4 strategy deliverables to always include each time in every project

If you’ve ever scoped a strategy project, then you’re familiar with the challenge of figuring out what deliverables to include, on what timeline, in which order, and from how many hours a strategist is resourced. Let me make it a little easier for you with this convenient checklist of every deliverable you should always include each time in every strategy project:

1. Stakeholder Summary*

Rolling up the key themes from your stakeholder interviews, and getting all the stakeholders back together again to share them out, is important for making sure everyone is on the same page. It’s also a form of corporate therapy where stakeholders’ objectives - which may be in conflict with other stakeholders’ objectives - are set out in the open for discussion. Remember not to call these “insights” however, as they’re really just observations you’re repeating back to your stakeholders.

*Some organizations find this exercise a waste of time since you’re really just telling them what they told you. Additionally some cultures make it hard to share out conflicting ideas, and some stakeholders strongly prefer their contributions to these conversations to remain anonymous. So if a Stakeholder Summary is more perilous than productive, don’t include it. It’s best to understand this about your client’s culture before writing the SOW, so you don’t include a deliverable that puts you on your back foot from the start.

2. Full research readout**

You’ve spent weeks fine tuning your research screener and questionnaire, and more weeks with your survey in the field. Absolutely when that research comes back you need to fully share it with your client in a presentation. Only a fraction of what you’ve found will inform your strategy, but it’s important for the client to see the full breadth of what was discovered so they have as deep an understanding of their customers as you do.

**The caveat here is that the research doesn’t tell a story about the customer - it can tell dozens of stories about the customer. Not all of these will align with the story of the customer that’s relevant to the other inputs of your strategy. So don’t share out the full research if you think the client may cherry pick some of the data and cling to it, even if it’s not relevant for the strategy you haven’t composed yet. Also sometimes it takes another week or more to go from raw data to a research presentation, so be careful that this deliverable doesn’t derail your timeline.

3. Early Insights and Observations***

As you near the end of your discovery, you’ll have collected lots of data across all the customer, competitors, company and culture and can begin to cluster these into themes - themes which may or may not become the load bearing insights in your strategy. They’re WIP but it’s still a good idea to share these out with the client so they can see the general direction the strategy may take, and can react to some of the insights you’re considering.

***Except that some clients try to tie these untethered insights into action, and want to know what they should do as a result of what you’ve found. This can make them anxious for the creative, and contribute to “strategy fatigue” where they begin to question the value of all this navel gazing when they really want to know what they should be doing to make more money. So don’t include this if you think your clients will want to go straight from insights to creative, and skip the strategy. That would be bad.

4. Standalone Strategy Presentation and/or Creative Brief****

It’s vital to let the client see the strategy and/or creative brief before any creative work begins, to make sure they’re aligned with its findings and altitude. This also ensures they’re actively involved in the project and contributes towards a feeling of collaboration.

****Some clients have difficulty evaluating a strategy without seeing how it pulls through to creative - whether that’s a campaign concept or a product sketch or a messaging framework. In these instances it’s often better to couple the strategy with the creative, to relieve clients of the burden of imagination. You’ll know if your clients are like this when you deliver the strategy without creative, and it goes poorly.

I hope this quick checklist makes your job as a strategist easier.

It may, eventually. But it helps to start with the realization that the strategist’s job is not just to understand how to execute the tasks of strategy. Their role within the project - and even before it starts, as the process is being scoped - is one that requires awareness of the client as people as well as the client as brand and business.

Which of course isn’t always possible. So the process - however templated it may look - is invariably bespoke. Something will not go as planned. Some pitfall will remain well hidden until it’s too late to avoid. A good strategist isn’t just one who can be flexible and adaptable - it’s one who expect to be, and isn’t derailed or disturbed when a project (inevitably, sorry) veers off course.

I struggled with this for a long time by the way, susceptible to irritation and even irascibility. But I got better at it and you can too.