The Mission

Here’s Zipline’s vision statement from their website:

Build the first logistics system that serves all people equally.

This statements needs no justification. It’s not clear if building such a thing is even possible, but it’s capable of rallying employees, shareholders, and customers around a common cause.

The Strategy

To continue with the Zipline example, while they don’t publicly share their strategy (not many companies do), here are some purely fictional possible strategic statements that Zipline could have for a 2-3 year period.

“L1” strategy statement

This is the first layer of strategy. The “Big goal” here IS the vision statement.

  1. In order to build the first logistics system that serves all people equally
  2. We believe that we must achieve the following in prioritized order:
    1. Expansion within currently-served geographies
    2. Develop a low noise solution for densely populated areas
    3. Expand into Latin America
    4. Reduce the cost to serve for existing fulfilment centers
  3. Reasoning
    1. Over the last two years, we have invested heavily in government approval in new areas in EMEA. We believe that proving out those investments with solid returns will have the biggest impact to our ability to grow and serve more customers. Historical revenues for areas with newly secured government approval indicate a lagging revenue, which we believe will continue to hold in this case [1].
    2. We also know from feedback from customers and local governments that the noise of our v1 product is one of the most-cited reasons for not winning expansion approvals [2]. We believe that validating a low-noise delivery pipeline will increase our total addressable market by 30% [3].
    3. As with last year, we still believe that expanding into LatAM will have a huge positive impact on the company, and we will continue to push forward in this area. The market indicators for this belief have not changed. However, based on what we have learned so far, and some shifts in public policy in the region, we do not believe we will be able to make progress here this year. We will continue our efforts at a reduced capacity in order to maintain some momentum, but this is now a lower priority than expanding in existing regions [1].
    4. Finally, while expansion is the most important goal, increasing the efficiency at which we operate is always important, and whenever it doesn’t conflict with the other priorities, we will continue to look for ways to be more efficient in everything we do.
    5. For this period, we will no longer be prioritizing further R&D on the existing arid plains solution due to lack of substantial gains from this work in the past year[4]. We will also no longer be prioritizing business expansion in coastal regions where we are not currently a good fit for the market [5].

Further strategy statements

For a company like Zipline, this list of goals would be broken down at least one or two more times before connecting them to the Work.

  • The global business development team would create another Strategic statement based on c. Expand into Latin America. If the global biz dev team at Zipline is one group, they may stop there.
  • The product team would redefine their strategy statements, which were previously focused on arid plains solutions, and instead focus on b. Develop a low noise solution for densely populated areas. If the product team is several departments who focus on different areas, they may add one more strategic statement each.
  • The team would continue to break down the strategy until each of the small goals for the L1 strategy statement is owned by a team that can act on it.