Strategies are documents which explain trade-offs and action that will be take for challenges.
Visions are documents that enable people who don’t work closely together to make decisions that fit together.
A strategy should recommend specific actions that address the challenges constraints and context. “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt recommends that they have three sections:
The diagnosis is a theory describing the challenge. It details the context and constraints that define the problem. It should be a thorough problem statement.
Policies are the approach you’ll take to solve the problem. They should include what trade-offs you’ll be making.
These are what you get when you apply your policies to the diagnosis.
A vision describes a future in which the tradeoffs from strategy are no longer mutually exclusive.
A 1 or 2 sentence aspirational statement to summarize the rest of the vision. This is the core statement that should be repeated at each meeting, planning session, and review.
How will you be valuable to your users and the company? What success will you enable them to achieve.
A short narrative that combines all the information and details into something that is easy to digest and understand.
What capabilities will you need in order to deliver the value proposition?
What constraints do you have today that the vision solves?
What constraints do you expect to encounter in the future?
Link all the plans, metrics, updates, references, and documents.