Where to Play
Box two of the Strategy Choice Cascade: the choice of field. Which customers, geographies, segments, channels and offerings, and, just as loudly, which not.
Martin's five classic dimensions of the playing field: geography, customer segment, offering, channel, and value-chain stage. He later added what amounts to a fifth and a half, the value system stage: where in the customer's larger system of activity you choose to compete. It is the quietest of the dimensions and it governs more than it appears to, including most outsourcing and partnership decisions, because choosing which part of the customer's problem is yours decides who your real competitors are.
The cardinal rule
Where to Play is never chosen alone. It forms an inseparable pair with How to Win, and the pair is the heart of strategy: a market is only "attractive" relative to a way of winning in it. The segment your analysts scored highest is worthless to you if you have no theory of advantage there, and a modest-looking niche can be the best field in the industry for the company that can win it. Scoring markets in the abstract is how strategy decks stay busy while deciding nothing.
A field that includes everyone is not a choice
The diagnostic is the Opposite Test again: a Where to Play that no rival would sanely reverse is not a decision. The Olay case study shows what a real one looks like: women 35 to 50 noticing the first signs of aging, in mass retail, at a prestige price point, and explicitly not the existing 50-plus segment the brand already held. The power is in the exclusions. Every named exclusion is information your organisation can act on; every hedge is a decision postponed to the front line.
The resource-constrained version
For smaller players, field selection should start with what Martin calls the Cheap Strategy question: what do we already hold that we are not using strategically? Existing customer trust, distribution, data, a capability built for one market that transfers to another. The cheapest field to win is usually adjacent to one you already occupy.
How this connects to OKRs
In our methodology, strategic cross-functional OKRs target progress on the chosen field, and the seam is diagnostic: an OKR that cannot say which Where to Play it serves is a sign the strategy is unclear, not that the goal is badly written. When quarterly planning keeps producing goals that feel orphaned, the missing parent is almost always this box.
Our opinion: an orphaned OKR is a Where-to-Play problem
The common instinct, when a quarter's goals feel scattered, is to run an OKR-writing workshop. We think that treats the symptom. A goal that cannot name the field it serves is not badly written; it is correctly written for a field nobody chose. Our position, and it is falsifiable: fix box two and the orphaned-goal problem disappears without anyone touching the goals. A fast-scaling insuretech we worked with was expanding internationally on every front at once; narrowing the field let us cut its company OKRs from three objectives and nine key results to one and three in a single quarter, and the goals that survived finally had a parent. The full account is in the insuretech case study.
One line to keep: A field that includes everyone is a portfolio that aligns to nothing.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
How is Where to Play different from a target market? +
A target market is where you sell. Where to Play is where you have chosen to compete and, just as loudly, where you have chosen not to. The exclusions are the choice. A field with no exclusions is a wish, and the OKRs beneath it will scatter.
Why do our OKRs feel orphaned? +
Usually because the field they serve was never chosen. When goals cannot trace to a Where to Play, better goal-writing will not fix it; answering box two will. Narrowing the field is often what lets a bloated portfolio collapse to a focused few.
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