Where to Play, How to Win

Most leadership teams are not short of strategic ideas. What they lack is a clear answer to two harder questions: where, specifically, should we be competing — and why would we win there?

The where to play, how to win framework exists to answer exactly that. It's a discipline for making strategic choices explicit, so that focus becomes real rather than rhetorical. It stops organisations spreading resources thin across too many fronts and forces the kind of clarity that lets teams actually execute.

Two questions that need to be answered separately

The framework rests on a deceptively simple structure. "Where to play" and "how to win" look like one question. They're not.

Where to play is about identifying the market spaces worth competing in — specific arenas where conditions are shifting, where customer needs are growing, and where your company has a genuine right to show up. It's an outside-in scan: what is changing in the market, where are competitors absent or vulnerable, where is new value beginning to form? The answer should not start from what you currently sell or where you currently operate. It should start from what's moving.

How to win is a separate exercise entirely. It asks what customers in those spaces actually value — not what you assume they need, and not what your product happens to deliver. We call these benefit areas: the real outcomes customers are trying to achieve, the problems they want to avoid, the way they want to feel in the process. Getting this right requires talking to customers, not theorising about them. The framework only produces useful output when both questions are answered with external evidence.

"Where to play and how to win look like one question. They're not — and confusing them is where most strategy processes go wrong."

Where most companies get stuck

The pattern we see most often is this: organisations answer "where to play" by defending the territory they already hold. They define their market by what they currently make, the customers they already serve, and the competitors they already know. That's inside-out thinking, and in a market moving faster than most strategy cycles, it produces strategies that look coherent on paper but have no forward motion.

The "how to win" question gets answered the same way. We've sat in rooms where the answer was essentially a capabilities audit dressed up as customer insight — a list of what the company does well, mapped onto needs it assumed rather than verified. The result is a set of focus areas that feel strategically sound but are anchored in internal ambition rather than external reality. Execution stalls because the customer never quite shows up the way the plan expected.

This is the gap that the framework is designed to close.

What it looks like when it works

A useful strategic focus area sits at the intersection of a real market opportunity and a genuine customer benefit area. It should be specific enough to guide decisions and narrow enough to focus resources — but broad enough to allow a company to build something significant.

It's a pattern we've seen more than once. A manufacturer of industrial filtration systems reaches the limit of what product-line expansion and incremental feature development can deliver. Margins thinning. Core business commoditising. Rather than defending the current portfolio, the leadership team uses this framework to identify a specific strategic focus area: predictive maintenance enablement for critical filtration systems in energy and chemical plants. That single line of clarity changes how the company operates. Product develops sensor-embedded systems. Sales moves from transactional selling to performance-based contracts. Customer success deploys remote diagnostics teams. The company shifts from component supplier to operational partner — with measurably higher retention and margin.

That outcome didn't come from a better product. It came from a sharper answer to where to play and how to win. What came after that clarity — how the commercial architecture was rebuilt around those choices — is the harder half of the work. We cover that in Where to Play, How to Win: What Comes After Lafley.

"The best strategic focus areas are specific enough to guide decisions and narrow enough to focus resources — but broad enough to build something significant."

The question the framework forces you to answer

The discipline of this approach is not the analysis. It's the trade-off. Defining where to play also means defining where you are not playing. Choosing how to win in a specific benefit area means deprioritising others. Most organisations find this harder than the strategic thinking itself — because saying no requires commitment, and commitment makes failure visible.

What we've seen is that leadership teams who go through this process properly come out the other side with something more valuable than a strategic plan: a shared filter. When a new initiative lands on the table, the question isn't "is this a good idea?" It's "does this connect to where we've decided to compete?" That shift in conversation is where strategy starts to become execution.

If you're working through this in your own organisation, start with two questions in your next leadership session. What are the two or three market spaces where conditions are shifting most in your favour? And in each of those spaces, what do customers value that you're positioned to deliver better than anyone else?

The answers won't be perfect first time. But asking the right questions is how you build a strategy worth committing to.

Once the focus areas are clear, the next challenge is deciding which initiatives to resource and which to stop — see How to Prioritise Strategic Initiatives When Everything Feels Urgent.

Key takeaways

"Where to play" and "how to win" are two distinct questions that need separate answers — conflating them produces strategies that are internally coherent but externally untested.

Where to play should be determined by outside-in signals: shifts in market conditions, emerging customer needs, and spaces where competitors are absent or vulnerable — not by the territory a company already holds.

How to win requires genuine understanding of customer benefit areas — the outcomes customers are trying to achieve — not an inventory of your own capabilities mapped onto assumed needs.

A well-defined strategic focus area sits at the intersection of a real market opportunity and a validated customer benefit area; it should be specific enough to drive decisions about what not to do.

The real test of this framework is whether it produces trade-offs — if the strategy doesn't help you say no, it isn't focused enough to execute against.

FAQ

What is the where to play, how to win framework?
A discipline for making two strategic choices explicit and separate: which market spaces are worth competing in, and what customers in those spaces genuinely value. Treating them as one question is where most strategy processes go wrong.

What is the difference between where to play and how to win?
Where to play is an outside-in scan of market conditions — where demand is shifting and competitors are absent or vulnerable. How to win is a separate question about customer benefit areas — the real outcomes customers want, verified with them directly, not assumed from your own capabilities.

What is a benefit area?
A benefit area is the real outcome a customer is trying to achieve, the problem they want to avoid, or how they want to feel in the process — established through direct conversation with customers, not internal assumption.

How do you know if a strategic focus area is well defined?
It sits at the intersection of a genuine market opportunity and a validated customer benefit area. It should be specific enough to guide real decisions and narrow enough to focus resources, while still being broad enough to build something significant.

What comes after defining where to play and how to win?
Turning the focus area into a commercial architecture — resourcing, prioritising initiatives, and deciding what to stop doing. That's covered in Where to Play, How to Win: What Comes After Lafley and How to Prioritise Strategic Initiatives.