Business

Create a Strategy Map in English

Reading 5 min Article Advanced

Vocabulary - 10 business terms

Grammar - Present simple

Exercise

Tap all the highlighted words in the text below to see their definition. ⇩

Introduction

The strategy map is a visual diagram that will help you explain your strategy, priorities and positioning so everyone in the organization can easily understand. It’s created during the strategy planning process.

The structure

The strategy map gets organized around 4 main blocks or perspectives which will have concrete goals which need to be fully connected. The link between each goal from the four blocks will help you understand why each priority makes sense and if there are important missing elements of your strategy. The perspectives are:

People & learning.
Internal processes & operations.
Customer perspective.
Financial perspective.

Let’s look at some examples:

1. Learning and Growth Perspective

This is the foundation of the strategy. It outlines the employee’s skills and knowledge required to make the operations work, as well as the platform and resources that will be crucial to achieve the main goals.

2. Internal Process and Operations

This is the second layer, which explains “how” you will achieve your financial goals while dealing with clients and specific processes. Key process elements include innovation and market expansion, enhancing customer value by improving relationships with existing clients, working toward operational excellence and properly managing partner and supplier relationships.

Customer Perspective

This should describe the key factors of your customer value proposition. How are you going to differentiate yourself from your competitors while selling to customers. How will you maintain a strong and valuable relationship with them?

Financial Perspective

Upon finalising the strategy map, this details what you want to achieve financially. We can refer to revenues, margins, profits, productivity or all of them together.

Let’s Check an Example

Financial perspective: Achieve 100 million dollars in revenue from new clients in United States.
Customer perspective: Launch our new product at a lower price in the United States.
Process perspective: Prepare our content and platform to operate in the United states.
Internal perspective: Recruit a team to open the United States market.

Can you see? It’s very simple and practical to follow these 4 steps to design your strategy map.

Grammar – Present Simple