Real-World Application of Strategic Clarity in Platform Leadership

Posted Jan 28, 2025

By Muness Castle 6 min read

Introduction: Connecting Theory to Practice

In earlier blog posts, I explore frameworks for effective leadership, from documenting strategy and planning dynamically to focusing on outcomes and leveraging structured tools like Strategy And Tactics (S&T) trees. This follow-up highlights how my leadership team and I apply these principles while leading a data and engineering platform organization.

Platform teams operate at a unique intersection—their success depends on enabling other teams to succeed. This requires careful prioritization, clear communication, and a focus on delivering measurable outcomes. Knowing what we want to achieve doesn’t always mean we know how to achieve it. Often, we need examples of what good looks like to translate abstract goals into actionable steps.

Here, I share practices that currently work for us and help shape our strategy while driving impact.

Documenting Strategy: Building a Framework for Alignment

Platform teams thrive when their contributions clearly link to organizational success. To foster alignment, my leadership team creates a comprehensive strategy document that:

Clarifies how the team’s work aligns with broader organizational goals.
Provides actionable themes and priorities that guide decision-making and focus.
Highlights specific ways the team delivers value and enables others.

Feedback and Impact

One team member shares:

“Working on a platform team is challenging. We do not have a direct impact on top-line metrics, which makes it difficult to measure our success. From a strategic standpoint, we constantly need to validate that what we prioritize will contribute to the success of other teams. This requires ongoing communication with those teams to ensure our strategic vision aligns with the teams we support.”
“I hope your efforts at clarifying strategy are well received by others, but for me, it’s extremely valuable, so I wanted to express my gratitude for the effort that went into it. It’s very motivating!”

This clarity motivates the team and builds trust. It also provides a shared framework to guide alignment with other teams, even in a decentralized environment.

Planning, Not Plans: Embracing Adaptability

Instead of rigid plans, we focus on adaptable themes and dynamic prioritization. For example:

We prioritize initiatives that improve the team’s ability to respond to evolving needs and support key business areas.
This adaptability allows us to pivot quickly when opportunities or requirements change.

Practical Tools

Maintaining a Running Log of Learnings: Our leadership team keeps a dynamic log that captures key priorities, changes affecting the team, significant pivots, and wins. This practice helps track progress and provides a shared understanding of evolving organizational goals.
Regular Upwards Reporting: We provide updates to the head of platform, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. These updates highlight progress and seek input on the relevance and prioritization of initiatives.
Sharing Peer Updates: We share formal and informal updates with business, analytics, and engineering leads in business-facing verticals. These updates review progress and actively solicit feedback to refine priorities.
Working with Finance and Analytics: We collaborate with Finance and Analytics to estimate ROI for initiatives. This informs priorities, guides decision-making, and shapes future Objectives to maximize value creation.
Encouraging Challenges and Alternatives: We set the expectation that team members challenge Key Results (KRs) and Objectives or propose alternative approaches. Recognizing and supporting this behavior fosters a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability.

Outcomes Over Outputs: Delivering Measurable Impact

We emphasize outcomes over outputs, focusing on contributions to success. Examples include:

Fostering Innovation: Teams develop solutions to replace manual workflows, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy in critical processes.
Encouraging Proactivity: Team members participate in company-wide initiatives, like hackathons, resulting in impactful projects that quickly move into production.

We aspire to explain both the desired outcome at each level and how it meets the satisfaction criteria for the layer above. To make this process even more actionable, we define the “Mechanism of Action” for each theme and objective—describing how it will achieve its intended result.

For example:

Broader Objective: Boost subscription renewals for our Pet Happiness Service.
Theme: Enhance Pet Happiness.
Mechanism of Action: Provide cats with 30% more cardboard boxes and dogs with weekly belly rubs.

By starting with the high-level objective and cascading down to actionable mechanisms, this approach creates clarity and ensures alignment across layers. Teams not only understand what they’re working toward but also how their contributions support broader goals.

This combination of outcomes, satisfaction criteria, and mechanisms bridges the gap between strategy and execution. It fosters alignment, curiosity, and shared context, enabling teams to challenge plans thoughtfully and contribute to better solutions.

S&T Trees: Structuring Dependencies and Objectives

We use structured tools like Strategy and Tactic trees to connect company goals to actionable work, fostering alignment and engagement at every level. For example, in a recent strategy brief, we:

Referenced Company Goals: We started by outlining how our team’s work supports high-level organizational objectives.
Defined Themes: We identified themes that contribute directly to those goals, providing focus and clarity for our efforts.
Set Multi-Quarter Objectives: We established long-term objectives that align with the themes and provide measurable targets.
Outlined Key Results (KRs): Each objective includes specific, time-bound KRs to track progress and success.
Mapped Epics to KRs: In Jira, we created Epics that correspond to each KR, breaking them into manageable, actionable workstreams.
Linked Issues to Epics: Finally, we added phased issues under each Epic, representing the detailed tasks necessary to achieve the KR.

This structured approach encourages shared understanding and provides enough context for team members to engage critically and creatively with the work. It also enables us to prioritize effectively, adjust as needed, and measure progress at every level.

Lessons Learned

Several lessons emerge from these practices:

Clarity Inspires Ownership: When teams see how their work fits into the bigger picture, they feel more motivated and proactive.
Adaptability Drives Success: Emphasizing themes over rigid plans allows us to respond quickly to new opportunities.
Collaboration Amplifies Impact: Cross-functional partnerships and proactive communication are essential to achieving outcomes.

References to Earlier Articles

This follow-up builds on concepts I discuss in earlier posts:

These articles delve deeper into the frameworks and principles I reference here, providing the foundation for the approaches we use.

The Power of Strategic Clarity

Leading a platform organization is challenging, but the right frameworks and principles can make a significant difference. By documenting strategy, focusing on outcomes, and fostering collaboration, our leadership team creates a shared sense of purpose and delivers measurable results.

For leaders in similar roles, I encourage you to:

Invest time in creating clear, outcome-driven strategy documents.
Embrace adaptability through dynamic themes and prioritization.
Use structured tools to map objectives and dependencies.

Strategic clarity builds trust, encourages innovation, and aligns efforts with organizational success. It’s our responsibility of leaders of such organizations to clarify how we support the organization up, down and sideways.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.