Several years ago, I embarked on a journey to get really, really fit.
My objective was simple (and probably vain): I wanted to be shredded so I could show my eventual grandchildren how awesome and jacked I once was.
I just wanted to do this for a single moment to show myself I could do it (Shoehorned Fight Club quote: “A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.”)
My goal, then, would be to get below 10% body fat while increasing muscle mass.
To do that, you usually have to cycle through phases of bulking and cutting. Bulking requires a slight calorie surplus and lots of protein, plus a lot of weight lifting (compound movements). Cutting requires a slight calorie deficit and lots of protein, plus a lot of weight lifting (and cardio). You see incredible results in 3-6 months, but usually the truly astonishing results come from multiple cycles across a year or two.
To be honest, it’s not that complicated. And I’ll tell you what: neither is SEO, usually.
The brilliantly complex plan, in fact, is often untenable when it comes to implementation.
When I hear people regurgitating Huberman protocols of %X weekly ice baths, 120 minutes of zone 2 cardio, intermittent fasting on a paleo diet, 25 different supplements, sun gazing, and hyperbaric oxygen chambers, it usually means the person is not going to follow through on any of it (and is usually unserious about the boring disciple required to achieve interesting goals).
That’s why you hear fitness people say “the best diet is the one you can stick with over time.” Because success over the long game is usually a function of boring consistency, singles and doubles that add up and compound over time.
Same thing with SEO. You come up with 1,000 technical issues to fix, recommend creating and/or updating 500 pages, say words like “semantic” and “hreflang” several times, and then executives are like, “wut?”
So how do you get things done? You want to know the following:
- Your objective
- Your goal / KPI
- Your starting point
- Your plan and timeline
Brilliant strategy, unexecuted, is not brilliant strategy
“Strategy is visible as coordinated action imposed on a system. When I say strategy is “imposed,” I mean just that. It is an exercise in centralized power, used to overcome the natural workings of a system. This coordination is unnatural in the sense that it would not occur”
― Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
The crux of good strategy is figuring out how you uniquely will win, but the missing ingredient in strategy is laying the path for feasibly executing on that plan.
Done correctly, it usually involves some painful tradeoffs, as focus and concentrated force is usually required to achieve remarkable outcomes. Then, it involves commitment to the plan and artifacts and rituals to guide the plan to completion.
I don’t want to denigrate either side of the equation. You need both.
Strategy left unexecuted is potential energy, but completely useless and ineffective. Execution without strategy is pure kinesis, chaotic and unfocused, often a waste of valuable time and resources.
What I’m talking about is the bridge between the two functions, the strategy <> execution gap.
Back to the fitness example. I’ve got my objective and my goal, and certainly I’ll have to actually DO THINGS to change my body composition. But I should design a plan based on my objective and goal so I’m not just randomly doing exercises and flying wild.
Surely, if I came up with a plan where I would spend 2.5 hours in the gym everyday doing complex workouts with a personal trainer, buying and taking all the supplements available, and sleeping 10 hours per night for ideal recovery (with the occasional sauna use for relaxation and muscle recovery), then I would make strong progress towards that goal.
But what’s my starting point?
If I work a demanding job in finance (12 hours per day), live at least 35 minutes from a gym with the requisite equipment for my plan, and have to take care of small children (thus limiting my potential to achieve 10 hours of sleep), how feasible is this strategy, really? And perhaps I have a bad shoulder, which really rules out the extreme bench press protocol Andrew Huberman recommended I take on.
So I need to think about feasibility as well as theoretical perfection.
Well, I could quit my job and devote the next 12 months solely to this objective. Or, I could alter the strategy (and plan) to allow it to fit more seamlessly into my existing routine – say, by choosing my apartment gym that has fewer complex machines.
This may elongate my timeline or cause me to draft a more realistic goal (perhaps a new squat max instead?), but if the brilliant strategy is not possible to execute, it’s almost worse than no strategy, because eventually I’ll be demotivated and perhaps throw out the entire plan.
First, I need to ask, “what’s my current situation?”
How Does [Thing] Happen?
When I joined Workato to lead the experimentation team, I first audited the existing environment. I asked anyone involved in growth and marketing, “how does an experiment get launched here?” From ideation to design, execution, and analysis, how does this thing get done here currently?
Because if I want to run 10, 20, 50 quality experiments per quarter, I first need to figure out what the process of getting a single unit live is.
When we worked with [redacted very large company], they asked us to build a blueprint to bring them to category leadership. Not “increase our traffic 10%,” but “how do we dominate the customer journey in search?” A big ask.
And we did. We indexed their maturity across multiple dimensions of search and performance like share of search, portfolio performance, technical SEO, off-page SEO, and UX / conversion. There was a massive opportunity to improve many dimensions, particularly their content coverage and velocity.
But when it came time to build out an engagement around implementation, we asked two simple questions: “how much content do you currently produce?” and “what’s the process by which a page gets published?”
Turns out they were only publishing a handful of pages per quarter. Their process was unstructured, going through many cross-functional reviews with no standard process or agreements, and they didn’t even have a single content hub or URL structure to publish their content.
So immediately launching into a high velocity program, say 35 new pages per month, would be destined to fail, at least until we figured out how we could grease the wheels and actually push work through.
As I’ve written about before, I’m a fan of big, ambitious goals. But you have to first balance them with your current status quo, otherwise you end up failing due to indigestion.
Define quality standards, visualize the process
Part of what we do when building out programs is defining what “good” looks like, ideally as objectively as possible.
This is simple in some scenarios, where a technical bug is obvious and fixing it is a binary issue.
But with content production, things can get murkier. What does “high quality” mean?
Well, many people have different ideas of quality, and it includes several related and unrelated dimensions like brand POV, tone and style, length and structure, imagery and multimedia, user experience, SEO guardrails, CTAs, etc.
So we collect all of this information, front-loading which dimensions matter the most and identifying the review phase gates we’ll need to go through in order to get a page live.
Which brings me to my next artifact: the visual process map.
As Peep Laja used to say, “if you can’t describe what you do as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Not that things can’t change (and they should as you iterate and optimize the process), but visualizing how things get done shows you exactly where drag and delays may occur, thus predicting and preventing them.
It also allows for flexibility as well as process optimization.
Process Optimization: Kaizen and the Scientific Method
Sometimes it’s easier to build a program from scratch than it is to optimize an existing process.
Like, I took tennis lessons, and it was so difficult because I had to relearn how to swing and unlearn all of my bad habits before replacing them with better ones. Might have been easier to just learn from scratch.
But most companies have an existing process, even if undocumented. What to do then?
Implement the scientific method, find bottlenecks, cultivate hypotheses to fix them, test them, and iterate.
And how do you go from 10 to 100 pages (or experiments or campaigns or whatever unit of work) per time period?
Only three levers to pull here:
- More resources
- Less friction
- More focus
Friction is the most impactful of these levers.
I’ve seen firsthand companies with an abundance of money and resources simply unable to get things done because the system was too frictionful. So eliminating drag, lowering the cost of action, or standardizing processes is key.
Set up a mise en place so people don’t have to think about every little decision or cut their onions every time they make a taco.
More resources is obvious. More writers can produce more content. Check.
More focus is underrated.
We amped up our own production of LinkedIn content, podcasts, and blog posts (and this newsletter) once we eliminated all the other stuff we were doing (ads, TikTok clips, YouTube shorts, webinars, etc.).
Concentrate your forces.
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
“A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.”
― Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
On a more philosophical level, I often find that complexity is the enemy of action, and thus, impact.
As SEOs (or PMs or content marketers or experimentation professionals), we know more about the nuance and edge cases that almost anyone else does (or cares to). And we should keep it that way.
When I ran experiments, I didn’t talk to my VP about sequential testing versus bayesian statistics. I talked about performance goals, KPIs, inputs, and resource requirements. This allowed us to drive the action and throughput required to get to our goals, and I just subsumed the complexity myself and with my team of experts.
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