Stellar Strategy 2x2s
Stellar Strategy 2x2s

Stellar Strategy 2x2s

A few weeks ago we delved into our Top Talent 2 x 2s: today, we return to 2 x 2s, diving into our four favourites for strategy & decision-making.

The best frameworks are both simple and profound. They help us see complex problems through a clearer lens, forcing us to make explicit trade-offs that might otherwise remain fuzzy. That's why we like the 2x2 matrix, it reduces seemingly complicated decisions to two fundamental dimensions. These 4 Strategy 2 x 2s build on each other to help us navigate strategic challenges:

  1. The Priority Matrix (PMAT): How do we choose between competing opportunities?
  2. The Eisenhower Matrix: How do we allocate our time and attention?
  3. SWOT: How do we assess our strategic position?
  4. BCG Growth-Share Matrix: How do we manage our portfolio of businesses?

Together, they form a toolkit for strategic decision-making, from day-to-day prioritization to long-term portfolio strategy. Let's dig in…

(1) What is The Priority Matrix (PMAT)

Our first ever Blueprint was The Priority Matrix, including a video walkthrough from LinkedIn COO Dan Shapero. The crux of the framework is that we can plot a set of potential initiatives on two axes:

  • Size of Prize: how big an impact would this have if it were to happen. This could be revenue, the number of users engaged, customer sentiment, or any output metric.
  • Ability to Win: the likelihood each initiative will be successful, factoring in competitive dynamics and execution risk.

This makes it easy to compare a set of potential options and where to prioritize, whether new products to launch this decade or tasks to get done this week.

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For example, take Meta in 2023: their AI-driven advertising and Instagram were clear Home Runs, building on existing advantages. Reality Labs and AR/VR were Big Bets requiring leadership focus, while they deprioritized broader metaverse moonshots that risked becoming Junk. Small Wins came from continuous optimization to the Facebook Blue app - important but delegatable.

The beauty of the PMAT is it works equally well for massive strategic choices for a company like Meta all the way down to an individual or team's weekly priorities.

And there’s an even more powerful insight for leaders: NOT to spend all our time in the Home Run top-right quadrant. Instead, as Dan wrote about here, we want to spend almost all our time in the left-hand side:

  • Double Down on Big Bets: where our influence and abilities is critical to their success.
  • Destroy Junk: pruning projects that are taking up time but delivering very little.
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(2) What is The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is named after US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and coined by Stephen Covey, the author of (the highly recommended) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Where the PMAT helps us choose what to do, The Eisenhower Matrix helps us decide when to do it. It outlines what is:

  • Important: how important a given product or project or task is
  • Urgent: how soon they need our attention

The matrix then breaks down into four quadrants with clear directives:

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Consider an R&D leader's weekly priorities: shipping a critical bug fix (important & urgent), preparing for next quarter's roadmap (important, not urgent), responding to Slack messages (urgent, not important), and clearing old JIRA tickets (neither). It’s more urgent and easier to respond to random Slack messages, but there’s greater value from getting the roadmap right.

The crux of both the PMAT and The Eisenhower Matrix is spending sufficient time on the left-hand side - specifically the top-left - items that we must invest in, but not necessarily right now. This could be writing a blog post tomorrow, preparing for next week’s key customer meeting, or ensuring we're set-up to crush our annual planning next month. It’s not conflating urgency with importance: In our notification-filled world, it reminds us that investing in urgent quadrants often comes at the expense of what is important. Eisenhower captured this tension perfectly when he noted, "What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important."

(3) What is SWOT?

SWOT analysis emerged from research at Stanford in the 1960s, breaking down our strategic position across both internal and external factors:

  • Internal: what we control (Strengths & Weaknesses)
  • External: what happens around us (Opportunities & Threats)
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Take Amazon's entry into cloud computing: they turned their strength (massive server infrastructure from e-commerce) into their biggest opportunity (AWS), addressed key weakness (dependence on low-margin retail) and defended against the threat of retail commoditization.

SWOT reminds us that strategy isn’t just about responding to market forces; instead, it’s about understanding how our unique capabilities or limitations position us to capture opportunities or expose us to threats. It also reminds us that the magic isn’t writing down 4 distinct lists, it comes when we start asking questions that span across the quadrants like “Which of our strengths are most likely to become weaknesses in this fast-evolving market?” or “Where are we treating market threats as ‘external factors beyond our control’ when our strengths could reshape the game entirely?” or “Where are our competitors’ strengths creating threats we’re ignoring?”

(4) What is the BCG Growth-Share Matrix?

Although James is a proud Bainie, we’ll give credit where credit is due: we can’t highlight a set of Strategy 2 x 2s without this one. Created by Boston Consulting Group's Bruce Henderson in 1970, the Growth-Share Matrix revolutionized how companies think about managing their portfolio of businesses and products across two dimensions:

  • Market Growth: how fast the overall market is expanding
  • Relative Market Share: how we're performing versus competitors

And then each quadrant gets a memorable name that’s stood the test of time:

  • Question Marks: continuing our theme of the top-left being the interesting quadrant, these are going to require heavy investment with uncertain outcomes to compete more effectively in a high growth market. Therefore, do we double down or cut our losses? Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a good example here: they’re #3 in arguably the most lucrative market out there, competing with the larger (and equally deep-pocketed) offerings from Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure).
  • Stars: these are our winning products that require significant continued investment, but with confidence that they’ll generate strong returns. Think Apple’s iPhone today: if they continue to stay on the forefront of innovation (or at least perceived innovation), it’ll be a $200B+ annual revenue business for many years to come.
  • Cash Cows: these are not necessarily the sexiest products, but are the most reliable profit generators. Think Microsoft Windows today: it appears to be the least interesting part of Microsoft, but throws off 10s of billions of dollars in cash flow to invest in Azure, Office, and the rest of Microsoft’s broader suite.
  • Dogs: These are the portfolio's underperformers - low share in low-growth markets that often need to be fixed, sold, or shut down. For example, Meta's Portal smart display device, which they discontinued in 2022 after failing to gain meaningful share against Amazon Echo and Google Nest in the slowing smart home device market.
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As with SWOT, the power of the Growth-Share Matrix is in forcing tough conversations about resource allocation across the quadrants: the BU leaders can focus on maximizing individual product performance, but it’s the CXOs who make the hard decisions about when a former Star has become a Dog or how much to milk a Cash Cow to fund Question Marks. Cash Cows should fund Question Marks, Stars need reinvestment to stay Stars, and Dogs need tough decisions.

Combined together, these four matrices reflect the key questions every leader faces: What should we prioritize? When should we do it? What advantages can we leverage? And how should we allocate our resources? By mastering each of them, we can all lead just that bit better.

How do we use these Top Strategy 2 x 2s?

James:

We’ve ordered these in the same order that I use them: the PMAT is deeply ingrained in everything I do, and I often ask myself whether I’m lazily doing something that feels urgent when in reality my time would be better spent on something harder and more important.

Where I use the PMAT and Eisenhower weekly, I use SWOT more like quarterly, and then I rarely use the Growth-Share Matrix. Which isn’t because I don’t see the value, it’s because there’s limited value as part of my fractional exec work for early-stage AI startups. If I were back at LinkedIn or working at any large, multi-business company, it would be more relevant more often.

John:

Hang on. A mistake I see people often make is talking strategy before defining what they mean by “strategy”. This is a term often stretched and misused. I’ve always found (former LinkedIn CEO) Jeff Weiner’s definition crisp and useful: “How a company navigates its competitive landscape (and the dynamics most heavily influencing that landscape, e.g. technology) to achieve its objectives.”

Once we have a useful definition we can agree on, we can begin using a structure like a 2x2 to organize our thoughts.

James:

Fair enough! All 4 of these can help a company execute against Jeff’s definition. One of the biggest value-adds to me from these 4 has been digging into the interplay between each of the quadrants. The basics for SWOT and Growth-Share, for example, are filling out the quadrants, but the real value comes from thinking about how initiatives in each quadrant are either enabling or inhibiting each other. And asking the cross-quadrant questions.

John:

I like thinking across the matrices, too. If we return to Meta’s Reality Labs, we can see it travel through all four matrices: it's a Big Bet in PMAT, Important but Not Urgent in Eisenhower, leverages their Strength in consumer social products through SWOT, and sits as a classic Question Mark in BCG Growth-Share. The four frameworks give us different lenses on the same strategic choice. So what do you with this? A useful exercise is to apply guiding principles to a decision. For instance, if a good decision values things like massive upside and building a competitive moat, Reality Labs makes sense. If expected returns, predictability and focus are important, probably less so.

James:

I’m bullish on Reality Labs and can’t wait for Meta’s Orion glasses to go mainstream.

It’s also a good reminder that execution is so critical. It's not enough to just identify the right quadrant - you need the discipline to actually focus there. Connecting back to Growth-Share, most leadership teams I've worked with can spot the opportunities, but fewer have the courage to stop funding the Dogs. Back to my Bain days, the theoretical answer was easy, the doing it in practice was not; which is why the most consistent critique of consultants is that they create pretty strategy decks that aren’t rooted in the reality of what’s feasible so they sit on shelves.

John:

Which brings us back to why these frameworks are so powerful - they force us to make the implicit explicit. Whether it's the PMAT pushing us to articulate why something is truly a Big Bet, or SWOT making us honest about our actual Strengths versus our aspirational ones, or BCG requiring us to admit which products are really Dogs. These matrices strip away the comfortable ambiguity we often hide behind. The frameworks themselves are relatively straightforward, but the conversations they force us to have? Nowhere near as easy, but it’s the tough ones that actually drive change.

Want to learn more?

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON THESE TOP STRATEGY 2x2s AND MORE?

Here’s our full Blueprint on The Priority Matrix:

And, staying on the theme of strategy and decision-making, here are 2 more from folks you’ve definitely heard of:

And here’s one more taking a more qualitative approach to considering the impact of a strategy:

Lastly, this whole video from 2008 is beyond silly, but it does have a BCG Growth-Share Matrix reference that should make any former consultant chuckle:

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