
Introducing Stratechia
A NEW KIND OF STRATEGY SHOP
Stratechia is a strategy and innovation advisory firm hyper-focused on helping technology-driven businesses grow purposefully and profitably. We work closely with leaders, teams and organizations to develop winning strategies and build the capabilities needed to achieve the success they envision for themselves.
OUR SERVICES
IT'S NOT WHAT WE DO, BUT HOW WE DO IT
All of our services share a common element:
Unique engagements custom-tailored to fit your culture and challenge.
Our Method
We call it Framestorm.™
We use powerful performance frameworks designed into highly engaging visual canvases supported by our expert guided facilitation. This allows us to leverage your knowledge and expertise while simultaneously drawing out your best thinking. Inevitably, our Framestorm™ method produces winning strategies and solutions in a fraction of the time and cost of more traditional consulting. And, buy-in is built-in.
Core Services
- Strategy Development
- Strategy Alignment
- Customer Experience
- Agile Innovation
- Lean Operations
- Go-to-Market
Enabling Services
- Training
- Events
- Insights
6 Core Services
Strategy Development
Strategy is about making winning choices. We use the Playing to Win strategic framework to help you develop unique answers to the two key questions at the heart of any winning strategy: where to play and how to win. We then help you test your assumptions, increasing your odds of success.

Our Framestorm™ approach to strategy development utilizes the Play-to-Win Canvas to guide your team through the thinking required to generate strategic possibilities.
Developed in collaboration with playing-to-win framework creator Roger Martin, the canvas provides a visual guide and artifact for teams.
Our process begins with gaining clarity on strategic intention: the specific challenge, based on the current strategy. An issue is framed as a choice between mutually exclusive high-level options, and a multitude of initial where-to-play, how-to-win possibilities are generated.
These possibilities are thematically clustered and culled down to a few high-potential possibilities, each of which is then explored through the integrated cascade of the five key questions.
Once each strategic cascade has been thoroughly explored and drafted, each new strategy is reverse-engineered to determine what must be true—about segments, channels, customers, capabilities, costs, and competition—in order for a given strategy to be successful.
The outcome is a portfolio of testable hypotheses which, when explored, yield the final winning strategy.
Strategy Alignment
Getting a winning strategy to permeate and drive the entire organization is no easy feat. Successful deployment rests on the ability to achieve cross-company alignment. We believe the best mechanism for doing that is Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), made popular by Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, and adopted by the likes of Google and Amazon.

Our approach to alignment features a proprietary Framestorm™ canvas that facilitates the development of cross-functional Objectives & Key Results—OKRs. Now a well-known and widely-adopted framework for driving progress, OKRs was the acronym coined by legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove and made popular by one of his key lieutenants, John Doerr, now chairman of Kleiner Perkins. Doerr taught OKRs to Google and Amazon founders in their early days. The method remains robust in both companies.
OKRs represent a basic yet critical step: setting goals that provide measurable milestones and deliver concrete results that enable you to know whether and to what degree your strategy is on course and working. These goals should be developed in a bidirectional fashion, just as the strategies they support are.
We have found OKRs to be the most effective way to align and deploy strategy, because the framework is simple. Objectives are directional statements of intent, the “what.” Each objective is further defined by three to five key results, which are specific and time bound, and thus measurable. Key Results are the “how.” Generally, speaking, OKRs are tied to annual goals, but are set, tracked and reviewed quarterly.
Customer Experience
In today’s hypercompetitive world, business success is increasingly dependent on your ability to deliver a unique and compelling customer experience. Our proprietary Customer Experience System (CES) is a powerful turnkey approach to measuring, mapping, and managing your customers’ journey through all of their interactions with your company. We help you better understand your customers, choreograph unique experiences, and build enduring relationships.
Agile Innovation
Profitable growth requires a continuously flowing innovation pipeline, which in turn demands an ethos of lab-like curiosity supported by a simple, fast and frugal experimentation method. Our proprietary Strategic Innovation System (SIS) provides an agile innovation management framework designed to repeatedly and consistently guide creative concepts from inception to launch, regardless of whether the idea is internally or externally focused.
Lean Operations
After nearly a decade of working with Toyota, we have mastered the authentic operating principles behind the vaunted Toyota Production System. Our approach centers on making more room for what truly matters by eliminating what doesn’t. It’s a lean and subtractive approach to kaizen — continuously improving and simplifying even your most complicated workflows.
Our Framestorm™ approach to improving operations centers on the process improvement method known as kaizen. Kaizen is the Japanese word referring to the continuous improvement efforts popularized in the U.S. during WWII and later adopted by Japan during the post-war occupation.
Our Kaizen Canvas incorporates kaizen as we learned and mastered it from Toyota. The focus is on incremental improvement to key processes and workflows with the express intent of removing excess waste, overload, and inconsistency.
Kaizen starts with setting compelling objectives. The work then turns to mapping the current situation, producing a visual depiction of value and waste. From there, problems get framed and analyzed, ideal outcomes defined, and potential solutions generated, along with expected business gains.
Experimental test plans are then developed and executed in an accelerated “lean” fashion.
Go-to-Market
Winning ideas remain just that until they are brought to market. Whether you’re launching a new product, a new business, or entering a new market, a solid go-to-market strategy can be the difference between winning and losing. We work closely and confidentially with you to ensure that your business concepts take flight.

Perhaps the most differentiating feature setting winners apart from the crowd is the ability to ensure that fresh ideas see the commercial light of day.
Whether it’s launching a new product, service, business or entering a new market, our Go-to-Market Framestorm™ method centers on developing our FlightPlan™ Canvas, comprising the three phases of a well-executed launch: Pre-Launch, Launch, and Post-Launch.
- Pre-Launch is composed of 8 key elements: launch team, value statement, key customers, opportunity size, performance targets, pricing model, key partners, and compliance issues.
- Launch phase covers beta, pilot, and rollout timelines, distribution channels, sales process, marketing communication, training and tools, and product fulfillment.
- Post-Launch takes into consideration critical elements often overlooked in traditional launch strategy development: channel support, client/customer support, retention strategy, and feedback/improvement processes.
3 Enabling Services
Events
Break is the important part of breakthrough. When a well-worn pattern is broken, creativity emerges. It is the broken pattern that makes us sit up, take notice, and pay attention. We think differently, more freely, more resourcefully, when a break occurs.
Enter Stratechia events. Whatever the format — summits, sprints, hackathons, offsites — we design purposeful breaks that produce the kind of creative breakthroughs that lead to growth.
Insights
Inspiration for elegant solutions doesn’t come from locked-room brainstorming sessions. It comes from simply getting out more.
While we appreciate arms-length quantitative research, we know that unmet customer needs often lie beneath the surface. There is no substitute for deep customer empathy and understanding, so we employ the best discovery techniques to reveal those insights, guiding your teams through up-close field observation and engaging interviews with real people.
Strategy is an integrated cascade of choices that uniquely positions a player in its market to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.
ROGER MARTIN
coauthor, Playing to Win
ABOUT US
PASSIONATE, PURPOSEFUL, PRINCIPLED
When three true professionals with uniquely complementary talents and backgrounds decided in 2018 to join forces after over thirty years of pursuing separate but related paths, sparks flew. A new and different kind of hybrid strategy studio was born. One with over a century of combined experience in performance development.
We knew we wanted to have a significant impact on an increasingly more technological business world. We wanted to work closely with senior leaders to balance and blend the right dose of strategy, innovation and operations to create a winning path forward. We chose a name indicative of our focus on strategy and technology:
STRATECHIA
We chose three non-negotiable traits that we agreed would define and distinguish the character of our firm:
Passionate — the nature of our work must inspire us to engage fully.
Purposeful — every engagement must help drive profitable growth for our client.
Principled — our work must be performed at the highest levels of professionalism.
We constantly seek out new and stimulating challenges that fit these characteristics, in turn enabling us to achieve the kind of world-changing impact we aspire to.

Matthew May
FOUNDING PARTNER

Deirdre Borrego
FOUNDING PARTNER

John Humphrey
FOUNDING PARTNER
The Stratechia Way
Core Purpose
We exist to help our clients profitably grow to market leadership by catalyzing and coaching the internal creativity and capabilities that often lie dormant, hidden, or even locked away.
Service Focus
We aim our blend of strategic and creative services toward our passion: technology-oriented businesses, including the automotive, advertising, biologic, digital, financial, medical, and mobile technology spaces.
Unique Difference
Unlike traditional strategy consulting firms that sell you back your own ideas derived and repackaged from a long, drawn-out interview process, we facilitate your best thinking real-time from the inside out in workshops using our proprietary Framestorm™ method, typically in one-tenth the time and at one-fourth the cost.
Hybrid Capabilities
Gone are the halcyon days of in-depth analysis and three-year plans. The pace of change today renders traditional approaches to strategy and innovation irrelevant. Our nearly century of combined experience in traditional advisory spaces gives rise to a unique hybrid blend of strategic, creative, and information expertise.
Our clients benefit from the best of several worlds.
Guiding Principles
elegance rules
Achieving maximum effect with minimum means.
choices, not plans
Strategy is about making choices, especially what not to do.
frame first
Difficult challenges demand intelligent framing.
test everything
Every great idea is but a hypothesis when first conceived.
OUR THOUGHTS
CONCEPTS & INSIGHTS ON STRATEGY, GROWTH & WINNING
BLOGS
BOOKS
ARTICLES
Mindfulness Without Meditation
InnovationThe Secret to Organizational Innovation
InnovationWinning the Brain Game
Creativity, InnovationState Your Strategy in a Sentence
Go-to-Market, Strategy3 Quick Ways to Quiet Your Mind
Creativity, InnovationLess Overthinking = More Innovation
Creativity, Innovation3 Simple Steps to Silencing Your Inner Critic
Creativity, InnovationThe Play-to-Win Career Strategy
Strategy