ensure that their performance is guaranteed? The fun of numbers begins here: you set your end goal! Smart teams know that you always need to begin with an end in mind, and choosing the right success metrics (KPIs) will help keep track & monitor closely the underperforming parts.

#3 Optimize current operation or R&D to find interesting ways to do new things

For every single team (Marketing, Product, Tech, Customer Success etc), SOPs and blueprints are not enough as they only display how each department should collaborate together in a cross-functional project (the wide aspect), not the depth of the initiative itself. A typical good project usually possess these elements:?

• Good objectives & success metrics (how should the end looks like)?
• Efficient timeline & human resource allocation (doing X yields higher result but taking longer than doing Y, hence, Impact / Timing is what matters here)
• Go-to-market strategy (how are you going to introduce it to the end users)
• Dashboards for monitoring performance (measure how well you’re doing & improvise on what works, what doesn’t)

Now, you probably get some sense of how a Strategy Analyst’s typical day looks like. Let me tell you 3 secrets (!)

WHY YOU SHOULDN'T JOIN STRATEGY & ANALYTICS TEAM?

#1 Instead of easy battles, we choose difficult ones

If you look at our society as a whole, you will definitely figure out that problems and inefficiency are everywhere. For example, before Shopee & Lazada, we used to buy things in an old-fashioned way like going to the market, going to Facebook or .com sites. Now, with just a smartphone, you can purchase the-whole-word with just one click (literally). That is just an example of despite how difficult a problem is, there will always be a solution for it in a matter of time.?

Easy battles are solvable. What about the challenging ones? If they are known and worthy to solve, someone out there is probably working on these now. But there still exists problems that people doubt its worthiness and they choose to ignore it, what would you do then??

What if you’re the only one that can envision its potential? What actions are you willing to take? Can you go as far as to do whatever it takes to convince people?

As a BI controller, or Strategy Analyst, this is just a typical question you encounter on a daily basis. We try to crack the forgotten market - traditional SMEs (micro & nano offline sellers) - the segment that got ignored by big players. As such, we try every possible way to do things both strategically and tactically: aim differently & play differently. If 99% of people choose to ignore the problems, who will solve it anyway? Why not us? If not us, then who?

#2 We do not always win, but we learn?

Ok, if I’m being honest, we rarely know exactly what we should do. We have a culture of learning & experimenting. Start from simplicity to test the market response, if it’s positive, we improvise what we have done. And if it fails? We do not try to blame it on anyone but our lack of efficiency & planning effort. Resources have been wasted anyway, and we try our best to draw the key learnings from it.?

We don't feel confident about the future, but we believe in the ability to learn fast from taking calculated risks, and transform oneself.

#3 We are not visionary, we only do it from the heart (and mind)

The Heart

Caring too much exposes you to a kind of vulnerability. It forces us to go an extra mile with just about almost every single problem you can explicitly see - because we do not feel confident about the future. Hence, what we can do now - what is under our control at this moment - is just trying as hard as we possibly can.?

The Mind

Nonetheless, that is not to say we’re a fool for bad resource allocation & impractical ideas.? We obsess over taking actions & seeing impact. And since resources are limited, we know really well the rule of 20/80 (80% impact comes from top 20% key drivers). We just try our best to do as many 20%’s as we can, and hope for the best.?

Of course, things go wrong sometimes, that’s mostly because we haven’t tried hard enough, and we embrace a culture of ownership & taking accountability for our own actions.

THE BOTTOM LINE

What do you feel after knowing these 3 little secrets? Do they sound lame or uninteresting? If the answer is yes, congratulations! You have saved your precious time from not joining SoBanHang. What can I say now? I wish you all the best & endearing in whatever your next journey takes you to.?

And what if you fall in love with the things I listed above? I’m sincerely glad that we are able to talk in the same language! But, before all the fun, let’s keep in touch via this address & see if you want to get engaged with us!

Again, we still do not know what we are doing, but we sure have a lot of fun while doing it. Because startup life is a journey rather than the end result itself.

This article is brought to you by Tin Tran - BI Team Lead of SoBanHang. It’s inspired by one of Paul Graham’s article about Earnestness in startup founders. I hope you guys enjoy the reading just as much as you will be in love with what we do here at SoBanHang. Stay tune til next post!

Credit by Tin Tran _ BI Lead at SoBanHang (Finan Pte Ltd)