Your Category Strategy is Just a Spend Report (And That’s the Problem)
The strategy we deserve to build.
When I was first asked to build a category strategy,
I thought — finally, a chance to be strategic.
So I opened a fresh deck.
Pulled in the spend data.
Listed the top 10 suppliers.
Mapped a few trends.
And 20 slides later, I called it a strategy.
Everyone nodded.
No one questioned it.
Because honestly? No one really knew what “strategy” meant either.
The Strategy Theater
We say we want a category strategy.
But what we really want is a report that looks good in the quarterly review.
✓ A heatmap
✓ A few bar charts
✓ A slide that says “Savings pipeline – under validation”
Sound familiar?
It’s not your fault.
Procurement never got trained on how to build strategy that changes behavior.
We learned how to report the past — not shape the future.
The Missing Links
Real strategy needs three things:
A clear direction — Are we reducing cost, risk, complexity, or emissions?
A plan of action — What levers will we pull? Who owns what?
A way to say no — To reactive buying, to bad specs, to supplier pressure
If you can’t say “no” to a bad request — you don’t have a strategy.
You have a wishlist.
From Slides to Control
What changed for me?
I stopped starting with spend.
I started with demand.
Why are we buying this?
Who’s requesting it?
Can we reduce the frequency, spec, or volume?
Can we influence the business before they issue the PR?
That’s where strategy lives.
Not in Excel tabs.
But in the upstream conversations we were too late to join.
If this hit a nerve…
You’re not alone.
Most procurement folks I talk to are stuck in the same loop:
Build a deck
Present it
Nothing changes
Repeat next year
But real strategy?
It changes what gets bought, how it gets bought, and why.
That’s the strategy we deserve to build.
🟢 Thanks for reading today’s edition of Beyond the PO.
I write what most procurement decks leave out.
Want more unfiltered sourcing stories?