Strategy – Aditya Kothadiya's Musings

“Business Strategy Framework” is a framework about how you think about your focus and strategy for Engineering Platform, Product, and your Go-To-Market.

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Let’s consider an example. At Avoma, we’re building an AI-meeting assistant.

From a use-cases perspective, there are many different kinds of meetings. Everyone’s workflows, pain points, and needs are very different.

When we decided to build Avoma, obviously, we could have built a horizontal AI meeting assistant to serve every single meeting use case.

But that would have been a bad business strategy, especially when you’re a startup and just starting out 😀.

Instead,
• We built the engineering platform and AI tech in the most scalable way to evolve into future use cases

• From the product perspective, we decided to focus on only customer-facing (Sales & Customer Success) external meetings

• From the GTM perspective, we reach out to the VP of Sales and Customer Success persona

Hope you’ll find this framework helpful when you make strategy and prioritization decisions in your company.

Lesson learned from the 2016 retrospective

One of the things I observed in my 2016 retrospective was — I had achieved the goals that were clearly defined and had a clear action plan to execute them.

For example — I achieved the goal of improving my fitness by doing P90X3 routine, which required exercising 30 mins/day for straight 90 days.

On the contrary, I did not achieve the goals that did not have any clear action plan. For example — reading a book per month or blogging actively.

Strategy and plan for 2017

So for my 2017 goals, I thought why not apply a methodical approach so that I can be sure to achieve those. I know what I want to achieve, but it didn’t have a clear strategy and specific action plan.

For strategy, applying a top-down approach helps me start with a big picture and then break that into smaller milestones.

At the same time, for a specific action plan, using a bottom-up approach helps me define a day-to-day routine.

Examples

Fitness Goal

One of the goals for 2017 is — to exercise for 9–10 months. So from a top-down strategy perspective, I plan to do 3 repetitions of P90X3 routine. So every 3 months, I will complete a P90X3 routine, and in between take a break for a few weeks.

At the same time, from a bottom-up tactical perspective, I plan to allocate 45 mins to exercise on 6 days a week — preferably at a consistent time every single day.

Reading Goal

Similarly, for reading one book per month goal, my strategy is to read ~300 pages book per month.

And my tactical plan is to read ~15 pages per day. So I need to allocate dedicated 15–30 minutes to read ~15 pages every single day.

You got the point. I have done a similar exercise for my other goals about blogging, programming and building a startup venture.

Summary

My hypothesis is – having some kind of system and method in place will be crucial in making consistent progress on the goals I have defined.

The top-down strategy is important as it removes the uncertainties of how I’m going to achieve a bigger goal by breaking it into smaller steps.

The bottom-up plan is important as it creates daily habits by consistently allocating a dedicated time every single day.

Now this is a plan. Certainly, it might work or fail. We will see. I will update in 3 months if it worked or not.