#7: Strategy communication, execution, and updates - with Megan Murphy from Hotjar

Megan joined Hotjar two years ago, and had the challenge to create the strategy from scratch. But moreover, she has the opportunity to review with fresh eyes how the execution went and what she learned along the way. In this very interesting conversation we covered the journey, starting with very insightful tips on the initial strategy creation, how they communicated and aligned the strategy across the organization, and eventually what they learned while executing.

We talked about:

• Considering that 70% of strategies are never executed due to bad communication, Megan decided *not* to fail for this reason and what she did about it.
• How Megan first aligned expectations by sharing what a strategy is not.
• Megan recommended strategy books: Blue Ocean Strategy, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Playing to win.
• How Megan used a trello board to divide all the “task” or all the information you need to put together for the strategy following the Good Strategy/Bad Strategy methods.
• Using Reforge’s “4 fits” to align on the market, the model, and the channel, and use it to discuss with stakeholders the fit of the product strategy.
• How to identify market insights through signals, patterns and trends. The role of product leadership in keeping an eye of those external trends.
• The high ROI of 1:1 strategy conversations.
• How Megan used Airbnb’s 11-start experience exercise, and the key result was that people find out that 5-star experience was not out of reach.
• Hotjar’s final strategy artifact was a 5’ video extracted from the original 15-pages document, making much more memorable, and easier to consume and understand.
• How Hotjar teams created ⅔ of the initiatives that were considered for execution of the strategy.
• How they learned that one of the strategic pillars was not relevant and what they did about it.

And many other things!

You can find Megan on Linkedin.

Remember that you can find more info and material on 100productstrategies.com.

If you are eager to know more about product strategy, check out Product Direction: How to build successful products at scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs

You can also contact or follow your host, Nacho bassino, at nachobassino.com (training, coaching, and more)