It’s the Tactics, Stupid

Great strategic thinkers are great tactical thinkers. Steve Jobs, a brilliant strategist, was accused of being a micromanager because of his maniacal focus on the smallest of details. He’d spend weeks working with Jonathan Ive on the look and feel of the buttons on the iPod. He changed the packaging material of the original Macintosh because he thought it “smelled funny.” Likewise, Mark Zuckerberg still writes code and conceives new features of Facebook. You see, they understand that strategy is useless without effective tactics because strategy is comprised of tactics. In politics, they say, “It’s the economy, stupid.” In business, we should be saying, “It’s the tactics, stupid.”

Few would deny that Zuckerberg is a brilliant strategic thinker. He’s able to see and sense the long term and can therefore lead his organization through the strategic mire of the complex world of social networking. But—and this is a big “but”—Zuckerberg is very much a tactical thinker and the history of Facebook is the history of a company obsessed with tactics, with fine tuning existing features and the courage to add new ones. Early features of Facebook included the profile, notes, status updates, groups and the wall. The wall was an important feature because it allowed users to post information and for friends to leave notes and comments. It’s what made Facebook so hypnotic in the first place. But not all of the features were strategic; some were just tactics for tactic sake. Take, for example, the “poke” feature about which Mark said, “When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings." Today the poke has evolved and it’s used to say “hello” to friends and as a type of flirting for others (when I was younger “poke” had a very specific meaning, like “poking” someone with a pencil, or a … well, you get the idea).

Of course, not all Facebook features have been successful. In 2007, they added a virtual gift feature. You could send small icons and novelty items, for $1.00, like Valentine messages or charitable donations. It lasted a few years and never really took off. Great strategic thinkers are great tactical thinkers and great tactical “tinkerers”.

Strategists like Jobs and Zuckerberg exemplify a process called adaptive management to develop, test, and implement new tactics, determine the effectiveness, and align them with the corporate strategy. The objective is to optimize your tactics so that they’re most effective. Web designers call this “site optimization” which is a process used to drive the evolution of a website by testing different elements of the site to see which one drives the intended result. It is a pure form of adaptive management and can be used in almost any business model, not just site design.

Tactical Optimization

In fact, website optimization is a concept borrowed from direct mail marketing in which one improves their marketing program by testing “variations” of the program against a control or winning design. You develop new design tactics, aimed at optimizing a certain behavior, like “unit volume,” and then test the new tactic against the existing tactic. We call this A/B testing.

For example, imagine that you have a gray “Buy Now” button in a 12 point font on your site. You theorize that a bigger button may be more noticeable and increase your sales and so you make a 16 point button and test it against the control button (the 12 point button). You do this by sending 5 percent of your customer to the test page and the other 95 percent to the control page. To your delight, the 16 point button beats the smaller one and so you now make it the control button. You reinforce success and abandon failure by getting rid of the smaller button. But you’re not done, if a 16 point is better than a 12 point, then what about an 18 point button? Could it beat the 16 point one? You run the test and again, it does. So, then you make a 20 point button, run the test, but find that it doesn’t beat the 18 point one, you sell less product. So, you’ve just discovered that 18 points is the optimum size for your “Buy Now” button. You then proceed to do the same thing with the other elements of your design, things like price, product, colors, and offers. Through such systematic testing, over time, you’ll develop the best winning combination of tactics that will together optimally drive your business model. This is the process that Facebook uses to optimize their site.

In developing new tactics, you should do so based on your theoretical understanding of your business. Test them against the best ones you’ve got and then get rid of those that don’t work as well. This isn’t just a process that you can use with e-commerce sites or direct marketing, it’s a process that all business models can (and should) employ.