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Strategy versus Tactic

September 6th, 2009 | Strategy

Dog Chasing TailA lot of us live by the market-driven sword and after reading the following post: What is a “Market-Driven” Product?, I wondered, is ‘being market-driven’ a strategy or a tactic.


My initial thought was that it couldn’t be a strategy because it is not really measurable. I suspected that as you tried to find a deeper meaning to why ‘being market-driven’ was labeled as a strategy you would find that it is not a strategy, but a means to a strategy. Therefore, it has to be a tactic if we base the criteria of strategy being the ‘what for’ and tactics being the ‘how’. How do we achieve our revenue targets? By being market-driven.


Not so fast. Tactics are activities to achieve needed to achieve the objective – implement the strategy. Is ‘being market-driven’ really an activity? It feels a bit high-level and not really actionable.


I posed the question, is ‘being market-driven’ a strategy or tactic, to the #prodmgmt community on twitter and one of the first responses (of many good responses) was from Adam Bullied who said it was a philosophy. Interesting.


We know from other articles and experts that strategies are really in place to guide decisions. We also know that three of the main components of a strategy (or a set of strategies more likely) is the mission statement, vision statement and values. When Adam mentioned it was a philosophy, my immediate thought was ‘being market-driven’ is better defined as a mission statement. It seems like more of an overall goal that is accomplished (in this case, maybe never completed) over time as other (real) strategies are achieved.


In the end, I believe that ‘being market-driven’ is more of guiding philosophy used to help shape strategies versus an actual strategy or tactic. It is a useful principle for us to put a decision-making framework in place, but not for making actual decisions.


P.S. I found this – Strategy and Tactics By Eli Goldratt, Rami Goldratt, Eli Abramov – really interesting. This too – Strategic planning.


Image Source: Austin Cotton Company
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    • I'm a fan of Eli Goldratt, but there were so many typos in your reference, I started doubting the full validity of your washington state univ/vancouver faculty reference. The Theory of Constraint gods spend lots of time working through argument forms and testing validity of assumptions (necessary, sufficient, parallel, etc.), which is helpful in working through conflicting strategies, but I would submit that "being market driven" (or BMD) is nearly meaningless jingoism unless you can define which market, how you are sensing their needs and how you are aligning your distinctive competencies to them. If you like the hierarchical constructs, the ones I have seen start with vision and move on down to mission, values, personality/brand, strategic goals, resources, systems/processes, objectives, strategies, tactics. It is not unlike a project management office or other sytematic thought-process. Whether you buy into 1-to-1 matching between the levels or not, we probably can agree that BMD isn't even a sufficient "vision", which is the highest level of abstraction in any strategic analysis and the obvious target to attempt to pigeon hole this favorite Dilbert-esque business-speak. BMD is not even a sufficient philosophy. If you see subliminal parallels between BMD and WMD, that is on purpose (neither really exist, but they sounded good to someone at the time...)
    • I agree that 'being market driven' is very high-level and no where near sufficient for basing decisions. However, I do think it makes a decent start to building a mission or values. If you can distill that statement down and frame it with the missing attributes that you listed (i.e. which market) then you will have a strong component to your strategy.

      Great comment!
      Stewart
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