Strategic Roadmap — Cadence Labs Scale-Up

A Level-4 strategy simulation set at Cadence Labs Ltd., a London B2B SaaS scale-up at £14m ARR, growing 55% YoY but caught in the scale-up “diffusion trap”: it is chasing three growth stories at once — moving upmarket to enterprise, expanding into new verticals, and launching an AI analytics module — and doing none of them decisively. Net revenue retention has slipped from 118% to 104%, the enterprise sales cycle has doubled to 150 days, and at £1.1m monthly burn on £19.8m cash the company has ~18 months of runway before a Series C that assumes a credible path to £40m ARR. Over four rounds you run the executive team through Sola & Couturier's six-step strategic-thinking arc: (1) FRAME the single core strategic question rather than a priority list — the evidence points at the retention leak, not the exciting AI bet; (2) GENERATE and test strategic options against the data on growth, NRR, burn and runway; (3) FOCUS exactly 100 scarce focus points across four bets that together demand 165, forcing an explicit “stop-doing” decision and a direct call on the AI module (ship, fast-follow, or publicly de-prioritise) against a competitor announcement and £1.4m of reference-customer churn risk; and (4) SEQUENCE the kept moves across four quarters with dependencies — stabilise NRR before chasing a new vertical — and defend a runway buffer. The engine prices every choice in ARR trajectory, NRR, monthly burn, and months of cash runway. Wrong strategies underperform on purpose: funding all three bets within 100 points starves every bet and decelerates growth; choosing the exciting AI module while NRR bleeds fails the diagnose-before-imagine test; leaving the AI question ambiguous after the competitor ships triggers the £1.4m churn; launching everything in Q1 ignores the dependency that NRR must be fixed first; and burning below 14 months of runway forces a Series C from weakness that crushes valuation. Track ARR, the path to £40m, NRR, monthly burn, runway months, focus discipline and the explicit stop-doing list. Teaches strategic framing, the discipline of “no,” the diffusion trap, runway as a strategic constraint, and dependency-aware sequencing.