What is Strategic Program Management?

How to predictably turn company strategy into reality.

I’ve spent the last 7+ years doing, defining, evolving and leading Strategic Program Management at high-growth tech start-ups. Over the years I’ve heard the same questions many times - What is it? How does it work? When do you need it? How do you get buy-in? What problems does it solve? How is it different from Technical Program Management or project management? So I’ve decided to write it down. 

Photo by Mark König on Unsplash

The problems

Company strategy is hard to bring to life in a way that’s not chaotic - especially when you’re a start-up, things are moving fast and you need to have market impact.

Company strategy is sometimes just a one-line statement agreed by the executive team and communicated at company All Hands a few times. Many start-ups don’t even have a written strategy. But people kinda know what they’re supposed to be doing, right? Yeah, kinda. But that kinda is costly. Kinda turns into teams being misaligned in their understanding of the problems you’re solving, or the size of the target segment you’re building for. If strategic alignment doesn’t happen early enough at the right level, it often only comes to light when you get into execution - and by then it’s too late.

Some of these problems might sound familiar:

• You’re not hitting your company goals. Things are moving slowly and inefficiently as orgs are misaligned and cross-functional plans aren’t lining up. And you don’t have a satisfactory answer as to why. 

• Decision-making is painful. You’re spending a lot of time in meetings and reading/writing/commenting in docs trying to get a common understanding of priorities and next steps with cross-functional leaders. And there are so many docs! 

• Product and Engineering teams’ roadmaps aren’t fully aligned with the company strategy or what Marketing and Sales are focused on despite having decent processes in place for planning and execution. For example, you find out that a product team prioritized building an integration with a competitor last quarter when your go-to-market strategy is to be the primary solution in the space - going head-to-head with competitors, not playing side-by-side.

• Teams are executing well but nobody is looking at how their work comes together across orgs. For example, Product wants to launch and announce two new features in the next 6 months. Marketing is working on a rebrand and planning an updated website launch. How do you sequence these big changes AND make sure we don’t impact customers - as well as other dependent teams, such as customer support, sales enablement, business systems (who all have other priorities of their own).

• Your website doesn’t reflect what your Product teams are actually building. The messaging is speaking to mid-size customers but your product capabilities aren’t quite there yet as the product team are solving problems for much smaller companies (with 10-100 employees). And your sales team isn’t selling what you’re talking about on the website - they’re outbounding to enterprise customers and promising them the world :) 

• Communication challenges are exacerbated if your teams are based in different timezones, for example across Dublin, Ireland and San Francisco, leaving only an hour or two each day to connect in real time to iron out any confusion and agree on next steps.

How to turn strategy into reality

Strategic Program Management is how you turn your company strategy into reality in a consistent, predictable way. These are the key elements:

• Strategic Programs: Once company strategy and goals are defined (and documented), the executive team identifies what Strategic Programs are needed to bring them to life. Each program focuses on one aspect of the strategy, such as becoming the leading software used in a particular industry, or overhauling your SaaS pricing and packaging, for example. These programs organize the right cross-functional people and work needed to hit key company goals with confidence. 

• Winning Strategies: Each program has a Winning Strategy doc that helps everyone understand what they’re working towards and why. It sets a clear vision and describes how the program helps execute on your company strategy. The cross-functional program team aligns on the Winning Strategy and references this doc when making key decisions, prioritizing work, and measuring the success of their efforts. 

• The PgM (Program Management) Framework: This enables everyone to execute together across teams and timezones by creating the high-level structure needed to execute that strategy. It sets the program up for success and for whatever inevitable change comes down the line. It puts structures in place for accountability, visibility, decision-making and most critically, gives you confidence that the most important work will get done on time.

Winning Strategies

The program Winning Strategy is a living cross-functional doc, the first draft of which is written up and agreed upon during Program Set-up. It should contain:

• North star metric: How will we know when we’ve succeeded? This should be motivating but specific and measurable. Think in terms of 2-3 year timeframe and in line with company strategy.

• Program strategy: How will we get there? What path will we take, what high level directional decisions have been made to guide teams to the north star? 

• Annual goal: What will we achieve this year that makes tangible progress towards our north star metric? Make sure it’s SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound).

• Initiatives: What are the distinct pieces of work needed to deliver these results? 

Here’s what a simple Winning Strategy outline might look like for a Pricing and Packaging program:

• North star metric: Double ACVs (Annual Contract Value) in the next two years.

• Program strategy: Drive online customers to talk to the Sales team who will negotiate higher revenue and annual contracts with bigger customers.

• Annual goal: Launch new pricing and packaging in-market as an A/B test by the end of Q4.

• Initiatives: 

  • Solution Design: covering pricing and packaging research then design of the packaging solution, plus feedback and iteration. 

  • Implementation: teams will need to build new upgrade flows, change billing systems, update the Marketing website, etc. 

The result is there should be a clear line linking the work teams are doing with top-line company strategy. Easy, right? In theory, yes! In reality it can be more challenging. In my experience, Winning Strategies can take months. Strategy takes elapsed time, it’s not a matter of just sitting down to write it.

Some mistakes I’ve seen: 

• Company strategy is too high level. For example, ‘We want to win in the Customer Engagement space’ without specifying what ‘the customer engagement space’ means as this can be defined in different ways. This can result in inefficiency and delays in decision-making as teams attempt to do research and get alignment at various levels of the company. It can also result in too many people thinking about strategy and not enough focusing on execution.

• Lack of decision-making more than a year out. Like, “This year we’ll focus on just one product” but the company vision is to sell multiple products in future. Will that be next year or 3 years out? When in future will influence the Winning Strategy and what product teams need to build now.

• Winning Strategies are too siloed. They’re written by different program teams but there’s often overlap and dependencies between them. If these aren’t uncovered early in the strategic planning process - by listing out all strategic initiatives upfront and doing high level planning before going deep on individual Winning Strategies - this can lead to more delays and inefficiencies. 

The PgM Framework

The PgM Framework is a simple but incredibly powerful framework for executing complex, cross-functional work. It puts just enough process in place to ensure alignment at the right level while enabling teams get shit done - and do it with a degree of autonomy. Teams naturally work differently - across Marketing and Product, for example, but also within the same department. They use different tools, such as Coda, Figma, Github and communicate differently with various Slack channels, team rituals, etc. so a flexible but consistent framework is key.

There are 5 components (6 if you include the Winning Strategy):

1. Goals and milestones. Develop meaningful quarterly goals and critical path milestones to enable teams to make decisions and ensure you’re tracking towards the program’s strategic objectives & annual goal.

2. Roles & responsibilities. Who’s involved? Who is the Program Leader and the Exec Sponsor? These are critical program leadership roles and should be assigned by the executive team. Agree who the decision-makers are and how you will make key decisions. The DACI framework is a great tool for this.

3. Communication framework. What’s the web of communication that connects all of these people? This is a combination of meetings, Slack channels, push and pull communication. It should contain everything from company All Hands and executive steering committees to daily stand-ups.

4. Open questions: Great ideas come with ambiguity, always. Capture this ambiguity in the form of open questions. Rate and prioritize them, assign owners, chase them down. Having a view across everything makes sure the right focus areas are getting the right level of attention by the right people - especially if they need senior leader or executive discussion.

5. Risks: Identifying and documenting risks is critical for keeping everything on track. Successful growth companies are ambitious and move quickly, they don’t take time to think about how they might not be successful, i.e. how things might fail. Futurespectives (sometimes known as pre-mortems) are a fantastic way of surfacing risks and creating shared understanding.

Once these 5 components have been comprehensively documented you’re ~70%* of the way there (*made up but roughly feels right!). Now all you have to do is manage the program :) This framework will enable you to manage the inevitable change, such as key stakeholder changes, company strategy tweaks, global pandemics, etc. in a structured way without slowing down execution.

Why you need Strategic Program Management

Delivering on strategy is hard. Doing it quickly, efficiently with everyone rowing in the same direction is even harder. But it’s worth investing in. One hesitation I’ve heard is that adding another layer of management will slow things down with more “process”. Done well, Strategic Program Management will speed things up - too many leaders, PMs, PMMs, EMs, spend far too much of their valuable time in meetings trying to get aligned on what they’re supposed to be doing and how. One great example of this value-add is product launches - Program Managers cut through the noise, get the right people together at the right times to make sure all milestones are hit and the product launch is smooth and on time. The first time we introduced the PgM Framework at Intercom it resulted in releasing a new product on time that had been delayed twice (for ~7 months) before this (you can read more about how I program managed this launch on this Intercom blog post). 

I’ve also heard, “We don’t have enough time to write more docs”. But one up-front Winning Strategy doc - containing max 1-2 pages - can prevent many reactive docs down the line. And free up a lot of follow-up meeting time as teams and leaders refer back to it to guide decision-making and ensure cross-functional alignment throughout execution.

Stay tuned for more on all things Program Management and turning strategy into reality ✨

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Working with me

I’m available for consulting and coaching if you need support implementing these frameworks. I partner with leaders to help you figure out what’s preventing you and your company from successfully delivering on your strategy. Please email me for more details.