Insights
Meet Your Chief Strategy Officer Lauren Milne
Find out all you need to know about Apply Digital's CSO
- Article
- 3 MIN READ
- Feb 27, 2024
When it comes to positioning an organization to achieve its business goals, no component is more critical than strategy. Any company can simply double-down on tactics in an effort to pursue growth, but having a well-defined strategy to guide execution is what separates short-term thinking from long-term success.
At Apply Digital, we’re fortunate to have Lauren Milne as our Chief Strategy Officer. With over 15 years of experience as a strategist for Fortune 500 companies across a range of industries, Lauren leverages her experience every day to go deep on complex questions and deliver value for our clients and partners.
We connected with Lauren to learn a bit more about how she got started in strategy, what she wishes more people understood about the discipline, and why context is everything.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Apply Digital: You have over fifteen years of experience working as a strategist in industries including healthcare, retail, sports, and finance, among others. How has working in these disparate fields informed your unique perspective on strategy?
Lauren Milne: Having worked in so many industries, I’ve found that I see the same challenges over and over again. That repeated exposure across verticals benefits all clients, because you can pull from different contexts to inform solutions in others.
For example, the [major sports organization] isn’t solely concerned with what other sports leagues are doing — they have a pretty good pulse on their own competitive set. But they were really curious to know how Kraft Heinz was approaching a similar ‘house of brands’ challenge. It’s interesting that we don’t compare companies inside of their own category anymore.
What drew you toward strategy as a field of study? Did your personal interests inform your career path?
I didn’t really know I was a strategist until I was approaching problem solving in an agency setting, and asking questions that sort of had us walking ‘back upstream’, as I often say. Someone looked at me and said something like ‘Those are great questions — you’re a strategist!’
I need to understand that macro picture before I can start to get into any type of detail. It has to be contextualized, and the act of really trying to understand objectives, or drivers, is my mental model. That’s how I solve problems, how I think about things, and that’s how I discovered that I’m actually well-suited to strategy.
Once I got into it, it became very clear that this is what excites me. I like the ambiguous starting point, and helping to figure out the best path forward — based on whatever the ambition is — versus being further downstream, still dealing with complex problems, but with a narrower scope.
That’s a perfect lead-in to our next question, which is more about the tactical level. How do you leverage digital strategy and business transformation to drive value for Apply Digital clients and partners?
Business Transformation Strategy at Apply Digital covers a lot of ground — we can be starting way upstream with our clients trying to put pen to paper on the enterprise strategy or divisional strategy, helping clients determine what direction they should be headed based on a number of different factors - market conditions, changing customer expectations, business dynamics, etc. We can help them think through how best to deliver on an existing enterprise strategy by way of new experiences, products and platforms. We can dive into brand, loyalty, and commerce strategy more specifically. And we can make sure to calculate the expected ROI on any investment we’re proposing our clients make to meet their objectives.
Regardless of where we start, the most important thing is that we create connections between the strategy and the plan that moves it forward. Too often strategies come together that seem divorced from what’s happening downstream, so they aren’t of any value to our clients; they can’t achieve the desired impact.
We make sure that we sit together with a cross-functional group of team members — inside of Apply Digital and on our client’s side — right from the outset, to be sure we develop a well-rounded perspective that considers some of the more macro details while also thinking through the implications of those at a more tactical and executional level. We leverage multiple kinds of inputs to formulate both the strategy and the execution plan and we review that iteratively as we create it, with our client partners, so that it’s a true co-creation effort, and one that stakeholders can feel confident in. Taken together, this approach is the root of “Connected Thinking, Connected Results”, and something we all believe very strongly in.
What do you wish more people understood about strategy?
Strategy is a big word that can mean very little. It’s used in a lot of different contexts, and oftentimes people assume they’ve already done it, or that it’s not that impactful to the work.
What I want people to understand is that there is great meaning in strategy when it’s done properly and thoughtfully. In the absence of a strategy and a plan, you can spend a lot of money and time being more execution-focused. But if you don’t know what that investment is really in service to — if you can’t actually show how that's connected to an objective, either at the enterprise level or within a business unit — then you can’t really know how it’s going to be successful.
You’re not going to start building a home by just nailing pieces of board together. You have to have a blueprint for how that house is going to come together so that it gets done properly. Strategy is the plan that helps ensure any investment you make is made in the best possible way, so the business is successful and your customers are happy.
Interview conducted by Nathan Munn
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