As we start the new year, I’d like to try something new. I’d like to try the empowered team thing. Instead of worrying about the details of the corporate goal-setting process, I want to own my strategy for the year at work, full stop. I’ll integrate the goals of seniors and needs of clients. Then, I’ll take the most important things and focus on that. Then, instead of dealing with all the individual corporate management processes individually, I’m going to use them as lenses to display and present my strategy.
When you look at these processes separately—annual goals, performance reviews, and quarterly business reviews—they can feel like an elaborate exercise in feeding the bureaucratic beast. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if I could flip this process on its head? What if I viewed these tools not as taskmasters but enablers.
Let’s start with some fundamental truths. Goal setting is pivotal in getting things done. Also, there will be tension between the way I see the world and the way senior management sees the world. I can look at this in two different ways:
- The Firm Owns the Planning Process In this case, I become an extension of the company’s processes. The company sets the strategy and I execute on it.
- I Own the Planning Process and the Firm Acts as My Enabler: Conversely, we have a scenario where I set the goals and the company helps me achieve them. Of course, the company and I discuss those goals but at the end, I own them. The corporate systems act as enablers, supporting my initiatives. The firm acts as an investor with checkpoints throughout the year to see how I’m executing on the strategy.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of the first approach, which ticks all the necessary boxes. However, the true goal isn’t just about ticking boxes, which is mainly about following a process. The real aim is to use these boxes as a guide, not just as a checklist. The company needs my help to develop the story further and get things done.
Take the example of one of my friends. She’s an incredibly talented individual contributor at a large firm. She recently shared her frustrations with me. She’s often the go-to person for new initiatives—a testament to her capabilities. However, these new ideas, invariably born in the higher echelons of corporate strategy, often miss the mark and end in disappointment. So she complains, “They don’t know the best way to deploy me.” My advice to her was simple: “Flip the script. The company clearly values your input – so why not tell them what you should be doing? Or even better, just do it on the side and demonstrate the value.”
Symbiotic Strategy
The goal, then, is to create a symbiotic relationship where I own the goals and strategy and senior management acts as an investor. They set a high-level strategy, review my goals, and check in during the year (or in the case of my boss, every week or so). In this case, senior management acts as facilitators who prioritize and fund initiatives.
Another trick here is that my strategy for the year should be as simple as possible. I will be using the process of “via negativa.” This is a Latin term that translates to “the negative way.” With via negativa, the goal is to remove any excess so that I end up with the simplest strategy that gets my work done.
So by removing everything but the essential and putting them together into one cohesive process I get:
- Setting Strategy: Aligning Goals and OKRs. The most basic questions in any job are “What do you want to do?” and “How are you going to know if you are successful?” That’s the annual goals. We can call them OKRs or any other fancy names but that’s what we’re talking about.
- Prioritization and Capacity Planning: This is where things get a little tricker. We need to figure out what matters and who does it matter for. We also need to understand the value of each piece of work, value being defined by the impact / effort (taking into account urgency).
- Feeding the Developers (Sprint Planning): This part is all about delivery. This is where the team breaks down the big epics into the work developers will do. It includes the more detailed refinement of how the developers will get things done. By ensuring that work supports the key goals for the quarter (and year) I can make sure that the annual goals are met. Note that not everything goes up to the OKRs. Things get squishy here with lots of BAU, bug fixes, and small improvements.
- Checkpoints: Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly Meetings. This is where we’re really flipping things on its head. This is the time we check in with the larger organization and measure progress. These are times for my team to shine and show what we’ve been able to accomplish against our goals. It’s also a time to highlight where we may have fallen short and what we’ve learned from that.
- Annual Reflection and Planning: And the end of the year we can tie up what we’ve done into a little bow. We can show what we’ve accomplished and reflect on the year. The annual review can be a time for comprehensive reflection. It’s an opportunity to look back on the year, understand the successes and the learnings, and use these insights to shape the goals for the next year in a cycle of continuous improvement.
It may seem straightforward, almost self-evident, that these items should be interconnected, forming a cohesive strategy. However, in reality it can feel quite the opposite, which each item treated separately. Each part of the process is siloed and managed by different teams for distinct purposes. This segregation is not just a matter of perception; it’s ingrained in the operational structure, with each process designed to serve a specific, isolated function.
The key to transforming this fragmented approach lies in viewing each of these processes as different facets of a single, unified strategy. Instead of treating them as isolated work products, they should be seen as one strategy that’s viewed through different lenses and for different purposes, each one contributing to the overall picture.
By adopting this approach, I can leverage these different processes and transform them into stepping stones and drive tangible results. Instead of having processes dictate my strategy, I’m using them to drive results.
The Journey Forward
So, let’s see how it goes this year. It seems simple but the devil is in the details here. Here’s the challenges I see:
- Balancing level of detail in refinement: Ensuring I have the minimum level of useful detail at each horizon: annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly.
- Prioritizing goals by different dimensions/customers: Ensure that we are delivering key value where it’s most needed.
- Balancing short term and long term: How do we balance refactoring existing code and building new features? What about designing an MVP that’s extensible in the future?
- Matching up results and development: It’s hard to match up actual customer impact and development. These don’t happen simultaneously.
And the real key here is to build a sustainable and reproducible process that’s light weight and keeps us moving forward. That sounds funny given the amount of work I’m putting into this document, but the idea is to spend the work up front so that it’s easy to maintain throughout the year.