When strategy is not a presentation but the operating system of a business

Today, the situation has changed: strategy has become a living, constantly updated document, and its creation is a collaboration of the entire team, not just the leaders. This is facilitated by a new culture of open planning and modern collaboration tools, such as TEAMLY, which can integrate people, data, and ideas into a single digital ecosystem.

Hello everyone. This is Vitaly Chesnokov, CEO of QSOFT — the creator of the collaboration and knowledge management platform TEAMLY.

I decided to share with you some futuristic thoughts on strategic planning — I won’t say that we at QSOFT are ready to completely abandon long-term plans, but I personally find the idea very appealing.

Why does business need a strategy

In the past, it was believed that a strategy was a “roadmap for five years ahead.” Today, in a rapidly changing world, it is more of a compass that helps make decisions under uncertainty. It does not guarantee an exact route but sets the direction of movement and criteria for choice.

A good strategy answers three main questions:

• Where are we headed?

• What is our competitive advantage?

• How do we allocate limited resources?

Without this guide, a company finds itself in a mode of chaotic reaction or simply “going with the flow.”

Let’s consider several areas where strategic planning is particularly critical.

• IT and product — prioritize hypotheses, choose a technology stack, and create a product roadmap to avoid wasting resources on "features for the sake of features."

• Marketing — define brand positioning, plan advertising campaigns, experiment with new channels.

• Sales — select target segments, devise a strategy for entering new markets, test pricing models.

• Production and supply — optimize chains, choose between outsourcing and automation, reduce costs.

• Startups — find product-market fit and build a scalable business model ready for investment.

In all these cases, strategy helps not just to "plan," but to understand why this particular path was chosen by the team.

Why Strategy Should Be Team-Based

In the traditional approach, strategy is formulated by a narrow circle of executives, while the rest of the team sees it in a finished form. This format seems quick, but in practice, it is not.

Firstly, a strategic session with top management is not a one-meeting affair. Secondly, artificially limiting the circle of generators leads to fewer productive ideas. Thirdly, employees do not feel involved and do not see their role in the overall picture.

Co-creating strategy addresses this problem—it transforms the document from an order "from above" into a joint project that the team builds together.

The advantages are obvious:

• More context and nuances. People "in the field" see real risks and opportunities earlier than management. For example, sales managers know where customers most often refuse, developers see technical debts, marketers identify blind spots in positioning.

• Increased engagement. If a person participated in creating goals, they feel responsibility for the outcome. A strategy that employees believe in does not require additional "motivation."

• Reduced risk of blind spots. Each department adds its data, making the picture complete.

• Flexibility and adaptation. Collective strategy is easier to adjust—market changes are discussed openly, without resistance.

However, collective planning has its challenges as well. Let's explore potential obstacles and ways to overcome them.

Hidden Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Of course, strategic planning in a team is not chaos and anarchy, but a properly organized and managed process. However, even being aware of this, one can get bogged down if mistakes are made.

1. Endless Debates

When many people participate in a discussion, it’s easy to get caught up in the details.

Solution: A moderator is needed to guide the dialogue and maintain structure. A digital platform — for example, TEAMLY — helps with templates and prioritization mechanisms: each participant adds ideas to a common database, and then the team evaluates them by importance and impact.

2. Loss of Focus

Debates can steer the discussion off course, and key insights get lost in a mass of comments.

Solution: The AI assistant in TEAMLY can analyze long discussions, highlight main themes, group ideas, and even suggest a preliminary structure for the strategic document.

3. Fragmented Information

A common situation: some ideas are in chats, some in Google Docs, and meeting summaries are in emails.

Solution: In TEAMLY, all materials are located in one space — from drafts and discussions to the final document. One source of truth, interconnected through links and tags.

4. Silent Agreement Syndrome

Not everyone is willing to speak out in open meetings.

Solution: TEAMLY supports anonymous idea collection and synchronous brainstorming: participants write their thoughts simultaneously, and AI helps eliminate duplicates and highlight the best suggestions. This way, every voice is heard.

How Collaborative Platforms Help at Every Stage of Strategic Planning

Collective planning requires not only a culture of openness but also tools that support transparency and order. TEAMLY was created precisely for this purpose — as a platform for living strategies.

1. Virtual Brainstorming Sessions

Instead of a chaotic chat, a structured idea base is needed.

A template page is created where participants add their suggestions parallel to each other. This synchronicity creates an “intellectual explosion” effect: the team sees a flow of thoughts and mutually complements them.

After gathering ideas, you can quickly conduct clustering — with the help of smart tables, TEAMLY AI will group entries by topic proximity and highlight duplicates.

For example, when planning a marketing strategy, AI can automatically identify blocks such as "new channels," "brand," and "viral content," which helps maintain structure.

2. Planning Strategic Initiatives

The best ideas turn into initiative cards — with goals, deadlines, metrics, and responsible parties. TEAMLY allows managing them according to OKR principles: each goal is formulated as a measurable result tied to specific tasks.

It shows who is responsible for what, the dynamics of completion, and where the "bottlenecks" are. Thus, the platform turns strategic words into concrete actions.

3. Collaborative Writing and Editing of Documents

Creating the final strategic document in TEAMLY resembles editing code in GitHub: everyone sees changes in real-time, versions are recorded, and comments remain "in context" — that is, right next to the relevant paragraph, graphic, or table.

This eliminates the usual chaos of emails like "look, I changed the item on page five" and reduces the risk of information loss.

The revision history becomes a kind of chronicle of decision-making — you can return to any moment and understand why the company chose a particular path.

4. Support from the AI Assistant

The TEAMLY AI assistant can do more than just rewrite texts; it can meaningfully analyze knowledge. It can:

• Synthesize discussions, creating digests on topics.

• Find internal reports or data that support hypotheses.

• Propose a logical structure for the strategic document.

• Check formulations for clarity and consistency with corporate goals.

In fact, he becomes the second analyst of the team, helping to navigate through the sea of information.

How a Living Strategy Looks in Practice

Imagine that a tech startup decides to update its product strategy. Instead of assigning this task to a single manager, the team creates a new project in TEAMLY called "Strategy 2026."

Next, the process is initiated.

1. Idea Collection Stage. All employees contribute insights — from customer feedback to risks. AI helps to remove duplicates and categorizes ideas by themes ("pricing," "functionality," "UX").

2. Analysis and Priority Selection. The team votes on the most significant themes. From these, strategic goals are formed.

3. Formulation of Initiatives. Each goal is turned into a project card with KPIs, deadlines, and owners.

4. Constant Updates. The document lives on: every week, AI publishes a digest of changes and compares actual results with initial expectations.

Result: Instead of a static file, the company gets a dynamic strategy management system where everyone can see how their contributions impact the overall direction.

Conclusion: It’s not enough to declare a strategy. Tracking its execution in almost real-time is a great driver for the team.

Cultural Effect: Strategy as Collective Thinking

Tools are important, but the key is culture. When strategy ceases to be a "secret document" and transforms into an open knowledge base, profound changes occur within the company:

• The habit of "waiting for instructions from above" disappears.

• Self-organization emerges: teams propose ways to improve results themselves.

• Data transparency reduces tension between departments.

• People begin to think in terms of "contribution to strategy," rather than "task execution."

This is the transition to living strategic management — when a project in the knowledge base becomes not just an archive, but the nervous system of the organization.

TEAMLY — An Example of a Domestic Approach

Many similar platforms (Notion, Miro, Confluence) are evolving towards information integration and collaboration. However, TEAMLY emphasizes the flexibility of work processes and built-in decision-making automation.

The TEAMLY collaboration platform combines:

• a knowledge base;

• databases — smart tables with various visual representations: Gantt chart, Kanban, list, calendar;

• collaborative document editing;

• chat and comments directly in the KB articles;

• courses created by reusing KB articles;

• tests for knowledge assessment;

• a smart AI layer that helps structure chaos.

This combination makes TEAMLY not just a repository of information and not just a platform, but an operational environment for collective thinking.

A strategy that really works

A modern strategy is not about reports, but a living network of interconnected ideas, hypotheses, and actions that are constantly updated based on data. Creating such a strategy is impossible without collective participation and convenient digital tools.

TEAMLY shows that even in complex organizations, it is possible to combine the speed of decision-making with the quality of content. While strategies used to be "written once a year," now they are lived every day — updating goals, discussing results, and adapting to a world that changes faster than any document.

A strategy as a living document is not just a fashionable metaphor. It is a new management reality where knowledge becomes a common resource, and the company transforms into a self-learning system.