Six months, one book, and what it taught me about starting
In December, I started building a guide, something that would be useful to others, then expanded it. What began as a handful of pages grew, and six months later I have a rounded piece of work: The Strategic Manager’s Playbook.
I want to tell you how it came together, because the way it came together is itself a small case study in how to start a project. If you’re staring at something you’ve been meaning to begin, I hope this offers some practical advice.
Start smaller than the thing it becomes
I didn’t sit down to write a book. I sat down to write something genuinely useful, a few pages I wished someone had handed me earlier in my career. That modest framing is exactly why it got off the ground.
“Write a book” is paralysing. “Write the three things I wish I’d known” is an evening project. Nearly every project I’ve worked on that actually started did so as a deliberately small version of itself. Momentum is generated, not summoned: you begin, roughly, and the readiness shows up afterwards.
Name the problem before you fall for the solution
Once those pages multiplied, I had to answer a question I’d recognised a hundred times in client work but had quietly skipped for myself: what is this for, and who is it for?
It’s the golden rule that runs through the book. Identify the problem before you reach for a solution. We so often do the reverse, getting attached to the thing we’re making before we’re honest about the need it serves. The problem I cared about was that plenty of capable managers are never actually taught to think structurally, to break a messy situation down, frame it, and lead the change that follows. Once I’d named that, the decisions made themselves. Everything that served it stayed; everything that didn’t, however clever, came out.
Give it a structure so it can grow
A pile of good ideas isn’t a project. The moment my notes had a shape, they started pulling new material towards themselves and the writing got far easier.
I used the principle I’d recommend for any plan: make it MECE, where the parts don’t overlap and, between them, they cover the ground. For your work that might be phases or workstreams rather than chapters. The discipline is what matters, a clear structure tells you where the next piece goes, and where it doesn’t belong. It also lets a project survive being put down and picked up again. Over six months, life happened; a good outline meant I never had to remember where I was.
Frame it so someone else gets it in one breath
Somewhere in the middle I caught myself writing in my own shorthand. Fine for notes, fatal for anything you want others to use.
The fix is framing, and the tool I trust is SCQA: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer. Set the context, introduce the tension that makes it matter, sharpen it to a single question, then answer it. Running each chapter through that test exposed the weak ones, the places I hadn’t earned the reader’s attention. The same test works on a project pitch or the first email you send to get a team on board. If you can’t frame why it matters before you explain what it is, you’ll lose the room.
Decide what “finished” means, then ship
Projects drift away from completion unless you define what done looks like. For me, “rounded” meant a piece that stands on its own, opens with the foundations and closes with leading change, with nothing essential missing and nothing padded in. The moment I could describe that finish line, the remaining work became obvious.
Then came the hardest part: releasing it. There’s always one more pass you could make, but a project that never ships helps no one, and feedback from real readers beats another month of private polishing. So I shipped it, slightly nervously, and I’m glad I did.
None of this is unique to writing a book. It’s how I approach a transformation programme, a product, or any project worth doing, and it’s what I’ve tried to make practical and usable in the book itself.
The Strategic Manager’s Playbook is out now. If you’ve downloaded or bought a copy, thank you, and I genuinely welcome your feedback. And if you’re in the middle of starting something of your own, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Let’s talk.
If you’ve downloaded or purchased, thank you. I welcome your feedback.
