July 4, 2025

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: Forming Superware's Strategic Plan

Show Notes

#12. We just wrapped up our latest round of strategic planning at Superware—and it was a game-changer using the approach outlined in Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

Here’s what stood out from our process and why it made such a difference for us. After landing a major consulting win, we still hadn’t cracked product market fit for our industry apps. Instead of more generic goals and vision statements, we dove into Rumelt’s practical framework and it completely reset how we tackled strategy as a team.

KEY LESSONS

Diagnose, don’t guess. We spent time individually reflecting and then collectively diagnosing our core business challenge—rather than just listing random goals, we drilled down to the one issue holding us back.
A strategy is a hypothesis. We treated our strategy as an experiment instead of a guarantee. This mindset (so familiar to us coming from agile software backgrounds!) lets us iterate, learn, and adapt much faster.
Coherent actions aligned around guiding policy. Instead of a to-do list, we identified focused, coherent actions that all support our guiding policy—making it clear what to prioritize and what to (confidently) leave out.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Learn how Superware used Good Strategy/Bad Strategy to reset direction

00:25 Introduction to Practice Leading and Neil Benson

01:12 Kicking off a new financial year with strategic planning

02:00 Major consulting win versus lack of product market fit

02:51 Discovering Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy framework

03:31 Defining bad strategy and pitfalls to avoid

04:21 Key elements of good strategy: Diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions

05:03 Tangible example of guiding policy: The local grocery store

06:00 Diagnosing Superwire’s biggest challenge using design thinking

06:57 Dot voting and achieving team alignment on strategy

07:50 Addressing industry focus concerns and building a strategic hypothesis