Your Strategy’s First Customer Is Your Team
Stop broadcasting top-down mandates and start applying customer-centric principles to your company’s vision.
The Common Belief: The Immaculate Execution
Does this sound familiar? The senior leadership team disappears into an off-site for two days. They emerge, clutching a beautifully crafted PowerPoint deck, shimmering with hockey-stick graphs and bold proclamations. This is ‘The Vision’. The strategy. It’s unveiled in a grand, all-hands meeting. The CEO speaks with passion. The deck is emailed to everyone. The job, from the ivory tower’s perspective, is done. The assumption is that a brilliant strategy, clearly communicated, will be flawlessly executed by a motivated workforce.
We believe that if the thinking at the top is sound, the action at the bottom will naturally follow. We treat strategy like a royal decree, a stone tablet handed down from the mountain. It’s logical, it’s been approved by the board, and therefore, it should just… happen. We expect employees to see the genius, internalise the mission, and change their behaviour accordingly, almost through osmosis. This is the myth of immaculate execution: a great plan needs only to be announced to be realised.
But where did this belief come from?
Why This Myth Persists: The Ghost of the Factory Floor
The roots of this thinking run deep, back to the industrial age of command-and-control. It’s a hangover from Frederick Taylor, where a distinct line was drawn between the ‘thinkers’ (management) and the ‘doers’ (labour). Strategy was the exclusive domain of the executives; execution was the job of the masses. In that model, you didn’t need buy-in, you needed compliance. The organisation was a machine, and employees were cogs. You simply programmed the machine and expected it to run.
This legacy persists in our corporate rituals: the top-down cascade of information, the focus on broadcast communication (like emails and town halls) over genuine dialogue, and the implicit belief that disagreement or confusion at lower levels is a sign of resistance, not a flaw in the strategy’s design or delivery. We measure the success of a strategy launch by how many people opened the email, not by how many understood, believed in, and could apply the vision to their daily work. It feels safe, orderly, and decisive. But is it effective? Have you ever stopped to ask why the last five ‘transformational’ strategies fizzled out after the launch party?
Here’s what the data actually shows...
The Reality Check: Your Strategy is a Product
Let’s be brutally honest, in the style Marty Cagan would demand. Your strategy is not a sacred text. Your strategy is a product. And your employees are its first and most important customers. If they don’t buy it, it will fail. Period. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your consultants were, or how elegant your slides are. A product that no one uses is worthless.
Gallup research consistently shows that only a fraction of employees (around 22%) strongly agree that their leadership has a clear direction for the organisation. Even fewer can confidently say how their own work contributes to that direction. This isn’t a communication problem; it’s a product problem. You’ve launched a product into your internal market without doing any user research, without understanding the customer’s pain points, without a value proposition that resonates with them, and without any mechanism for feedback or iteration.
We obsess over customer-centricity for our external products. We build personas, map user journeys, and run A/B tests. Yet, for our most critical internal product—the very direction of our company—we adopt a ‘build it and they will come’ mindset that would get any real Product Manager fired. The reality is that if your employees aren’t buying your strategy, you haven’t sold it to them. You haven’t even designed it for them.
Don’t believe me? Let me show you...
Real-World Examples: The Product Launch Failures
I’ve seen this pattern play out time and again. These aren’t failures of intellect; they are failures of empathy and process.
Take Company X, for instance... A massive retail bank, let’s call them ‘Britannic Bank’, launched a five-year “Digital-First Revolution” strategy. It was a masterpiece of strategic thinking designed to fend off fintech challengers. The problem? They never spoke to the branch tellers or mortgage advisors. For the execs, ‘digital-first’ meant efficiency and future-proofing. For the frontline staff, it sounded like “your jobs are obsolete.” The ‘product’ was perceived as a threat. They resisted, passively and actively, not because they were stubborn, but because the product’s core value proposition for them—the end-user—was negative. The multi-million-pound programme ground to a halt within 18 months.
This pattern shows up again in... a logistics company I worked with, ‘Haulage PLC’. Their new strategy was all about “Data-Driven Optimisation.” The vision was to use real-time data to make their delivery network hyper-efficient. On paper, it was brilliant. But the lorry drivers, the key ‘users’, saw it as a surveillance tool. The new system required them to input complex data at every stop, a process that felt clunky and slowed them down. The executive team had designed the product for the data analysts, not for the people who had to use it in the pouring rain on a dark Tuesday morning. Adoption was abysmal until they went back and redesigned the ‘user interface’ with the drivers.
Even more striking is the case of... a software company that got it right. Their new strategy was to pivot from being a feature-factory to a customer-outcome-focused business. Instead of a grand reveal, the CEO, acting as the Chief Product Owner, held ‘user research’ sessions with every department. They asked engineers, marketers, and support staff: “What’s stopping you from focusing on customer outcomes now?” They created internal ‘user stories’ for the strategy. For a sales manager, it was: “As a sales manager, I want to be incentivised on customer retention, so I can sell solutions that last.” They released the strategy in iterative phases, gathering feedback and refining the messaging. The strategy wasn’t a document; it was a living system they built with their people.
So how do you make this mental shift?
The Better Approach: Become the Chief Product Owner
If your strategy is a product, you, the executive leader, are its Chief Product Owner. Your job isn’t just to invent the product; it’s to manage its entire lifecycle, from discovery to iteration. This requires a fundamental shift in your approach:
Define the Internal Value Proposition: Stop talking about shareholder value. Translate the strategy into a clear answer for every employee: “What’s in it for me? How does this make my work more meaningful, secure, or impactful?”
Write Employee User Stories: Instead of top-down mandates, understand the jobs-to-be-done for different teams. What are their pains and gains? How does the strategy help them achieve their goals? Your Project Managers and PMO officers are perfectly placed to help facilitate this.
Launch in Beta: Treat the initial strategy roll-out as an alpha or beta test. Release it to a pilot group of change agents. Gather feedback. Find the bugs in your messaging and your implementation plan before a full-scale launch.
Create a Roadmap, Not a Static Plan: A strategy should have a roadmap. What are the key features (initiatives) we are rolling out this quarter? What’s the success criteria (internal adoption metrics)? This turns a monolithic, scary transformation into a manageable, iterative process.
Measure What Matters: Your KPIs can’t just be financial. You need product-market fit metrics for your strategy. Track employee understanding through surveys. Measure belief with sentiment analysis. Monitor adoption by seeing if teams are changing their behaviours and priorities.
Ready to make the change? It starts with a simple mental shift.
Mindset Shift Guide
Stop Broadcasting, Start Engaging: Swap the all-hands monologue for departmental Q&A and feedback sessions.
Reframe Employees as Customers: Your first and most important market is internal. Win them, and the external market will follow.
Swap the ‘Big Reveal’ for an ‘Alpha Release’: Test, learn, and iterate your strategy and its communication.
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