Best Buy’s Strategy Failed. Now Tell Me Why.
Let's play a game. Imagine Best Buy's just announced new strategy turns out to be an unmitigated disaster.
That's a premortem. You assume the strategy has already failed, pick a date, and work backward to figure out why. Companies regularly run postmortems after the fact, but it's a lot cheaper to find the flaw using the same mindset in advance than finding it eighteen months later after millions of dollars have been invested.
To catch you up, incoming CEO Jason Bonfig’s strategy is to reposition Best Buy from a primarily big-box electronics retailer into a broader retail-and-technology platform, with customer experience as the operating center. His four stated priorities are: advancing Best Buy as a retail and technology company, improving its reach, enhancing the customer experience and focusing on being a human-powered company. Backing that up, they’re piloting small-format stores, between 12,000 and 15,000 square feet, in places like Jonesboro and Cape Cod, and converting parts of existing stores into new experiences, including Meta demo shops and Yardbird outdoor sections.
None of what follows is a knock on that plan. It might be exactly right. This isn't a critique of Best Buy's strategy. It's a demonstration of what a premortem finds and how it finds it, using a real, recognizable company’s actual strategy.
In a normal strategy review, every objection implicitly challenges something the organization has already decided to do. The premortem changes the social contract because you’re saying, “We've agreed it failed. Your job is to explain why.”
So let’s imagine it's February 2028. Bonfig has been CEO for fifteen months. Full-year comps came in negative. The small-format store program got paused somewhere north of a dozen locations because they were significantly underperforming. The four priorities Bonfig announced on his way into the job just got cut down to two in the latest investor update.
The strategy failed. Now we work backward and ask why. I've imagined four people inside Best Buy explaining what they saw from where they sat. They don't agree with each other, and that disagreement is the most useful part of the exercise. A real premortem in a real room would sound a lot like this.
The Small-Format Store Leader, Jonesboro
“We spent a lot of time figuring out what would fit into 13,000 square feet. I’m not sure we spent enough time figuring out why someone would choose to shop here. We had fewer products than a full Best Buy, but we weren’t dramatically more convenient. We had demos and experiences, but customers could still research most of this stuff at home. People came in, looked around, and left. The store worked the way we designed it. I’m just not sure we designed something enough customers actually needed.”
The District Manager, Traditional Stores
"My twelve stores generate most of the revenue this company still runs on, and I watched the best merchandisers and the most attention get pulled toward the small-format program and the media business, because that's where the exciting story was. Nobody ever said the core stores were less important. Nobody had to. The budget and executive attention said it for them. We were still core, but we felt forgotten, and a store team that feels forgotten stops going the extra mile."
The Merchant
"I was buying for three different format specs at once, large, medium, and small, plus trying to fit Lego, trading cards, and outdoor gear into assortments that were already tight. Every one of those additions made sense on its own. Nobody ever sat down and said what we'd stop carrying to make room. So I was managing more complexity with the same team, and complexity is where margin slips through the cracks. By the time anyone caught it, we'd already lost it."
The Retail Media Lead
"Our business needed two things to keep growing: clean store data and consistent traffic. Instead we had three AI partnerships running at once, a store fleet in the middle of a format overhaul, and a leadership team asking us to hit growth targets while the stores that were supposed to feed us data were busy being reinvented. Nobody starved us on purpose. We just got the leftover attention after four other priorities took their share."
Working Backward
The premortem gives you two things that are hard to get in a normal strategy discussion: a concrete failure to reason backward from and the psychological safety to say what you really think caused it.
And most importantly, a premortem turns vague concerns into causal stories. It forces participants to construct a plausible history of failure rather than brainstorm a generic risk list.
Before the exercise, someone might say, “I'm worried we have too many priorities.” That's generic and easy to dismiss. But after a premortem, you get, “We kept adding assortment, so store formats became muddled, labor and merchandising complexity rose, the economics deteriorated, and the rollout stopped.” Once you've got the causal chain, you can challenge each link, address the biggest risks, and identify the early warning signs that would tell you whether your imagined failure is actually starting to happen.
The four people above don't give us the same answer, which is exactly what you'd want from a premortem. One thought the customer proposition wasn't strong enough. Another thought the core business was starved of attention. The merchant saw complexity. The media leader saw competing priorities and dependencies.
Now you have something useful to investigate. Are these four independent risks, or are some of them symptoms of the same underlying problem?
The customer proposition deserves its own scrutiny. Maybe customers simply won't find enough reason to choose a smaller Best Buy. But the other three explanations start to cluster around something else. Taken together, those three point toward a capacity and clarity problem: too many things competing for finite resources and attention, without enough clarity about what gives way.
This is how companies fall into the Strategy Trap. Each individual decision can make perfect sense. But eventually all those reasonable decisions hit the same finite organization at the same time. The premortem helps you see that collision coming before you've spent eighteen months and millions of dollars fighting through an execution nightmare.
Bonfig announced four priorities, and every one of them was a yes. Expand reach, elevate the experience, stay human-focused, build a media and technology business. At least publicly, there wasn't a clear “what not’ attached to any of them, no statement of what Best Buy would do less of, sell less of, or fund less of to make room. A strategy that's all yes eventually becomes everyone's problem to sort out alone, store by store, merchant by merchant.
I don't think that means the plan is wrong. Small-format stores might be exactly the right bet. The retail media business might be exactly where the real profit is. But in my experience, plenty of strategies with perfectly reasonable ideas still fail because leaders weren’t clear about what was ending to make room for what was starting.
If I were running this premortem inside Best Buy instead of on a blog, here's where I'd push next. I’d ask what is the company willing to be worse at on purpose? What will the company stop doing to make room for this new direction? Which of the four priorities would get more budget and attention if the other three had to shrink to pay for it? And if the answer is "none of them, we can do all four well at once," that's usually the moment worth challenging hardest, because it's rarely true.
A premortem gives people permission to construct plausible explanations for failure before failure happens. You don't have to believe any one of them will come true. You're looking for the ones plausible enough that you'd rather address them now than spend the next eighteen months finding out the hard way.
For the record, I'm rooting for Bonfig and Best Buy. I hope none of these stories come true. The whole point of a premortem is to make sure they don't.
