How do you phrase a company-strategy question so a skip-level director gives a specific answer?

## Why the broad version fails `What is the company strategy?` is a question with no edges, and leaders answer edgeless questions with the safest available text — the public narrative. You learn nothing you could not have read, and you have spent your best slot. The fix is not to be cleverer, it is to be narrower. ## The four things that bound a strategy question **A named subject.** Ask about *this team's work*, not about the company. The whole value of the skip-level chair is that they can place one team against the others; a company-level question throws that away. **A time frame.** Next year, or the next planning cycle. Without one, the answer floats between what happened before and what someone hopes for eventually. **A forced ranking.** Ranking is what makes an answer falsifiable. A list of priorities is free — everything is a priority. Asking where the team sits in the top three forces a leader either to place it or to notice out loud that they cannot. **A mechanism.** After the ranking, ask who sets it and when it last changed. This is the difference between hearing an opinion and learning how the organization actually works. A leader who says the ranking is set in a planning cycle with named owners is describing a machine; a leader who says it evolves organically is describing its absence. Put together: `Where does this team's work sit in next year's top three priorities?` followed by `Who sets that ranking, and when did it last move?` ## What a strong answer sounds like A strong answer is concrete on three fronts. It names the bets — commonly a small set, three or so, because leaders who plan against priorities tend to carry a short list. It places your team against one of them explicitly, including how: the backend team you would join owns the data path that the second bet depends on, say. And it attaches resourcing: this team goes from eleven engineers to a range of fourteen to seventeen, or holds flat while a sibling team grows. Numbers phrased as a range are normal and honest — plans are ranges — but the presence of a range at all tells you the plan exists. A weak answer names bets but cannot connect your team to any of them, or connects it to all three, which is the same as none. Neither is proof of trouble. It may mean the ranking is genuinely new, or that this leader inherited the group recently. But it is a thing to test in the next round rather than to nod through. ## Turning the answer into the artifact Write it down as an org chart with the bets across the top and the teams underneath, and draw a line from each team to the bet that pays for it. Two lines matter most: the one into the box you would occupy, and how thick it is compared to the lines into the neighbouring boxes. A team hanging off the third bet with flat headcount, next to a team hanging off the first bet that is hiring, is telling you where scope and promotion opportunity will accumulate over the next couple of cycles. This is not a reason to decline; it is a reason to ask what your first year of work would be attached to. ## Two calibration notes First, do not confuse specificity with confrontation. You are asking a leader to be concrete about their own plan, which most are pleased to do — it is the part of the job they think about most. Delivering it flatly and curiously, then listening, reads as engagement. Delivering it as a cross-examination does not. Second, respect what is genuinely confidential. Unannounced reorganizations, deals in progress and individual performance are things a director may decline to discuss, and the graceful move is to accept the boundary and reframe: ask instead what would have to be true for this team's work to move up the ranking. That version is answerable without disclosing anything, and the answer often tells you more than the original question would have.