What is 'End Game' thinking?

Back in my highschool days I played a lot of chess.

Mainly in my high school chess club in Long Island. I'd learned to play growing up playing against my brothers and various friends and family.

But I'd never really read a book as I felt like it was something I do for fun rather than taking it too seriously.

But I was pretty good at it. Mainly because I found i was pretty good at calculating in my head some moves in advance and game playing my opponents' moves out.

And so in my high school chess club I was the 'top board' for three years in a row.

We would travel to other schools in Long Island and my win-loss was about 50–50. But generally, given i was always playing against the top board of another school, i’d always be playing against someone that was quite well read on chess.

Why I considered myself 'an end game' player in chess

A person that is well read in chess will generally know openings well. I never had read a single chess book to this day... and so I was at a disadvantage here.

So this is why i generally concluded that if i was up against someone that was well read in chess, i needed to hold things relatively even past the opening (typically 8–12 moves).

Once we were beyond that point and if things were even, then i generally had a good chance of winning.

Because that was when it came down to who had better vision for all of the possibilities of how things could evolve.

Something i think i’ve always had a natural talent for.. in chess and outside of chess. And it was this part where how well read you are matters less.

And so in chess I joked with my friends and considered myself an ‘end game player’ for this reason.

In the first seven years of my career I used this skill as a strategy consultant

In consulting you're often making a ton of assumptions in your recommendations. And you are often game playing out the future a bit.

So it was as if I got to apply this chess skill to the corporate world and refine it.

I got good at doing competitive and market research. Seeing where the market was moving.

And realized that companies and CEO's were very bad at doing this basic task in a disciplined way. ie. documenting everything their competitors were doing and creating a story out of it.

Rather they would often make major decisions based on their gut and 'experience' or from what they 'hear in the market' when doing 4-5 hours of desk research would have helped tell the story much clearer.

Now I apply this 'end game' thinking to the tech world

Many companies think incrementally. The 'agile' approach basically indoctrinates you to approach problems this way.

Meaning you don't really have some end game in mind but rather you just test things and iterate till hopefully you get it right.

The problem is that that can often result in making a mess. Or rather doing a bunch of things that will not contribute to your end game.

And while I don't disagree with the idea of testing things... I do think it should be done with a strategic end game in mind.

And so the way that I often start when I am helping a company is by aligning on what this 'end game vision' is.

Let me give you an example of an offline fashion retailer that I talked to recently

It's a large traditional offline retail chain that has some initial ecommerce efforts and wants to become better at ecommerce and omnichannel.

Now the traditional approach would be to look at all the various problems and proposals from their internal management team and prioritise which to correct first.

This is very clearly not the approach that I take.

I start by thinking from the end. What do we want the end to look like? (ie. in a few years or so)

And in my view the end can probably be defined as having these characteristics:

• Very healthy LTV - CAC
• Healthy sales growth
• Less and less risk in having a good 'season' and rather just systematize as much risk as you can out of the business

Thus... we go to work on defining what this end game looks like. For example:

1. Inexpensive CAC (Cost of Customer Acquisition)

Online marketing is expensive. The best CAC for online customers is achieved by getting the customer through a retail store. Something i'd seen in a previous experience.

>> Thus we need to be good converting offline in-store customers into online

2. Strong LTV driven by a great customer experience and retention

LTV for an online fashion customer is best when they pick up at store and can reject things that don't fit or isn't exactly what they want

>> Thus we need a very good pickup model that is encouraged both online and when customers buy on their phone from in the store

3. It is very difficult to have all the sizes and colors in stock in the store without the store holding a lot of inventory

>>So let's look at having a non-sellable store item for every color and size variation that cannot be purchased but can be tried on. And then the customer is encouraged to buy from their phone after trying it on in the store, if they like it.

etc. etc.

The resulting plan you would get by starting from the end would look radically different then if you approached the problem incrementally (or in an Agile way)

And there are many things that you would have done in the incremental approach that you would no longer do.

That... is... End Game Thinking

Read it on my blog: https://www.endgameken.com/post/why-i-call-this-end-game-consulting