How Strategically Mature Is Your Team?
A twelve-question maturity assessment across planning, execution, and memory. Output: a CMMI-style level from chaotic to operationalized, plus the one lift most likely to move you up a level.
Who it’s for: CMOs and heads of product marketing who want an honest read on whether their strategy function is an artifact machine or a decision-making system.
Does your team have a written positioning document people actually read?
Read it honestly, not charitably.
Five levels, ranked by the evidence in your answers. The winner is where your actual operating behaviour currently sits — not where your leadership reports you are.
Most teams land at Level 2 or 3. That is not a failing grade; it is a starting point. What matters is whether you’re trending up or drifting down. Re-run this quarterly; the direction is more informative than the absolute level.
A profile that’s split across Level 1 and Level 4 usually means you have a strong leader carrying a weak system. That works until the leader rotates out.
Three moves you can make this week.
- Pick the single lift that moves you up one level — not the list of ten. Each level has one canonical next move: write the doc, retire duplicates, add leading indicators, automate feedback. Do that one thing for 90 days.
- Name an owner. Maturity without an owner decays inside of a year. Ideally a senior PMM with authority to kill stale documents and publish canonical ones. Without that authority, Level 3+ is not reachable.
- Use the Strategic Memory Maturity checklist to pressure-test the memory dimension specifically. Memory is the most common reason teams stall between Levels 2 and 3. If your memory score is weak, the rest of the fix won't stick.
Why these questions, in this order.
Twelve questions across three axes — planning, execution, memory — because strategic maturity doesn't show up evenly. A team can plan well and execute poorly, or execute cleanly on a stale plan. Averaging the scores would hide exactly the pattern the quiz exists to surface.
The five levels are borrowed from CMMI deliberately. Software teams have been using this vocabulary for thirty years; there’s no reason strategy functions should invent their own. The failure modes — documents nobody reads, decisions nobody remembers, metrics nobody reviews — are the same.
Run the full Strategic Context.
The shared memory that makes every other tool smarter over time.