Case Study: Building a Strategic Planning Process to Navigate Post-COVID Market Disruption

After a reorganization brought several new members to the leadership team, the BU President faced a challenge common to successful organizations. The business had enjoyed five strong years of growth and share gains, but the landscape had fundamentally shifted. COVID had driven unprecedented demand followed by supply chain chaos. Partners were introducing rapid technical innovations. The playbook that had worked was no longer sufficient, and with a partially new team, there was no established process for strategic planning or alignment on priorities. Everyone had ideas about what mattered most, but no framework to decide where to place the organization’s bets.

The Challenge

Strategic planning in large organizations often falls into one of two traps. Either it becomes a top-down exercise where leadership declares the strategy and the team dutifully nods along without real buy-in, or it becomes a bottom-up free-for-all where every function lobbies for their priorities and you end up with a laundry list rather than a focused strategy. Neither approach works when you need to align a leadership team around difficult trade-offs.

The PC and Peripherals business was operating at approximately $50B in revenue across PCs, monitors, and peripherals like keyboards, mice, and audio equipment. Each functional leader (Product, Operations, Sales, Finance, Marketing) had their own view of market opportunities and threats based on their vantage point. Each had initiatives they believed were critical. Without a structured process to surface these perspectives, evaluate them against a common framework, and build consensus on what truly mattered, the organization risked spreading resources too thin or missing the most important opportunities entirely.

The President needed more than a strategy document. He needed a repeatable planning process that would work with his new team, build alignment on priorities, and create a cadence for strategic decision-making going forward.

My Approach

I designed an eight-week process to analyze the industry and define our internal strategy. We started with comprehensive analysis of industry data, internal performance metrics, and identification of key market forces. I worked closely with internal experts in technology, products, and go-to-market to build a clear view of the factors influencing our business. This created a shared fact base grounded in data rather than opinion.

The next phase was deep one-on-one interviews with all functional leaders to understand their current priorities, key initiatives, and market observations. This wasn’t about collecting wish lists. It was about understanding what each leader saw from their perspective and what initiatives they believed were critical to the business. I documented every initiative mentioned and mapped them on a framework of urgency versus impact. Urgency measured how quickly we needed to make a decision before our performance suffered. Impact estimated the approximate annual margin dollars we could generate or defend if we got the strategy right.

With the market summary and initiative map complete, I facilitated a leadership workshop focused on alignment. The goal was to identify the top three to four strategic themes we needed to get right over the coming three to five years, then determine which initiatives were most important to these themes and warranted placement in the high urgency, high impact quadrant. The workshop structure was critical. Leaders could see how their input had been captured, understand the full landscape of initiatives across functions, and participate in the prioritization decisions rather than having priorities dictated to them.

Following the workshop, I worked directly with the BU President to finalize a clear statement of our strategy and the list of key initiatives we would fund and monitor over the next year. This wasn’t a 50-page document. It was a concise articulation of where we were going and what we would focus on to get there. We then distilled the strategy for rollout to all team members and secured budget approval for several major transformation initiatives including peripheral growth, customer experience improvement, and as-a-service business model expansion.

Results & Impact

• Secured strategic investments: Obtained $15-30M in funding from corporate for three key transformation initiatives (peripheral growth, customer experience, as-a-service business model)
• Peripherals business growth: Achieved 2x growth in peripherals business, adding over $1B in revenue over three years
• Customer satisfaction improvement: Delivered 20% NPS gains through focused customer experience initiatives
• Continued market performance: Sustained revenue and share growth trajectory with approximately $5B in revenue growth and 100 basis points of share gain
• Organizational capability: Established repeatable strategic planning process and cadence that the leadership team continued to use in subsequent years

Key Insight

Having a participative process was essential to getting the team aligned on what mattered most and funneling dollars and talent to those initiatives. In large organizations, leaders need to feel heard and have meaningful input into strategy, but they also need to see the process play out transparently so they understand why certain initiatives were selected over others.

The combination of a shared fact base, structured input from every function, and a collaborative workshop where leaders could see the full landscape and make trade-offs together created genuine alignment. It wasn’t about achieving consensus where everyone gets their top priority funded. It was about creating a process where leaders could see their input valued, understand the rationale for decisions, and commit to the final strategy even if their specific initiative wasn’t selected. That alignment allowed all the leaders to get behind the strategy and communicate it effectively to their teams, which is what actually drives execution.

Without that participative approach, we would have ended up with either a strategy that leadership paid lip service to while pursuing their own agendas, or a bloated list of initiatives that tried to please everyone and accomplished nothing. The discipline to focus on three to four strategic themes and truly prioritize initiatives was only possible because leaders trusted the process.