How I Read Strategy Blogs

I've long been a shill for Ben Thompson, and my coworkers have clearly seen his impact on my thinking, as evidenced by this SQL query a friendly passerby left on my unlocked work station back in 2017.

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This year my proselytizing extended to Christmas gifts for my immediate family. After a few weeks of enjoying her new subscription, my sister-in-law asked me a great question:

"What are your main takeaways from an update like this? What do you leave thinking about?"

The update in question was a recent daily update covering Facebook's earnings and the ongoing Facebook/Apple privacy posturing. The question is broadly applicable, though, across any post. I responded with the following framework for how I read Stratechery (or any other analysis), from the perspective of being a better leader for my business and a better thinker, in general.

(I'd also add that this is not the first IDFA entry from Ben, it's worth reading the rest for the full picture)

A lens for digesting a blog post on strategy

Almost every post will teach me something general about business. Some smaller percentage of them will do that and also teach me something about a specific business I have a personal interest in, and every now and then one will teach me about something immediately relevant to my business.

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In reality, all three levels are applicable to my business in some way, because general business strategy is broadly transferrable, but some articles are of immediate tactical value. For IDFA, for example, if you run a mobile game company you might immediately see a change you can/should make in your org.

For any article, I start at the top and then move down.

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1. Is there something here that is directly applicable to my work? If so, what action should I take in response to the new information?
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2. Is there something here that applies to an industry I am interested in/care about? Who else might be impacted by this information?
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3. What general concepts can I take from this? What trends does that point to at a high level?

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For this post:

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1. Will our average CAC increase as ads become less optimized with the restrictions on IDFA? Does an increase in CAC make some audiences more/less important to our business? What channel improvements can we/should we make to preserve CAC? What business lines make less/more sense in this environment?
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2. If I was Apple or Facebook, what would I consider doing differently in this situation, why aren't they doing that? If I was a mobile game maker, how would I change my behavior in response to this new information? How will this impact the perception of Apple as a monopoly/gatekeeping platform, will it increase congressional pressure?
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3. What are the implications of individual companies being such powerful gatekeepers for entire platforms? In what other industries does that dynamic exist? For FB facing an increase in ad prices, indicating a saturating business model, what could the next line of business be for them that will help sustain growth?
   

Once you've gotten there, you can actually take the themes of the bottom layer and loop them back in to the top of the pyramid.

Platforms as gatekeepers/How to grow a saturated business:

1. Who are the other gatekeepers/platforms to whom my business is exposed? Should we invest in decreasing that risk by building across other channels? Where do we own the relationship with our customer vs not?
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2. Which businesses are most impacted by gatekeepers? What steps can they take to fix that? What opportunity is there for a new business to arise to combat the new problems that will exist in this world (alternate methods of cohort tracking, etc)?

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This combination of Tactics and Themes is kind of infinitely recursive, and it's why I find reading these posts valuable, regardless of whether or not the subject matter feels directly applicable to my business in the moment. Especially because it's hard to predict the needs of my business over time. You might find yourself in 3 years thinking about a problem and go "oh, this is just like that old stratechery article, I have a tool for thinking about this".