Strategy is not goal-setting, vision creation, or agreeing on principles and aspirations. Good strategy means identifying a core, actionable problem that fundamentally affects your current situation and then identifying a set of coordination actions to resolve the challenge. Bad strategy isn’t the absence of strategy; it’s typically the result of refusing to identify the core problem. If there’s no essential ...

Even the best products cannot overcome a poor sales process. Match your sales culture to your customer’s buying culture to successfully introduce your product and close opportunities. Identify your product’s sales needs and select the right approach to one of four buying cultures. Why Killer Products Don’t Sell by Ian Gotts and Dominic Roswell It has long been understood that different ...

Successful platform design requires a focus on interactions, a clear set of incentives for producers and effective filters for consumers. Starting a platform business means solving the chicken-or-the-egg problem. All platforms grapple with jump-starting their communities and ensuring long-term value creation. Carefully designing and monitoring interactions to ensure benefit for both sides, participation, effective matching and curation, and measurable ways to build audiences ...

Find your industry gaps, understand your customers and competitors and objectively assess your own capabilities. Then, combine the five essential marketing plays as your business evolves. The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market by John Zagula and Richard Tong Zagula and Tong present five key marketing strategies and a method for evaluating which is ...

Assess your market, your competition, and your strengths, then pick one of five essential marketing plays. In The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market authors John Zagula and Richard Tong, now both at Ignition Capital, show how all marketing strategies can be condensed into one of five basic plays. Based on their experience at Microsoft ...

Competition in the software sector is moving from individual products and services to platform ecosystems. Five key trends are pushing companies to platform strategies. Platform Ecosystems: Aligning Architecture, Governance, and Strategy by Amrit Tiwana   Platform Ecosystems describes the dynamics that are driving the new basis of competition in software. This is one of the few books in-depth available on product ...

Marketing is uniquely situated to help companies achieve business goals. To do this, the CMO must rise above tactical metrics and the four P’s. Marketing As Strategy: Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation by Nirmalya Kumar   In Marketing As Strategy Nirmalya Kumar exhorts marketers to step up, use marketing as a strategic lever, and move beyond the traditional four P’s. ...

Manage your portfolio of businesses or products by using a three horizon model. Horizon 1 are current offerings; Horizon 3 are forward-looking bets; Horizon 2 is the bridge. Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore  Although most businesses aspire to enter high growth categories, go-to-market considerations often conflict with portfolio management and result in resource allocation to low-growth, but highly material, products and services. ...