Services
Strategy Sprint
Use a strategy sprint to challenge your leadership team and help align them around a common view of your strategic challenges.
Pre-Sprint Interviews & Reading
We start at the Observe stage by auditing background material you can share with us. Existing strategy documents, market research, financial reports, sales materials, investor reports are all useful.
At the same time we setup a series of confidential one-on-one interviews with the leadership team and stakeholders you are involving in the strategy sprint. They will each be asked to write answers to a set of questions about the business, their role and their perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the business and the industry as a whole. Their written responses, and the discussions around them will remain confidential, only to be shared with the broader group anonymously.
The outputs of this process are used to form a strategic picture of your business and to help guide the preparation for the in-person workshops.
Post-Sprint Support
Our team remains in touch with your working group, in particular through weekly meetings with the leadership team members assigned responsibility for helping our team draft the communication documents for the new strategy. Two forms of communication will be created, a slide deck for sharing with staff at a high-level, and a longer document for sharing with the board and that becomes the version of the strategy given to new leaders. These will be shared in a form that allows your business to make them living documents, and perhaps to be branded to your specific corporate needs. This completes the Act component of the OODA loop.
Post-sprint interviews are held with each member of the working group to establish feedback on the process, and check that they felt they were able to fully participate in the workshops.
A final report will be shared summarising MERC’s perspective of the process.
The Importance of Confidentiality
One of the key strengths of employing a neutral, trusted third-party like MERC is the ability to have them surface uncomfortable truths from insiders, without there being repercussions for said insiders.
For this reason we insist that the interviews are done under a strict veil of confidentiality.
The Sprint
The core of the strategy sprint is three in-person, all day, workshops, spaced out over a working week.
The first day is spent setting the ground rules, reviewing what has been revealed from the pre-sprint interviews, developing a shared understanding of strategy, and establishing the boundaries the group will operate within. This is the Orient stage in the OODA loop.
The second day gets into the challenges that have been thrown up by the pre-sprint process. We use the double-diamond design process to guide the work of Discover and Define. Which does the group agree are truly critical? Which 2-5 should be prioritised? This is a collaborative, iterative process, that cycles multiple times, as individuals, in small groups, and finally as the whole working group.
The third day starts to look at what responses the business can make to the critical challenges we have agreed on, using the double-diamond design steps of Design and Deliver. We reframe the challenges, and look for the opportunities in them. What is the logic behind each response? How can we validate that logic, or do we already know it is validated? From the set of responses we curate the ones that the working group believes are worth investing time and effort in. Responsibility for helping Maritime Impulse developing these into the final strategy communication is assigned to individuals in the leadership team, with an agreed timeframe. This completes the Decide part of the OODA loop.
Product Strategy Review
For a maritime OEM who feels they already have the right business strategy, but is unsure that their specific products are supporting it properly, then a product strategy review is called for.
A product should create a specific business impact, deliver certain customer outcomes and may create learnings that are worth capturing. If these are not properly aligned with your business strategy then they can end up being a waste of effort, or worse, actively undermine your business strategy.
Has your product achieved product/market fit; meeting the underserved needs of target customers better than the competition? To do so it must be:
Desirable - customers want the benefits; and we understand what the benefits are that they want.
Viable - the dollars add up; when customers pay what it’s worth to them it covers our costs with a healthy profit margin.
Feasible - we can do it; we have the technology, the know-how, and the ability to scale to meet demand.
A product strategy review is a flexible process where we come in, establish the coherence between your product strategy and business strategy, and review how you discover customer needs, and implement them as product benefits.
Consulting
If you have an idea of work we could do for you that doesn’t fit the scope of the above services, then feel free to reach out. We can consult on an hourly or daily rate.
Ready to engage?
Please use the Contact page to tell us if you would like to engage our services.
