Reading/Strategy/Kickoff

The Reading department met Wednesday, August 5, 2015 to kickoff its strategy process. Notes follow below, and here's an audio recording.

About the process
Conventionally, strategy setting tends to encourage application of cherry picked data to support potential strategic positions with debate and argument to arrive at consensus. In contrast, the approach that we will be using allows people to propose strategic positions, and then to reverse engineer the necessary conditions by asking "what would have to be true for the plan to work?" and constructing tests by which those necessary conditions can be validated.

The process is based on the following five questions: The process is an iterative "cascade". The answer to question 1 begs question 2. And the answer(s) to question 2 must be logically consistent with the answer to question 1. And so on and so forth through question 5. In practice, as answers are arrived at for each of the five levels of the cascade, the previous question-answer set needs to be revisited to ensure consistency.
 * 1) What is our future winning aspiration? This is defining the expected outcome.
 * 2) Where will we play? This is about defining target segments, channels, products, geographies, and unit's position in the value chain, as well as ruling out places to play.
 * 3) How will we win? This is about defining the tangible things we'll need to do to achieve our goals.
 * 4) What capabilities must we have? This is about defining the abstract skills we need to succeed and leveraging existing strengths as appropriate.
 * 5) What management system do we need? This is largely about defining the sorts of metrics systems we'll need to track success.

This process can be used at different levels of an organization: an organization itself, departmental, and so on.

Current state strategy
To set context for the future oriented strategy setting process, here's the current state strategy.

Winning aspiration

 * Promote learning from open knowledge
 * Create more engaging interfaces to Wikipedia
 * Find more articles and go deeper into topics
 * Support different types of content (photos, media, graphs)
 * Make content freely available outside Wikipedia (APIs)
 * Attract potential editors and donors
 * Achieve goals without upsetting community
 * Protect content creators (legal)

Where we play

 * Product: most visible project: online version of encyclopedia (reference category)
 * Customer segment: online information seekers
 * Geography: everybody in the world
 * However, North American in network architecture and UX/feature bias (n.b., some network architecture hosted outside of North America)
 * Channel: primary channels of online consumption
 * Desktop web
 * Mobile web
 * Apps
 * Syndication
 * Dumps

How has this succeeded?

 * Free, good product, with many languages and popular channels (slow follower in adopting new channels)
 * Scalable operation (mass market, not heavily personalized, community content creation, efficient distribution model)
 * Strong search engine placement
 * Neutral point of view and generally established trust (community edited, non-profit)
 * Permissive (CC0) content licensing (external use)
 * Fundraising predominantly based on small donor model