Growth Strategy vs Execution: Closing the Gap Between Plan and Work

Arguing about whether strategy or execution matters more is like arguing about whether a car needs an engine or wheels. The useful question is what connects them. In most growth teams that struggle, both exist. There is a strategy, and there is a team doing a great deal of work. What is missing is the part in between, the part that shows how this week's work follows from this quarter's goals.

Two ways the gap shows up

• Direction without motion. The strategy is written and the OKRs are set, but the weekly work looks much as it did before. Leaders can describe the plan. The people doing the work describe their task lists.
• Motion without direction. The team ships reliably. Campaigns go live, content goes out, the CRM is busy. Ask what growth is trying to prove or deliver this quarter and the answers turn general.

They look like opposite problems. Usually they share a cause: nothing translates the goal into the work.

Goals go down, learning comes back

This article covers the first half of that sentence: how goals are translated into work. The second half, how what the team learns changes the plan and reaches other teams, is covered in our article on the Growth Loop. The two are complementary. A translation with no way back produces a plan that gets defended rather than improved. A way back with no translation produces learning with nothing to be measured against.

Where the middle layer sits

The NBT Growth Model has four stages: Growth Marketing Checkup, Growth Route Formulation, Growth Navigation and OKR-Driven Optimisation. Growth Route Formulation sets direction and priorities: where growth should come from and what matters most. Growth Navigation is the coordinated marketing and sales work that follows. The plan this article describes is what turns the first into the second.

Hypothetical example: a B2B software company has chosen mid-market UK customers as its growth route. Its chain from goal to work might look like this.

The operating plan is the layer most often missing. It names a small number of initiatives, each with an owner and an expected effect on the quarterly goal. Ninety days is a usable length because it lines up with a quarter, but it is an example rather than a rule. What matters is that the plan is short enough to be read, specific enough to generate weekly work and owned by someone who will notice when it stops being true.

How to write the quarterly goals themselves is covered in OKRs for Growth Teams. Google's guide to OKRs says that "Key results are measurable and should be easy to grade with a number" and that "OKRs are public so that everyone in the organization can see what others are working on" (Google re:Work, Set goals with OKRs). Both help the middle layer. A measurable goal tells you whether an initiative is plausibly helping, and a visible one lets other teams see what you are trying to do.

Can the next layer be derived from this one?

The simplest test of each layer is whether the one below it can be worked out without much argument.

• If a quarterly goal does not suggest which initiatives would move it, it is probably a permanent wish ("increase pipeline") rather than a choice for this quarter.
• If the operating plan does not generate weekly work, it is a list of activity areas ("content, paid, CRM") rather than a plan.
• If a piece of weekly work cannot be traced to an initiative, either the plan is incomplete or the work is optional. Both are worth knowing.

Not every task has to trace upwards. Fixing a broken form or answering a customer is not a strategic initiative and should not wait for one. The test applies to the bulk of the work, not to every item on the list.

The risk of skipping the route

When the route is unclear, it is tempting to start doing things and work out the strategy later. The risk is not that the activity is wasted outright. It is that nobody can tell which activity worked, because nothing defined what working meant. Budget and attention get spent before anyone has decided what they were for.

The opposite mistake is also available. If the route has already been tested and still holds, a fresh strategy exercise every time something changes is a sophisticated way of avoiding work. And urgent fixes that are easy to reverse, such as a broken tracking tag or a campaign pointing at the wrong page, should be made now rather than queued for a planning session. The question is whether the route is clear enough to judge the work against, not whether a strategy document exists.

Rhythm without ritual

Each layer needs a moment when someone asks whether it still holds. How often depends on the layer and the evidence. Tracking of weekly work can be frequent. Changes to the operating plan, and especially to the route, should follow the sales cycle, the volume of data and the evidence you actually have. A business with a long sales cycle will learn little about its route in a few weeks.

Not every review needs to change the plan. "This still holds, carry on" is a legitimate outcome, provided someone asked the question honestly. What should worry you is a review that could never have produced any other answer. Quarterly Business Reviews That Change the Plan covers route-level reviews where changing course is a real option, and when to stop underperforming channels covers one of the harder decisions they produce.

A quick test

Ask three people at different levels, say the CEO, the head of growth and someone doing the work, the same question: what are the two or three things growth is trying to prove or deliver this quarter?

If the answers broadly match and stay specific, the chain is probably working. If they diverge, or become vaguer further down, a layer is missing or out of date.

Don't assume you will pass. In research covering 124 organisations, Donald Sull and colleagues found that "only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company's strategic priorities" (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2018). The organisations studied were mostly large, and the figure is not a benchmark for your team. It does suggest that leaders' confidence in how well the strategy is understood is not, on its own, evidence.

The connection between strategy and execution is not a framework you install once. It is a short plan someone keeps true, and a willingness to let what the team learns change it.