Strategy Planning and Implementation Process, The Future of Sales with AI and The Tunnel Vision Trap

Action > Advice

Good morning

I’m on holidays this week, recharging after a long 12-month building cycle. The newsletter, however, is something that I’m writing regardless of time and place. Enjoy.

In today's edition, among other things:

• Strategy Planning and Implementation Process (How to)

• The Future of Sales with AI (Trends)

• Is AI Impacting Business?

• Pricing Masterclass: Strategies and Techniques for Optimizing Your Product or Service Pricing

• Engineering Practices at Big Tech vs. Startups

• Data-Driven Approach to Equity Distribution and Founder Compensation

• A Comprehensive Guide to Estimating Market Potential

Onwards!

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Strategy Planning and Implementation Process

The strategy season in companies is in full swing. I particularly want to recommend a process for planning and implementing strategy, which was once described and done at YouTube:

Shishir Mehrotra joined YouTube in 2008 right after Google acquired YT. YouTube was scaling at an enormous pace, creating internal organizational challenges focused around three elements:

Acquisition: The company was acquired early on and had to adapt to integration with Google, a renowned company known for its unique rituals. However, YouTube had its own distinct culture and challenges, so while we adopted many best practices, we also realized that many of Google’s rituals didn’t quite fit.

Hypergrowth: The period from 2008 to 2014 was marked by massive hypergrowth—every metric consistently broke records, our user base and revenue grew from millions to billions, and our team rapidly scaled to keep up. In what Reid Hoffman now refers to as “blitzscaling,” we had to adapt to the breakneck pace at which we were expanding.

Intertwined three-sided marketplace: While some companies have natural divisions, YouTube’s operations were highly interconnected—the changes we made to our product quickly spread across our creator and advertiser communities. The changes we introduced in our marketing model had to be synchronized with key product decisions. It was quite common for initiatives to be coordinated cross-functionally by engineers, product managers, content partnership managers, marketers, PR staff, lawyers, and others.

The result was a typical array of problems found in many organizations:

Constant planning and re-planning: It felt like we were always planning and then revising those plans because a new, shiny initiative would quickly take precedence and disrupt everyone’s plans.

Too top-down, too bottom-up: Teams complained that the process was either overly top-down (limiting creative freedom) or too bottom-up, lacking coherence and prioritization.

Chaotic meetings: Meetings were not well-planned, often missing the right people or lacking the necessary context. Since everything seemed important, the team struggled to make trade-offs.

Unclear decision-making paths: With such an intertwined business, it was often difficult to know where to go when faced with tough choices.

Sound familiar? The response to this challenge was the creation of a set of rituals and best practices. Over the years within Google, the YouTube team came to be seen as a cohesive unit, skilled at managing a complex organization, implementing new initiatives, overcoming tough problems, and attracting talent. To this day, many organizations (including Spotify) build their teams around these best practices.

In practice, it boiled down to the following system: