Broaden your company vision after a quarter
Broaden your company vision after a quarter
The Overlap #40
The Overlap is a newsletter somewhere between product development and organizational development. It comes out every other Wednesday. This one’s on when to articulate your team’s or organization’s vision.
I’m a big fan of John Cutler’s The Beautiful Mess. It’s no secret: I share at least one article of his per The Overlap.
One idea that John recently talked about is inputs first, bets next:
Many teams start with a list of opportunities, features, problems, or ideas. And then tack on success metrics, initiative KPIS, OKRs, or whatever to each thing.
Work —> Goal
This causes problems. Measurement is rushed, goal-setting is rushed, and there’s a whiplash effect as the team bounces between objectives.
Rather than start with features, ideas, or opportunities, John suggests starting with the vision and mission first.
First, clarify your team’s vision and mission. Can you carve out a 12-18 month area of focus that can remain stable? Maybe a central persona you want to make awesome at their job? A stable input? A key lever? Yes, great teams can make progress over days and weeks. But great things in product take a lot of thinking big and working small.
After clarifying your team’s vision and mission, then create a strategy. Or what he calls a persistent model.
There is a big difference between persistent models and work (or goal) related models. OKRs, for example, are a work related model. Work related models involve a specific time-span (e.g. a quarter). The team attempts to achieve The Goal by end-of-quarter.
Meanwhile, a north star metric and related inputs persist for as long as the strategy holds (often 1-3 years). The constellation of metrics serves as a belief map, driver diagram, or causal relationship diagram. It explains our mental model for how value is created and/or preserved in our product/system.
This is similar to what I advocate for in Prioritize cohesion, then decouple. Before reducing dependencies and fostering autonomous teams, create clarity on your organization’s vision and strategy. Then reduce dependencies and foster autonomy.
I’m thinking about vision a lot recently because my colleagues at garden3D (the organization I work at!) are aiming to realign our organization’s vision. We’re very decentralized. We’re amazing at capturing features/bets/opportunities. But we’ve felt the pains of not having a shared, coherent picture of where we want to be.
Define your vision after you’ve achieved a goal
I used to think defining a company’s vision — what difference they want to leave in 1 year — is the first thing a team should do when they start up. But now, I’m thinking it’s healthier to define it later, after focusing on a shorter time horizon. What difference do we want to make in 3 months?
It feels intuitive to define a vision at the start. But defining a vision with no experience is like asking an incoming college freshman to declare their major without giving them a chance to take some classes and explore their interests. How can an incoming freshman know what they want to study for the next four years without having taken any classes?
Same with articulating a vision for where you want your company to be in 1, 2, or 3 years. It’s easier to have a vision when you’ve accomplished some major goal. You have a better idea of how your company can impact your customer after you’ve done some actual work!
Your vision should inform your day-to-day. If it’s not, it isn’t a vision. It’s fluff. If I want to climb V10s by the end of next year, I better start working on V8s tomorrow. The point of articulating where you want your company to be in 1 year is so that you know what you need to do in 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day to get there.
To make sure that it informs your day-to-day decisions, start with a minimum viable vision. What do we want to achieve in 3 months? After the 3 months, revisit that question with a larger time horizon (what do we want to achieve in 6?).
This is why it’s a good thing that garden3D is revisiting its longer-term vision after existing for a bit. We gave ourselves the time to feel out what it’s like to bring three studios together, have a better idea of work we’re passionate about, and learned some lessons along the way. With these lessons, we can articulate a vision that’s bold and ambitious, yet translates into real day-to-day decisions.
Articulating a vision after doing some work for three months might be contrary to John’s advice of starting first with vision and mission. But it has its upside: we have a better idea of what our vision should be.
See you in two weeks,
–tim