How is a SOAR Analysis useful?
Before you begin conducting a SOAR Analysis, it’s important to answer a few important questions:
Step 1. Establish the Focus of your SOAR Analysis
To start, it’s important to note that existing businesses or businesses under development can benefit from conducting a SOAR Analysis. Understanding the purpose (growth focus, continuous improvement, etc.) of your SOAR analysis is critical to establishing an appropriate starting point. Also, having access to as much information as you can find about the company is essential to formulating a reality-based SOAR Analysis. Having access to decision-makers, managers, and leaders throughout the business is also critical to the success of the SOAR Analysis. By focussing on the creation of goals and objectives, the SOAR Analysis helps to position a business with a focus on achieving an ambitious vision through the realization of opportunities and results driven strategic initiatives. Developing situational awareness is critical in establishing a focus for your SOAR Analysis.
Step 2. Identify the Team
Establishing a team of diverse professionals that represent various functional areas of the business.
Further building on an organisation’s strengths will yield better results than spending time on improving weaknesses. Every element of the SOAR Analysis is described in further detail below, with several example questions:
Strengths
Within the SOAR Analysis, this concerns the most powerful strengths of an organisation. It refers to all capacities, skills and achievements (whether big or small). The following example questions apply:
- At what does the organisation excel?
- What have been the greatest achievements so far?
- What is the organisation most proud of?
- What makes the organisation unique?
- What makes the organisation valuable to purchasers?
- What does the organisation do better than its competitors?
Opportunities
These are aimed at possibilities and chances the organisation has. It concerns external conditions that could improve the profit or that focus on unfulfilled needs of customers.
Opportunities can also lead to a larger market share or improve the competitive advantage. Possible organisational threats or weaknesses can be reformulated into opportunities. All opportunities that emerge will eventually lead to success. Here too, example questions can be useful:
- Which collaborations could increase the chance of success?
- Which changes and market trends match with the current strengths of the organisation?
- Which threats could the organisation embrace and convert into opportunities?
- Which needs and wishes does the organisation not yet fulfil for internal stakeholders?
- Which needs and wishes does the organisation not yet fulfil for external stakeholders?
- Which gaps could the organisation fill in the market?
Aspirations
Within the SOAR Analysis, these concern the ambitions an organisation has; what does the organisation aspire to be and what can it realise? Which aspirations does the organisation have for the future, what is their vision? Within this vision, an organisation would do well to build on its current strengths. With sufficient inspiration, the aspirations could be clarified and the following example questions can be helpful:
- What does the organisation hope to achieve in the future?
- What will the future organisation look like?
- How can the organisation make a difference in the market?
- What is the organisation’s passion?
- Which strategies and actions could support the future ambitions?
Results
This refers to the tangible and measurable results that indicate when the goals and aspirations have been achieved. The following example questions can be useful for this:
- Which measures ensure that the organisation is on the right track for success?
- How does the organisation translate the vision of success into tangible results?
- When does the organisation know the goals have been achieved?
To start your own SOAR Analysis, download this editable SOAR Analysis PowerPoint template.
When you lead your team through this activity together,
the collaboration and diversity in thinking
will help you to land on a better strategy.
Plus, people are more likely to commit to the goals
and objectives when they help to create them.
Starting at the top left quadrant,
input your product’s strengths.
This is what makes your product stand out among competitors.
Questions to ask yourself and your team include:
What is our unique selling proposition
or what makes our product desirable to customers?
Let’s look at the strengths of Lyft,
the ride sharing app that launched
when Uber was already a well-established competitor.
Keep in mind that Lyft had to compete
in both the recruiting of drivers and selling to riders.
For drivers, Lyft stood out from Uber
because they created a system
where the drivers could make more money per hour.
And for the riders, Lyft chose to be more transparent
about the pricing of rides and put the pricing up front.
At the time, it was something Uber riders complained about
when stung by Uber’s unexpected surge pricing.
While both Lyft and Uber are very similar product services,
identifying their strengths helped Lyft to launch
and better operate in a crowded marketplace.
Moving to the top right quadrant,
fill out your product’s opportunities.
Launching a brand new product
has some built-in opportunities.
For example, leverage early adopters and influencers.
They love to be the first to try out
the new hottest thing.
To fill out this section ask something like:
What trends or partnerships might we capitalize on?
Productivity and messaging app Slack
did a beautiful job of capitalizing
on a partnership to create new opportunities.
To build the software used to control the Mars Rover,
NASA’s jet propulsion lab used Slack
as their communication and collaboration tool.
Slack made an opportunity out of this client
and created a clever campaign on their homepage.
The use case subtly implied
that if Slack was good enough for large teams of scientists
at NASA, the people putting robots on Mars,
then it’s good enough for anyone.
At the lower left section there are aspirations.
This is a space for expressing what you want to happen
and goals you plan to achieve in the future.
Great questions to ask include:
How can we make a difference?
And what are we passionate about?
The final quadrant on the lower right
is the results section for measurable outcomes
that can demonstrate you’ve achieved
your goals and aspirations.
You can ask questions like: What measures
and tangible outcomes will tell us
we’re on track toward success?
The SOAR framework is a great tool
to go beyond where your product is today.
It allows you and your team to be forward thinking
and address the potential of your product.
The analysis will inform many of the moving pieces
involved in your product launch.
When done right, it can make the difference
between taking a stab in the dark
or launching your product in harmony with the marketplace.