Tips for Writing Effective Strategy Documents for CTOs
Finally, Some Answers for CTOs on How to Write
Writing is hard. Writing strategy documents is harder. Few things will make you sweat, swear, and reconsider your life choices more than needing to deliver a strategy document to the Board by the end of the week.
As a CTO, this might not be our favorite part of the job, but it is an extremely important piece of it. In this article I’ll pass along some of the tips I’ve learned over the year to make the process less traumatic. Hope you find them useful.
Tips for Writing Effective Strategy Documents for CTOs
At least once or twice a year most CTOs in mid-market and enterprise companies have to write a strategy document of some kind for their CEO or Board.
Usually the document has something to do with a major initiative in the business or a very important product or technology initiative.
But let’s face it, CTOs are usually terrible writers, so writing a strategy document is scary for some.
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There is no shame in that. Writers are usually terrible technologists! Plus, CTOs didn’t go to school for the Humanities — we usually study Engineering. On top of that, writing lengthy prose is just not something we do on a daily basis.
Our focus is usually on 1 of 5 things: people management, technology management, vendor management, executive-level collaboration, or emergency firefighting (usually of a technical nature).
Sure, we’ll do PowerPoints & send emails until the cows come home, but that’s not the same as writing a strategy document or a strategic briefing for the Board.
Strategy documents tend to have the following elements commonly associated with them:
A major business decision is hinging on the strategy
The audience is usually other Executives and Board members
The topic usually has a high degree of organizational impact
There is a complex technology component to the topic
The audience wants to know strategic-level direction, plans and implications but not necessarily tactical “how” details
There is a strong financial aspect to the strategy document, i.e. costs, budgets, projections and so forth must be explained
The topic often has a great deal of risk associated with it and the CTO must figure out how to articulate their risk mitigation plans
As you can tell from the above list, strategy documents are challenging to write for anyone. But particularly so for the CTO who has to juggle business, product and technology to articulate their plans in just the right way.
Here are some tips to make your strategy documents both highly effective in terms of messaging and influential enough to win hearts and minds.
Tips for Writing Strategy Documents
Reduce whatever level of technical jargon you were planning on including in your document by 50%. What you think people understand versus what most non-technical executives actually understand are very different. Most of the time its better to err on the side of writing for the technically illiterate.
You must have a strong table of contents (TOC). CEOs and Board-types usually go to the TOC first to understand the flow & structure of the document. If the scope and sequence of the TOC isn’t making intuitive sense it will turn off the audience pretty quickly.
Good formatting is almost as important as good content for these kinds of documents. Boards are using to seeing well produced artifacts, so your documents must be up to par. On top of that, as CTO your content is already going to be harder to parse than most because of its technicality. Make sure you format your document consistently and cleanly, so it doesn’t get in the way of the message you’re trying to convey.
If most of your content in the doc is qualitative and you don’t have enough metrics, KPIs or hard numbers, this could pose a problem. Conveying strategic direction doesn’t mean you’re off the hook in terms of metrics. It simply means your metrics have to get strategic as well. Ignoring hard numbers will likely take away from the strength of your strategies and arguments with Execs/the Board.
Don’t over-explain. Technologists have a tendency to try to explain every little nuance too much. Resist the urge. You’re only trying to convey your strategies and any supporting arguments / facts. You must keep your narrative focused to get your point across to an audience that typically doesn’t have a lot of time on their hands. If you’re really struggling with whether to include a topic or not, its probably better to keep it out of your document.
I’ve noticed a lot of technology strategy development involves figuring out dependencies. This can be dependencies between systems, with people, across technology ecosystems or with 3rd parties and partners. Explaining dependencies in a concise manner is hard. So this is a particularly important area to focus on.
My view is that most of the time CTOs should stay pretty agnostic when it comes to the big business decisions. So, in your strategy document you should try to strike a balanced tone. You want to encourage a sense that even-handedness and pure factual analysis went into the development of your vision, strategies and ideas. Boards will appreciate that.
Every strategy document involves storytelling. As CTO go back and make sure your document is telling the 1 or 2 key stories that are important to you. That means like any other story your narrative has to have a beginning, middle and an end. If your document isn’t coming off like that, go back and rethink the scope and sequence of your content. You must lead the Execs and Boards from point A to point B by telling a clear story.
For God’s sakes if you’re writing a strategy document don’t forget what strategy actually means. Too many CTOs put in tactical, in-the-weeds content. Most CEOs and Boards don’t care about those things. Read up on strategy development & strategic thinking process before you write your doc. Knowing the differences between a strategy and simply a tactic or even a vision is quite important to be effective.
Hopefully these tips help you write your next strategy doc more efficiently and effectively.
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