Effective digital leaders treat strategy as both a verb and a noun: a cycle of work and outputs that sets an organization’s direction and continuously explores new ideas. A strategy on a page is an output that lays out the essential components of your digital strategy on a single page. To help digital business and strategy teams condense their strategy into an easily digestible document, we built The Forrester Digital-Strategy-On-A-Page Template that focuses on the following six components of strategy:

  • Purpose: A concise statement that describes the objective of the digital business. The purpose could be an underlying challenge your team hopes to address, the role your brand or product/service will play in people’s lives, or a digital-specific articulation of a firm’s overarching corporate strategy.
  • Vision: A clear direction for growth, outlining where the digital business plans to be in the future.
  • Hypotheses: A hypothesis is the bedrock of an effective strategy. It uses limited evidence and definable unknowns to predict a desirable outcome. Our template calls for multiple hypotheses: specific, falsifiable statements that challenge current thinking or assumptions about the market.
  • Guiding principles: Three or four principles that will guide how your organization will identify opportunities, create new ideas, determine needed resources, and prioritize initiatives.
  • Success metrics: Three to five KPIs or other metrics that will indicate the effectiveness of your firm’s digital initiatives and their efficiency.
  • Stakeholders: The key people, personas, and roles that will lead, influence, collaborate on, and be significantly affected by your digital strategy. This can include customers, internal stakeholders, external partners, and third-party developers.

Outlining your strategy through this template can help team members and collaborators think clearly about how their day-to-day actions align with the strategy. The template helps guide ongoing discussions and future strategic exercises within your team and among other teams.

Clients we invite you to try the Digital-Strategy-On-A-Page Template yourself! You can also set up a guidance session to discuss how you can build your own strategy on a page. If you’re not a client, reach out to us!

(This blog post was coauthored by Ashley Villarreal.)