Do you play Wordle? I absolutely love it! I play it every day with my daughters (or, if I’m completely honest, I let them join me when I’m playing). Here are two fun facts about this game: first, did you know that the guy who invented it is called Josh Wardle? I bet with this last name he must have thought about creating such a game long before he actually did it. And second, if you google it, the results page includes an animation of attempts to guess the word “Google” just next to the search box. The small things that make you happy on a Friday morning!

Anyway, back to the game itself.

When you play it, do you have a specific word that you always start with? I do. It’s a great word that helps me win almost every day. What makes it so special is that it has 3 vowels in it (out of 5 letters it’s quite a significant achievement, isn’t it?) The reason I like trying vowels early on is that it helps me understand the structure of the word, and from then on, it all gets much easier. That’s, at least, my recipe for success: first, find the vowels that appear in the word. Second, find the right place for the vowels, or in other words – the structure of the word. Then, it’s only a matter of finding the right consonants. Simple and effective, isn’t it?

I realized that this is something that I do whenever I’m helping my consulting customers or the CPO Bootcamp participants to make strategic decisions. I’m trying to find what are the anchors that they need to stick with and then work around them to find possible solutions. The problems become much simpler this way, because somewhat counterintuitively, the more constraints you have, the easier it is to find a solution. The possibilities are now limited, and that’s actually a good thing when you want to move forward.

Here’s how to find your strategic anchors, and help create clarity for the entire company.

List All of Your Constraints and Assumptions

For our anchors to be sustainable, we must ensure that we see the full picture when we decide on them. There are so many assumptions underneath every decision we make. Unfortunately, it’s very common that the management or founding team doesn’t see them eye to eye. It’s not necessarily because they disagree with each other, but rather because they never discussed their assumptions clearly. Typically they just assume that everyone reads the situation the same way. I can tell you that unless these assumptions are discussed explicitly, unanimous thinking is rarely the case. 

Creating the full list of your assumptions and constraints is easy – simply take a few minutes to write them down. Anything you might be “relying on” as an argument as to why you should be doing something, is an assumption worth listing. The list should be exhaustive – so initially, don’t hold back. Anything you raise is considered relevant until proven otherwise.

Here are a few questions that can help you uncover your hidden assumptions and constraints:

• What do we know – about the market, the customers, the product, the business, the plans ahead?
• What decisions have we already made (about all of the above)?
• What are our goals?
• What outcomes do we need to have?

Make Sure They Are Real

Since in most cases, you’ll have multiple constraints that contradict each other, we want to eliminate the complexity in advance as much as possible. The first step is to ask ourselves – about each constraint or assumption how real it is. In some cases, it wouldn’t be real at all – we only think there is something there but we can challenge ourselves. For example, you might think initially that your solution must be fully self-served, but when you think about it you realize that this is not necessarily the case. In other cases, especially with numeric constraints like desired business results or certain product metrics, it’s not as black and white. In these cases, you need to ask if the numbers you have listed reflect the real constraint.

One of the ways to test your numbers is to ask yourself what would happen if you don’t meet them. If there is an easy way out, maybe the real constraint is somewhere else. For example, if you have an ARR goal, ask yourself what would happen if you only get to 50% of it. It sounds scary, but for some companies – especially startups on their way to product-market fit, the ARR itself might not be important. They would need some ARR, in order to demonstrate that people are willing to pay for their solution, but initial ARR alongside great retention numbers might be good enough, and hence the real constraint lies there instead of in the pure ARR number they listed initially.

This step is usually great to debate within the management team. This way it not only creates clarity but also alignment between everyone in the room. Don’t be surprised if these discussions take time, and give them the proper time to mature. They are extremely important for your ability to move on to the next step.

Map the Conflicts

Once you have the full list of constraints, and you refined each and every one of them to make sure they are solid, it’s time to start looking at the bigger picture. In the previous steps, we were looking at each constraint on its own: whether or not a certain ARR goal is the right one. But in this step, we want to look at where these constraints meet each other, and more specifically – where they contradict each other. 

This is important because remember that our list is made of constraints and assumptions – things that we must meet or things that we believe to be true about the world. If they cannot exist together, you want to know about it.

It’s not always easy to acknowledge that you can’t get everything you need, but it is the only way to move forward. If your goals can’t be met together, ignoring this fact won’t help you. You will still fail to meet all of them, but you will miss an important opportunity to manage it in advance and make the best out of it. 

In most cases, you will start seeing the conflicts before you get to this step “officially”, so as you reach it you already have a list of problems that you have identified. Take a few more minutes to identify additional contradictions. One of the easiest ways to do this is to think about solutions that would adhere to all of the constraints simultaneously. If you can’t find any, perhaps there are two or more constraints that cannot live together.

Make Hard Decisions

Acknowledging that you can’t meet all of your constraints at the same time is a huge step forward. But now it’s time to make the hard decisions. This is part of the definition of strategy – it’s the decisions that you make that help everyone align and understand what to do. I have read so many strategic documents that don’t really make any decision, and in the end, I was left with “ok, now what?” 

I can fully understand why this was the case. It’s not easy to make hard decisions. That’s the crux of the problem. But that’s where your leadership comes to a test. To lead the company effectively, management needs to make tough decisions. It will create clarity and help focus everyone, and it will also build people’s confidence and trust in management. You will come out as a team who faces reality fearlessly and works with it instead of against it.

In any place that you see a conflict between constraints, one of them has to go or be redefined. Maybe you can give up on revenue this quarter, in favor of getting happy and retained design partners. Maybe you can minimize the effort on an existing product (and lower the results accordingly) in order to invest in a new and promising direction.

A great way to test if you were truly dealing with the tough questions is to summarize your decisions. You can’t pursue too many things at the same time. If your summary smells like “we want to do everything and anything”, you were too easy with yourself.

Strategy is hard. But that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?