How to Answer Questions Strategically With Executives
Does it feel like you're too in the weeds? Learn how to start with goals and strategy before diving into details to stay strategic and high level in your approach.
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Client: Whenever I’m in executive-level conversations, I consistently feel like I’m not having the impact I should be. When an executive asks a question, my instinct is to answer the question directly and quickly. I then realized my peers were not doing that. Their answers are more strategic. How do I do what they’re doing?
You’re delivering a presentation and a senior leader asks you a question:
“How does this affect other projects we’re working on?”
“How will the Go-To-Market work?”
“How do we architect this part of the feature?”
After taking in a deep inhale, you dive straight into the answer, adrenaline pumping. You attempt to answer the question succinctly and clearly, possibly without drawing another breadth.
“We will need to move 1 engineer from the other project but it should not affect its delivery timeline.”
“For the GTM, we have 3 workstreams planned — Lifecycle, Radio, and Paid ads. We’ll spend $100k across them and will kick off 1 week after the initial launch.”
“For the architecture, we will add a new column to table the user table while we work to refactor xyz.”
After you finish, there is silence. No follow-ups. You continue your presentation. However, you can’t help but feel like you missed an opportunity to sound more strategic. Or to somehow share more.
In another meeting later, you watch one of your peers rattle off goals, expected outcomes, and tradeoffs differently, sounding very strategic, thorough, and…like a true leader. How is she doing it?
What are the Leaders Really Asking?
To uplevel your answers and be more strategic in your responses, it’s helpful to understand the mindset of the leaders in the room and where they are coming from. This way, you can meet them where they are and give them the most relevant information they need to make a decision, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) the direct answer to their question.
First, leaders spend a large amount of their time working across teams and organizations. They are constantly on the lookout for incoming changes in direction that will affect their team roadmaps. They typically want to know if and how what you’re presenting changes the work of their teams and by how much. As a team member, you appreciate this.
Second, most senior leaders and executives are not up to speed on your project. They are busy. They have many projects. They may not remember exactly what the goals of the projects are, what the expected outcome is, and why it’s important to the company. But they always want to know this, because they’ll need to relay this back to their teams.
Third, leaders want to know you’ve done the work and that you’ve given this project the right level of thinking. They want to know that you know who’s for it, who’s against it, what might go wrong, and have covered all your bases on execution. They care less about the exact details versus knowing that someone (you) has thought through it.
So with these three factors in mind, let’s look at how we can uplevel the response and answer the question behind the question.
#1 Start with the Goal
Always take the chance to reiterate the goals and the impact of the project. Yes, it was probably slide #3 in your presentation, but by slide #10, some people have forgotten it. Start with the goals and outcome.
“Great question. As mentioned, the goal of the project is to increase the revenue of product X by 30% through a new multi-user feature that has been preventing larger customers from using our product.”
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