Which way is up

I started a new job last week and I'm trying to figure out which way is up.

I'm a diagnostic marketer. Before anyone touches budget, channels, or creative, I figure out why people aren't engaging, and then I build the strategy that fixes it. That order matters. If the strategy is fuzzy, more spend just helps you fail faster.

So I'm not writing a strategy yet. But I want to know everything I'd need to know to write one, so that when I do have a POV, it's a strong one and I can build traction on it. I made a checklist. I'm not going through it in exact order, but if something is missing at the top, I'm not going to be confident about anything below it.

I pulled together seven old strategy decks I had on hand, some from past jobs, some from the free work assignments you do in interview processes (I guess they're good for something), and used AI to pull out the shape. Every deck needed the same information before the strategy showed up. I didn't gather it in that order when I wrote them. If I had, it would have been faster.

A few caveats. All of my experience is B2C or B2B2C, health plans, consumer health, retail. No sales team in the middle. If you're in a B2B sales-led world, you'll have extra items, and you can probably remove others. In the end we're all selling to humans, and humans think the same way. This is also very idealistic. You might not get all of it. Get as much as you can. And I have more specific questions for my specific job, and you will too. I'm sharing this because it's what I'm working on right now, and I figured it might help someone else. Take the list and tailor it to whatever you're working on.

The goals and the business strategy

☐ Last year's results, and who owns the numbers.
☐ Last year's goal, and performance to it.
☐ This year's goal, as a number, and what kind of number it is (gross, net, bookings).
☐ The company objective that goal ladders to, in the company's words.
☐ What the company already believes the answer is. Every company has a working theory. Know it before you contradict it.
☐ The budget, even roughly, and what's already committed.
☐ The strategic choice the company has been asked to make and hasn't yet. There's usually one.

The customer

☐ Who the company thinks the segments are, and how current that is.
☐ The size of each segment, or an honest unknown.
☐ Who's actually converting today versus who we're targeting. Those are often two different groups.
☐ What they're trying to accomplish. The outcome, not the product. Nobody cares about a subscription. They care about treating their condition.
☐ The moment they meet us: what they were doing right before, and what they're hoping for.
☐ Why they chose what they chose today, and why they'd choose us.
☐ What they believe about us, and what they believe about the alternatives.
☐ Who decides, who pays, and who uses. Different people, a lot of the time. (In healthcare, your employer decides what's on the menu, you opt in, you both pay, and you use it.)
☐ What the research says in their own words: surveys, reviews, call notes, complaints. And how old it is.
☐ How they feel about what we already send them. A "was this helpful?" at the bottom of an email tells you more than the open rate.

The market

☐ Whether the category is growing, shrinking, or shifting, and why.
☐ What people want from the category, before they want anything from us.
☐ What's changing their behavior right now: price, regulation, a new default, a new habit.
☐ Their calendar and their moments. The journey they're already on that has nothing to do with us.

The competition

☐ Who the customer actually compares us to. It's not always who we think, and it includes doing nothing.
☐ What each one says at the moment of decision: the price, the promise, the proof.
☐ Where they show up that we don't, and where we show up that they don't.
☐ What they're better at, honestly. What we're better at, with proof.
☐ What they've launched or changed in the last year.

What's working and what's not

☐ Every program, campaign, and channel we run for this customer, with an owner (team, vendor, platform).
☐ The key metrics for each, last year and now: reach, response, conversion, cost, and which way each one is trending.
☐ What's working, for whom, and why we think so.
☐ What's not working, and which kind of problem it is: the message, the audience, the experience, the data, or the wrong question at the wrong funnel stage.
☐ The leading signals, not just the lagging ones: clicks, scroll, drop-off, replies, helpfulness.
☐ The moments in the journey where we have nothing. No owner, no content, no channel.
☐ What's already in flight, and what's already promised on the calendar.
☐ How reliable the data is, where the reports disagree, and what we can't see at all.

The experience and the machine

☐ What the product can actually do: the roadmap, the data fields we have, the platform limits.
☐ Where the friction is after the click. The best lever I ever pulled wasn't copy. It was two fewer app downloads.
☐ Which claims we're allowed to make, and who approves them.
☐ The dependencies: the data I need, the business requirements, the partners who have to say yes.
☐ Who does what, and who I need that I don't have yet.

Then the POV

Once those are filled in, or honestly marked, the strategy is a page. One sentence. Two or three pillars, each pointing back to something on the list above. What continues because it works, what changes, and what we're not doing. The tactics, the calendar, and the measurement come after that. They're the output, not the input.

Every line on the list gets one of three marks: a check, "assumed" with what would verify it, or "don't have it yet" with where it probably lives: a document, data, public research, or a person.

Did I miss anything? LMK.