Execution beats strategy every time

One of the most important lessons I learned at Meta is the by-now-common refrain of “Execution eats strategy for breakfast.”

Why?  Simple. 

If you have a perfect strategy but poor execution, you don’t win.  And worse, you don’t know why you didn’t win — is it because your strategy was wrong, or because your execution was wrong?  You’ve wasted time, and worse, you’ve learned nothing.

If you have a mediocre strategy but great execution, you still don’t win.  But at least you know why you didn’t win — you know your execution was great, so you must have lost because your strategy wasn’t exactly right.  Now you can update your strategy, and you have your execution machine ready to go to pick up the changes and ship them out.  You keep doing that enough, and then you win.

One example of this at Meta was how often we worked on tackling a problem — with a slightly updated solution — repeatedly until we got it right.  For instance, it took us multiple tries over several years to build a successful ad network.  (I worked on our first version — now ~15 years ago!)  With each try, we refined our target audience, the formats we provided, and the way we created value, until we got the right match for what our customers needed.  

Of course, a good strategy is important. There’s no point in executing on a bad strategy.  But by focusing on execution, we can iterate toward the strategy that wins for our customers today, even as the world changes. 

What does it take to focus on execution?  The same tools that work for setting any cultural focus:

1. Allocating time. How much time should any given team be spending on strategy versus execution?  20/80 might be a good start for most teams. It’s useful to set this expectation up front, so people know what to expect in the rhythm of building and where they should spend their time personally.  

2. Creating a strong customer feedback loop. After you execute fast and ship a product, how do you know if you’re on the right path? We need a clear way to constantly understand how customers are reacting to this version, whether it’s through dashboards or qualitative feedback, and feed that back into our system so we can update our strategy and ship the next version.

3. Creating clear incentives. Leaders can model a focus on execution by highlighting improvements, recognizing the teams building them, and showcasing how these compounding changes help our customers. Over time, career ladders and performance reviews should match those expectations around where it’s most valuable for people to spend their time.

What I like most about focusing on execution is that it gives you so many more tries.  I don’t just have one shot to create a perfect strategy — I have a shot every day to ship something, learn what works, and then update my principles to ship an even better product tomorrow.