Strategy vs AI, Documentation, Tools & Insights and Randomness | Blog at ./mentor.sh

By Luiz Fittipaldi, Global Strategy & Planning Manager at Preply

About The Strategy Memo

The Strategy Memo is where theory meets the mess of reality—a biweekly newsletter on business strategy, growth, and how things actually work behind the scenes. Written by Luiz Fittipaldi, who's scaled strategy at Bolt, Preply, Banco BV, and Movile, this newsletter delivers strategy theory stripped of buzzwords and grounded in practice, growth hacks for tight budgets, and real cases from real companies and markets.

The New Role of Strategy Teams in the Age of AI

Yes, this is quite a strong and fancy title, but I wanted to capture your attention 👀. Over the last years I've been working in tech companies from all sizes & industries and a few things became quite clear for me:

1️⃣ Smaller companies don't need a strategy team, as most of the strategy is done by the Founding team

2️⃣ As company grows, and start becoming a bit chaotic (good growth pains), Strategy team appears to help orchestrate everything and ensure that the Leadership Team Vision & Strategy is aligned across the company

3️⃣ This means that a lot of the work becomes Project Management (or Strategic projects if you want some fluff) and Strategy Planning

Now, let's fast-forward to 2025, the year where we're not only talking over and over about AI, but more clear use cases, such as automations and AI agents. Here, we don't need a Strategy person to be following-up endlessly to ensure people are executing the strategy, we have Slack workflows or Zapier to do this job.

Also, we don't need someone to know a little bit about everything, which comes with the whole overarching view that is natural to strategy teams. We have instead the possibility of developing in-house ChatGPT or Claude, or whatever which will know FAR more than we do, and in a level of detail which is impossible for us to compete - even with the brightest human mind.

Now we're challenged to ensure the organizations leverage these tools, and figure out how to work side by side with those to find creative ways of connecting the dots. In a world with an overwhelming amount of data, finding the patterns and knowing how to use those becomes the key competitive edge. Also, rather than thinking by ourselves where the company/teams should go - which I've never agreed with for a start, we should empower teams with the tools & data to make timely informed decisions.

Documentation: Why This Is Mine, Yours and Everyone's Problem

Piggy-backing on the last section, another key topic that became essential for me in the age of AI, is the role of documentation.

When a company is on a fast-paced growth, documentation seems like a secondary thing to do, given that there are many fires to put down at all times - which is completely reasonable.

But at the same time, the more we postpone its start, the more we lose valuable insights, processes, and end up actually losing more time in the long-term.

And here are 4 reasons why you should start documenting if not yesterday, today! 🤣

1️⃣ Nothing is more soul crushing than answering the same questions, over and over. Rather put it all in a beautiful Atlassian or Notion and share the link with people. Here instead of losing time in 1o1 interactions, you produce something 1-to-n and just need to keep perfecting it, so that it addresses more and more questions

2️⃣ The more work you're doing, the more insights you get. But if those insights are not properly documented, they're not learnings, but rather lost resources. Gather all those insights in a place where this knowledge can be managed and secured.

3️⃣ People leave, even your work besties. So it doesn't matter if you can always reach out to person X that might give you some valuable insights on topic Y, they will leave one day and all their knowledge is lost for you and the company.

4️⃣ Without documentation we have NOTHING to feed our GPT with, no sources, no researches, and it will be dumb - which no, is not ideal.

That's why one my favorite quotes is "the worst piece of paper is better than the sharpest of minds" - when it comes to documentation, the worst and ugliest doc, or Confluence page you might have is still much better than the smartest employee with the sharpest photographic memory, because one is built to last, the other no.

Tools & Insights to Bring Your Work to Another Level of Impact

Doubling down on the first section, if we agree that our job rather than knowing it all is to empower people and teams, then we should build them the best tools there are.

One of the things I've done at Preply recently for instance was to build up a customGPT with ALL the data from Confluence, research and Looker from the last 3-4 years of the company to build up a Bot that will allow teams to easily dive deep into our key projects, areas and almost as important, our strategy for the year - and how its execution is going.

As a cherry on top, I've trained the GPT on my knowledge of Strategy & OKR setting to help all the teams to be able to stress-test their ideas, refine their OKRs, and almost as important save me some time to focus on other projects. Now this little baby is the second one most used in the company - which gives you a sense of the power we can leverage!

Another amazing tool I've played with was Slack workflows. Now all frequent messages I need to send are fully automated. Of course some small adjustments were needed as for example moving from weekly Presentation docs to rolling ones, but now I can safely take vacations 🏖️

Zapier is a new realm I've just got certified and its potential is huge! Right now I've tested it out with some Competitive Intelligence insights by integrating it to GPT and Google Alerts, and more I'll tell you in the next newsletter.

But, so that you're not only on the IDEAS world, but can also test it out by yourself I've built three GPTs you can experiment with:

Strategy Coach: a free version of myself
Expat life: a tool to help Brazilians move abroad
Pitch deck pro: initially I did some work in this sense on Upwork but as the pay wasn't great, I've decided to just help people out and make it available for free

Random Thoughts

Outside being a strategist, I'm also a book writer, so if you haven't checked it out here is my new book - Our loves: real stories of real people (Digital and Physical copies)
Barcelona was out of energy for 12 hours and we were not ready. Lack of information, lack of preparation (from my side), made this day chaotic.
As more and more companies invest heavily in AI we cannot forget about the human need for this human 1o1 connection.
I had the worst and best experience at Glovo, which highlighted for me how much it matters the frontline in any operations.
Lovable allows you to turn random ideas into MVPs in minutes - and the best, for free! That's my newest addiction.

Luiz Fittipaldi

About the Author

Luiz Fittipaldi is Global Strategy & Planning Manager at Preply, a results-oriented Strategy Expert with a passion for driving global projects and initiatives. Throughout his career, he's focused on prioritizing impactful initiatives that drive long-term growth, aiming for a fivefold increase. He's dedicated to fostering strong, mutually beneficial relationships to align company priorities and ensure successful execution of strategic goals.

With over 7 years of mentoring experience in financial services, technology, and education industries, Luiz supports teams in career development and specific project needs. Ready to take your learning to the next level? Book a session with Luiz and unlock your full potential! 🚀

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