Same thing with SEO. You come up with 1,000 technical issues to fix, recommend creating and\/or updating 500 pages, say words like \u201csemantic\u201d and \u201chreflang\u201d several times, and then executives are like, \u201cwut?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So how do you get things done? You want to know the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cStrategy is visible as coordinated action imposed on a system. When I say strategy is \u201cimposed,\u201d I mean just that. It is an exercise in centralized power, used to overcome the natural workings of a system. This coordination is unnatural in the sense that it would not occur\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2015 Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters<\/p>\n\n\n\n The crux of good strategy is figuring out how you uniquely will win, but the missing ingredient in strategy is laying the path for feasibly executing on that plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Done correctly, it usually involves some painful tradeoffs<\/a>, as focus and concentrated force is usually required to achieve remarkable outcomes. Then, it involves commitment to the plan and artifacts and rituals to guide the plan to completion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t want to denigrate either side of the equation. You need both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strategy left unexecuted is potential energy, but completely useless and ineffective. Execution without strategy is pure kinesis, chaotic and unfocused, often a waste of valuable time and resources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What I\u2019m talking about is the bridge between the two functions, the strategy <> execution gap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Back to the fitness example. I\u2019ve got my objective and my goal, and certainly I\u2019ll have to actually DO THINGS to change my body composition. But I should design a plan based on my objective and goal so I\u2019m not just randomly doing exercises and flying wild. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Surely, if I came up with a plan where I would spend 2.5 hours in the gym everyday doing complex workouts with a personal trainer, buying and taking all the supplements available, and sleeping 10 hours per night for ideal recovery (with the occasional sauna use for relaxation and muscle recovery), then I would make strong progress towards that goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what\u2019s my starting point? <\/p>\n\n\n\n If I work a demanding job in finance (12 hours per day), live at least 35 minutes from a gym with the requisite equipment for my plan, and have to take care of small children (thus limiting my potential to achieve 10 hours of sleep), how feasible is this strategy, really? And perhaps I have a bad shoulder, which really rules out the extreme bench press protocol Andrew Huberman recommended I take on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So I need to think about feasibility as well as theoretical perfection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, I could quit my job and devote the next 12 months solely to this objective. Or, I could alter the strategy (and plan) to allow it to fit more seamlessly into my existing routine – say, by choosing my apartment gym that has fewer complex machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This may elongate my timeline or cause me to draft a more realistic goal (perhaps a new squat max instead?), but if the brilliant strategy is not possible to execute, it\u2019s almost worse than no strategy, because eventually I\u2019ll be demotivated and perhaps throw out the entire plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First, I need to ask, \u201cwhat\u2019s my current situation?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I joined Workato to lead the experimentation team, I first audited the existing environment. I asked anyone involved in growth and marketing, \u201chow does an experiment get launched here?\u201d From ideation to design, execution, and analysis, how does this thing get done here currently?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because if I want to run 10, 20, 50 quality experiments per quarter, I first need to figure out what the process of getting a single unit live is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When we worked with [redacted very large company], they asked us to build a blueprint to bring them to category leadership. Not \u201cincrease our traffic 10%,\u201d but \u201chow do we dominate the customer journey in search?\u201d A big ask. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And we did. We indexed their maturity across multiple dimensions of search and performance like share of search, portfolio performance, technical SEO, off-page SEO, and UX \/ conversion. There was a massive opportunity to improve many dimensions, particularly their content coverage and velocity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But when it came time to build out an engagement around implementation, we asked two simple questions: \u201chow much content do you currently produce?\u201d and \u201cwhat\u2019s the process by which a page gets published?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Turns out they were only publishing a handful of pages per quarter. Their process was unstructured, going through many cross-functional reviews with no standard process or agreements, and they didn\u2019t even have a single content hub or URL structure to publish their content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So immediately launching into a high velocity program, say 35 new pages per month, would be destined to fail, at least until we figured out how we could grease the wheels and actually push work through. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As I\u2019ve written about before, I\u2019m a fan of big, ambitious goals. But you have to first balance them with your current status quo, otherwise you end up failing due to indigestion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Part of what we do when building out programs is defining what \u201cgood\u201d looks like, ideally as objectively as possible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is simple in some scenarios, where a technical bug is obvious and fixing it is a binary issue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But with content production, things can get murkier. What does \u201chigh quality\u201d mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, many people have different ideas of quality, and it includes several related and unrelated dimensions like brand POV, tone and style, length and structure, imagery and multimedia, user experience, SEO guardrails, CTAs, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So we collect all of this information, front-loading which dimensions matter the most and identifying the review phase gates we\u2019ll need to go through in order to get a page live. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings me to my next artifact: the visual process map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Peep Laja used to say, “if you can’t describe what you do as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not that things can\u2019t change (and they should as you iterate and optimize the process), but visualizing how things get done shows you exactly where drag and delays may occur, thus predicting and preventing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also allows for flexibility as well as process optimization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes it\u2019s easier to build a program from scratch than it is to optimize an existing process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like, I took tennis lessons, and it was so difficult because I had to relearn how to swing and unlearn all of my bad habits before replacing them with better ones. Might have been easier to just learn from scratch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But most companies have an existing process, even if undocumented. What to do then? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Implement the scientific method, find bottlenecks, cultivate hypotheses to fix them, test them, and iterate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And how do you go from 10 to 100 pages (or experiments or campaigns or whatever unit of work) per time period?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only three levers to pull here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Friction is the most impactful of these levers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve seen firsthand companies with an abundance of money and resources simply unable to get things done because the system was too frictionful. So eliminating drag, lowering the cost of action, or standardizing processes is key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Set up a mise en place<\/a> so people don\u2019t have to think about every little decision or cut their onions every time they make a taco. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More resources are obvious. More writers can produce more content. Check.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n More focus is underrated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We amped up our own production of LinkedIn content, podcasts, and blog posts (and this newsletter) once we eliminated all the other stuff we were doing (ads, TikTok clips<\/a>, YouTube shorts, webinars, etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Concentrate your forces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity\u2014a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2015 Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a more philosophical level, I often find that complexity is the enemy of action, and thus, impact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As SEOs (or PMs or content marketers or experimentation professionals), we know more about the nuance and edge cases that almost anyone else does (or cares to). And we should keep it that way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I ran experiments, I didn\u2019t talk to my VP about sequential testing versus bayesian statistics. I talked about performance goals, KPIs, inputs, and resource requirements. This allowed us to drive the action and throughput required to get to our goals, and I just subsumed the complexity myself and with my team of experts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Want more insights like this? Subscribe to our <\/a>Field <\/a>Notes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several years ago, I embarked on a journey to get…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6638,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,184],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4885","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-content-strategy","8":"category-field-notes"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-65.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n
Brilliant strategy, unexecuted, is not brilliant strategy<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How Does [Thing] Happen?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Define quality standards, visualize the process<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/image-66-1024x486.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nProcess Optimization: Kaizen and the Scientific Method<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Simplify, Simplify, Simplify<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n