# Internal Memos

*Published: 2026-02-09 | Categories: Strategy*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/internal-memos/*

Internal memos are a powerful tool for aligning your team around decisions, changes, and initiatives. A well-structured memo ensures that everyone understands what is happening, why it matters, and what comes next.

### The Internal Memo Template

Use the following structure for every internal memo:

#### Summary

A brief overview of the memo's purpose in two to three sentences. What is this about and why should the reader care?

#### What We're Doing

Describe the action, decision, or initiative clearly and concisely. Be specific about what is changing or being introduced.

#### Why

Explain the reasoning behind the decision. What problem does this solve? What opportunity does it capture? Why now?

#### How We Will Measure

Define the success criteria. What metrics or outcomes will tell us this is working? Be specific and measurable.

#### When

Provide a clear timeline. When does this start? What are the key milestones and deadlines?

#### What Is Required

Outline what is needed from the team or organization. What resources, actions, or changes in behavior are necessary?

#### Who Is Involved

List the key stakeholders, owners, and contributors. Make accountability visible.

#### What Is Next

Describe the immediate next steps. What happens after this memo is read? Who does what, and by when?

I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# How to make better, faster and clearer decisions

*Published: 2026-02-02 | Categories: Strategy*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/how-to-make-better-faster-and-clearer-decisions/*

Making decisions is one of the most important skills in leadership and life. Yet most people approach decisions poorly — they deliberate endlessly, seek too many opinions, or avoid committing altogether. This framework gives you a structured way to make better, faster, and clearer decisions.

### Step 1: Start With the Answer

Before analyzing anything, state your instinctive answer. What does your gut tell you? Write it down clearly as a definitive statement.

Starting with the answer forces clarity. It gives you a position to defend or attack, rather than wandering through abstract analysis. You can always change your mind, but you cannot sharpen your thinking without a starting point.

### Step 2: List Your Reasons

Now defend your answer. Write down every reason that supports your initial position. Be specific and concrete:

- What evidence supports this decision?
- What experience or data points to this being the right call?
- What are the expected benefits and outcomes?

Force yourself to articulate why you believe what you believe. Vague intuition becomes actionable conviction when you can list your reasons clearly.

### Step 3: Counterarguments

This is where intellectual honesty lives. Actively argue against your own position:

- What could go wrong?
- What are you ignoring or underweighting?
- What would a smart critic say?
- What assumptions are you making that might be wrong?

Write down every credible counterargument. Do not dismiss them — engage with them seriously. The goal is not to talk yourself out of the decision, but to stress-test it.

### Personal Integrity Check

Pause and ask yourself honestly:

- Am I being influenced by ego, fear, or convenience?
- Would I make the same decision if the stakes were higher or lower?
- Am I avoiding a harder but better option?
- Is this aligned with my values and long-term goals?

This step separates good decision-makers from great ones. Great decisions require personal honesty, not just analytical rigor.

### Summarize by Restating Your Conclusion

After working through reasons and counterarguments, restate your conclusion. It may be the same as your initial answer, or it may have evolved. Either way, write it as a clear, confident statement:

- "We will do X because of Y, despite the risk of Z, which we will mitigate by doing W."

A well-stated conclusion is one that acknowledges trade-offs while committing to a direction.

### Tip: When You Want Advice

When seeking advice from others, do not present an open-ended question like "What should I do?" Instead:

- State your decision — tell them what you have already decided.
- Share your reasons — explain why you reached that conclusion.
- Share your counterarguments — show them the risks and trade-offs you have considered.
- Ask for their reaction — do they see something you missed?

This approach respects their time, focuses the conversation, and produces far better input than vague brainstorming. You get targeted feedback on your actual thinking, not generic opinions.

I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# Consultative Selling - the secret to winning complex sales

*Published: 2026-01-14 | Categories: Strategy*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/consultative-sales/*

Consultative selling is the ability to uncover and develop a buyer's true needs — both the obvious and the hidden — and to connect those needs to tailored solutions. It blends curiosity, empathy, and insight with structure and discipline. The best consultative sellers behave like trusted advisors who help customers think more clearly and make better decisions.

Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling demonstrated that top sellers win not because they pitch harder, but because they ask smarter questions, listen deeply, and create understanding before offering solutions.

### Why Consultative Selling Matters

In complex sales environments, the difference between average and exceptional sellers lies in how well they uncover and clarify buyer needs. A consultative approach drives higher conversion, deeper trust, and stronger long-term relationships.

- Buyers are overloaded with information. They need sellers who help them find clarity.
- True differentiation happens in discovery. Superior questioning and insight separate experts from order-takers.
- Trust drives every decision. When buyers feel understood, they buy faster, more confidently, and at higher value.

Consultative selling is not a tactic; it is a mindset. It transforms sellers from persuaders into partners.

### The Core Skills of Consultative Selling

A consultative seller masters nine interconnected skills organized into three categories that mirror the scoring framework: Needs, Trust, and Flow. Each skill can be evaluated at three levels of mastery: Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert.

#### Category 1: Needs — Uncovering and Clarifying What Matters Most

1. Need Discovery — Known Needs

- Beginner: Asks surface-level or generic questions and often misses key buyer needs.
- Intermediate: Uses structured questioning to uncover most known needs but may repeat or drift off focus. They begin to recognize patterns in buyer responses and connect them to common problem areas but still lack precision in steering the conversation.
- Expert: Quickly and elegantly uncovers all known needs through clear, relevant, curiosity-driven questions. They maintain complete control of the conversation flow while making it feel natural to the buyer. Their questioning demonstrates mastery of timing, tone, and phrasing, leading to total clarity on what the buyer truly values.

2. Need Discovery — Unknown or Unarticulated Needs

- Beginner: Limits discovery to what the buyer already expresses.
- Intermediate: Occasionally triggers new insights but inconsistently. They demonstrate curiosity but lack the deeper question sequencing or confidence to pursue latent motivations once discovered.
- Expert: Consistently uses contrast, reframing, or situational probing (as taught in SPIN Selling) to uncover latent or hidden needs and propose thoughtful, plausible hypotheses that surface unspoken motivations. They guide the buyer toward realizations they could not reach on their own. Their approach transforms the conversation from informational to transformational, creating genuine insight and value.

3. Needs Discovery — Emotional and Motivational

- Beginner: Focuses on functional features and misses emotional context.
- Intermediate: Identifies some emotional drivers but fails to deepen or connect them. They acknowledge emotional hints such as pride or fear but do not yet translate them into actionable insight or positioning.
- Expert: Skillfully reveals emotional motivations — such as pride, fear, belonging, or aspiration — and integrates them into the framing of value. They understand that emotion drives logic and use empathy to connect both dimensions seamlessly. Their ability to articulate the buyer's feelings better than the buyer can creates deep trust and buying confidence.

#### Category 2: Trust — Building Connection, Safety, and Credibility

4. Rapport and Trust Building

- Beginner: Sounds polite but transactional; the buyer remains guarded.
- Intermediate: Builds a friendly tone but without deeper rapport. They can engage buyers easily but fail to establish emotional safety or vulnerability that leads to open sharing.
- Expert: Establishes authentic trust and emotional safety, encouraging openness, honesty, and genuine collaboration. They make the buyer feel both understood and respected without pressure. Their tone, pacing, and empathy turn a sales conversation into a safe space for candid dialogue.

5. Listening and Responsiveness

- Beginner: Listens passively and moves on too quickly.
- Intermediate: Occasionally responds to buyer cues but misses emotional signals. They reflect back some buyer statements yet often focus on confirming facts rather than expanding meaning.
- Expert: Listens actively, mirrors tone and language, clarifies meaning, and adapts the conversation based on what is heard. They capture nuance in phrasing, pauses, and emotion, responding with precision. Their adaptive listening builds credibility, deepens rapport, and ensures no insight is left unexplored.

6. Adaptability to Buyer Type

- Beginner: Applies the same communication style to every buyer.
- Intermediate: Adjusts tone or pace inconsistently. They begin noticing buyer personality cues but still default to their own comfort zone rather than fully adapting to the buyer's decision style.
- Expert: Adapts fully — mirroring the buyer's style, personality, and decision process — to create natural alignment and trust. They adjust pace, vocabulary, and storytelling to match each unique communication profile. This dynamic adaptability makes every buyer feel comfortable and understood, dramatically increasing influence and engagement.

#### Category 3: Flow — Guiding the Conversation and Framing Value

7. Efficiency and Flow

- Beginner: Asks too many disconnected or repetitive questions.
- Intermediate: Follows a logical sequence but sometimes loses rhythm. They can maintain a coherent structure but struggle to balance depth and timing, occasionally over-explaining or under-exploring key points.
- Expert: Achieves smooth conversational flow, balancing depth and pacing while uncovering key insights efficiently. They know when to probe, when to pause, and when to pivot. The interaction feels effortless for the buyer while the seller maintains full strategic control of direction and outcome.

8. Question Design Quality

- Beginner: Asks generic or irrelevant questions that feel scripted.
- Intermediate: Shows some structure but lacks progression or insight. They understand the need for strategic sequencing but struggle to maintain flow or relevance between questions.
- Expert: Creates a thoughtful question sequence that feels conversational, strategic, and efficient, uncovering both surface and deep needs naturally. They combine curiosity with logic, allowing each question to build insight progressively. Their questioning feels effortless but achieves precise diagnostic depth that differentiates them as true advisors.

9. Consultative Framing of Value

- Beginner: Pitches products generically without connecting to buyer needs.
- Intermediate: Links features to some known needs but misses emotional ones. They begin to align product benefits with buyer goals but do not yet personalize or emotionally connect the solution to the buyer's deeper motivations.
- Expert: Ties the solution precisely to both stated and unstated needs, positioning value as personal and tailor-made for the buyer. They connect emotional and logical motivators seamlessly, ensuring the buyer sees the offer as the natural solution. Their framing leads to commitment because it transforms the product from a purchase into an answer to the buyer's story.

### How to Learn and Master Consultative Selling

- Study the Foundations. Read SPIN Selling and practice Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff questions daily.
- Practice Structured Discovery. Use this nine-criterion framework to self-score after every call.
- Record and Review Calls. Identify where you uncovered needs effectively and where emotional or hidden motivations were missed.
- Roleplay with Peers. Simulate buyers with complex motivations and practice adapting tone, pacing, and flow.
- Build Curiosity and Empathy. Ask "why" more often and explore not just what the buyer wants but why they want it.
- Track Growth. Use the beginner, intermediate, and expert model to measure improvement across each category.

### Conclusion

Consultative selling is the craft of understanding people, not just promoting products. The best sellers diagnose before prescribing, listen before speaking, and reveal before pitching. They create conversations that lead to clarity, confidence, and trust.

- A beginner focuses on gathering information.
- An intermediate connects questions to insights and begins shaping value through structured conversation. They know what to look for but are still mastering how to guide the buyer toward realization.
- An expert reveals meaning, emotion, and value, transforming a sales conversation into a partnership built on understanding and shared goals. They help buyers make better decisions and see new possibilities. Their approach drives loyalty, influence, and sustained long-term success.
I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# How to verify a project plan will succeed

*Published: 2025-12-22 | Categories: Operations*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/how-to-verify-a-project-plan-will-succeed/*

Writing great specification documents is both an art and a science. They are not static templates but dynamic tools that align people, clarify intent, and accelerate execution. The best specs create shared understanding, provoke constructive challenges, and strengthen conviction around what to build or do next. They transform ambiguity into clarity and momentum into meaningful action, turning early-stage ideas into well-defined, executable plans.

### The Role of Specs in Every Kind of Project

Specifications are valuable because they create the bridge between inspiration and execution. A good spec translates abstract intent into tangible clarity, allowing everyone, from executives to implementers, to see the same picture and row in the same direction. It forces prioritization, surfaces trade-offs, and gives structure to creativity. Without it, teams waste time debating interpretations instead of making progress.

Specs bring order to complexity and create a shared language that speeds up decisions, reduces rework, and ensures alignment.

They are not limited to product development. They are equally powerful tools for:

- Building new internal processes
- Designing recruitment or growth systems
- Defining operational improvements
- Defining new reports or metrics for success

Every project that turns an idea into action benefits from a thoughtful, well-written spec that aligns vision with action and helps teams move from uncertainty to confident execution.

### The Iterative Nature of Spec Development

Spec documents evolve iteratively. They allow teams to move from an idea to increasing levels of detail in a structured, aligned way while continuously gathering feedback. This iterative rhythm ensures that the project stays grounded in real insights and collective learning. Skipping the iterations just to produce a polished-looking document misses the purpose entirely. The process of iteration is where the real clarity and alignment are built.

### Levels of Fidelity and Timing

Fidelity defines how much depth and detail a spec should include at its current stage. Choosing the right fidelity level ensures that feedback and engagement are appropriate for where the project truly stands.

#### Low-Fidelity Specs

Typically short (under two pages). Their goal is to create a shared initial understanding and gather high-level feedback. These specs help decide whether to pursue the idea further, a go/no-go or directional conversation. They focus on why the project matters and its potential impact, not on execution.

#### Medium-Fidelity Specs

These come after initial feedback and early validation. Their purpose is to clarify the approach or options for approaches, how the project could be implemented in principle. They define the main approach options, early costs, timelines, and trade-offs. They balance detail and agility, encouraging productive debate about execution while staying open to iteration. Typically 2-5 pages long.

#### High-Fidelity Specs

These are detailed, precise, and execution-ready. They follow once an approach has been selected. Their goal is to document implementation details, edge cases, dependencies, and the rationale behind design or operational decisions. Feedback at this stage focuses on how to execute with excellence, not whether to proceed. The trick here is not to try and write everything because that could become tens or hundreds of pages which is unhelpful. But to define all the key critical things so the implementers can then implement with accuracy asking the right questions as they progress.

#### Common Pitfalls

Selecting the right fidelity is a leadership judgment call. It is about matching the spec to the project's maturity, the audience's attention span, and the type of feedback you want to invite.

- Too detailed too early: readers disengage.
- Too shallow too late: poor execution and bad decisions.

### Guiding Questions After Defining Fidelity

Once you have defined your fidelity level, pause and reflect before diving into writing. This is the moment to test alignment, validate assumptions, and ensure clarity across the team. Consider including these questions in the spec itself.

- What is our goal? Why are we writing this spec?
- Who is the primary audience, and what decision or action do they need to take after reading this?
- What must be true for this project to succeed? (these are the core assumptions)
- What data do we have, what data do we need, and how will we get it?
- What are the fastest ways to invalidate the riskiest assumptions?

### Key Sections to Include in the Spec Document

Use this as a checklist and tailor depth to the project fidelity. Each section should enable a clear decision or action.

#### Goal and Why It Matters

State the problem, the opportunity, and the business context in two to three sentences. Explain why this matters now and what happens if we do nothing.

Best Practices:

- Write the goal as a measurable outcome, not a task.
- Include the primary customer or user and the business unit impacted.
- Define the decision this spec is meant to enable.

#### Proposed Approach and Alternatives Considered

Describe the recommended path and the realistic options that were explored. Summarize trade-offs and reasoning.

Best Practices:

- Present two to three viable options with short pros, cons, and implications.
- Note any principles or constraints that shaped the choice.
- Call out what will not be done and why, to prevent scope creep.

#### Expected Impact and Success Metrics

Define what improvement you expect and how you will measure it. Link outcomes to company goals.

Best Practices:

- Use a small set of leading and lagging indicators with baselines and targets.
- Specify the measurement method and reporting cadence.
- Include guardrail metrics to avoid local optimizations that hurt the wider system.

#### Level of Effort, Cost, and Timeline

Provide a credible estimate of people, money, and calendar time. Be explicit about dependencies and assumptions.

Best Practices:

- Use ranges early and narrow them as fidelity increases.
- Show key milestones, critical path, and review gates.
- List resource owners and minimum viable scope for a first release.

#### Key Risks and Open Questions

Make the unknowns visible. Invite targeted feedback and mitigation ideas.

Best Practices:

- Separate risks you accept from those you will mitigate.
- For each risk, add likelihood, impact, and a mitigation or trigger to act.
- Convert open questions into explicit next steps or experiments.

### As the Spec Evolves, Consider Adding

- Tables that compress complexity: Use them to compare options, map dependencies, or track scope.
- UI sketches or flow diagrams to visualize structure: Show the happy path first, then edge cases. Label inputs, outputs, and ownership at each step. Keep diagrams simple enough to read on one screen.
- Impact summaries that tie execution to business value: Summarize the chain from action to outcome to metric. Highlight the expected payback period and the few assumptions that matter most.

### The Compounding ROI of Great Specs

Investing a few extra hours in writing the right specification can save weeks or even months of wasted effort. A well-crafted spec prevents premature overwork, reduces the risk of executing the wrong idea, and acts as a powerful alignment tool across teams. It is the moment where thinking crystallizes, decisions become visible, and collaboration deepens. The clarity achieved through a strong spec compounds over time, shaping better decisions and higher-quality outcomes.

### Spec Culture: Embedding Clarity into How Organizations Think

Great organizations do not treat specs as paperwork. They treat them as a thinking discipline. A strong spec culture recognizes that clarity drives velocity.

What Defines a Healthy Spec Culture:

- Writing specs is viewed as an act of leadership, not bureaucracy.
- Teams expect clarity before execution and reward precision.
- People take pride in surfacing unknowns early rather than hiding them.
- Every project, big or small, starts with a written articulation of why, what, and how.

When specs become a shared organizational habit, they elevate collective intelligence. Teams move faster, stay more aligned, and make higher-confidence decisions. Over time, this culture of clarity becomes a lasting competitive advantage.

### References

For more context on how specs fit into the evolution of a project, see the companion articles:

- Building the Business - How to execute projects that generate compounding growth
- How to manage building the business projects your leaders are driving

### Prompt to Review and Improve Specification Documents

Use the following prompt to review, refine, and improve any specification document interactively:

AI Prompt: You are an expert in writing and improving specification documents. I will provide you with a spec document. Your task is to:

- Review the document for clarity, completeness, and alignment with best practices.
- Ask any clarifying questions needed to fully understand the intent, audience, and stage of fidelity (early, mid, or execution).
- Provide a structured list of recommended improvements — organized by clarity, structure, logic, and impact.
- Ask me if I want to apply these improvements. If I say yes, implement them one-by-one, pausing after each to ask if I like the change or want to adjust it.

Output Format:

- Section 1: Summary of overall feedback.
- Section 2: List of improvement suggestions with reasoning.
- Section 3: Interactive improvement flow (implement suggestions one-by-one).

This ensures iterative enhancement while preserving author intent and learning from each revision.

I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# Fight for your culture so your team grows and wins

*Published: 2025-11-13 | Categories: Growth*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/fight-for-your-culture/*

Culture change is not a slogan, a training session, or a motivational speech. It is the sum of thousands of micro-behaviors: which tools people use, which shortcuts they take, how they explain delays, and how they react to new expectations. It is what happens when leaders are not in the room.

Many organizations struggle because their teams resist change — not out of malice, but out of habit. The friction is subtle: half-used tools, delayed projects, and endless narratives of being "busy." These patterns silently drain momentum.

One of the most reliable ways to break these patterns is through real talk and positive mental sword fights.

### Foundations vs. Results

There are two fundamentally different kinds of progress in a team:

- Foundations: the systems, processes, clarity, and structure that make consistent excellence possible.
- Results: the measurable improvements in retention, expansion, productivity, and revenue.

A team can dramatically improve foundations — better CRM structure, clearer playbooks, new tools — while seeing only modest improvements in results. This is normal. It's like reforging the ground beneath a house. From the outside the house looks the same. But now it can support another floor.

That is the stage many teams find themselves in: strong foundations, but not yet the corresponding results. That transition from structure to performance is exactly where real talk becomes essential.

### What a Positive Mental Sword Fight Is

A sword fight is not conflict. It is clarity.

It is a conversation where two people, aligned on the mission, remove vague excuses and get down to specifics. The intent is developmental. The tone is respectful. The process is rigorous.

It looks like this:

- Someone says, "I can't adopt this new tool, because it's complicated and takes effort"
- You say, "It's supposed to save you effort, can you show me exactly what takes extra effort?"
- Together, you uncover whether the constraint is real or narrative "resistance to change"
- You don't stop diving deep in a positive way until it is clear whether the "tool" has an issue that needs to be fixed or you are dealing with resistance to change.

When repeated enough times, this teaches people to pre-filter their own thinking. They stop inventing soft explanations. They start using tools consistently. They surface real blockers early. They grow.

### Who You Fight For — and Who You Do Not

Sword fights only work with people who have the right core mindset:

- Low entitlement
- Willingness to face reality
- Openness to change
- Desire to do excellent work

People with this mindset improve quickly when engaged in real talk. They become allies and culture carriers.

But some people, usually a small percentage, bring chronic entitlement or deep resistance to structure. They pull against the system. They drain others. They create silent or not so silent dissent.

You should not invest your energy sword fighting endlessly with them. They eventually need to move out of the team or into contractor roles where their behavior cannot undermine culture.

### Tools Become Culture Only When Usage Is Absolute

Tools like JAM and MAP are not suggestions. They are the operating system.

Full adoption produces:

- Faster onboarding
- Easier rollout of product changes
- Clearer client visibility
- Better risk detection

Partial adoption destroys all of this.

If one person does not use the MAP, and then product introduces a new step, you cannot scale the change. If someone refuses the JAM, you cannot accurately assess risk.

The standard is simple: 100 percent usage, 100 percent of accounts.

When a tool is used inconsistently, it is almost always a cultural problem, not a technical one. And the cure is real talk.

### Concentrating Effort to Increase Velocity

Velocity drops when projects stretch across weeks due to fragmented attention. Tools get built but never finished. Reports get half constructed. Important growth work drags.

Concentrated, workshop-based work resets the pace:

- Three hours together moves a project forward more than three weeks of scattered effort.
- Two focused sessions can finalize a compensation plan or design a new product motion.

This is how leaders turn foundations into visible business results.

### Dual Personas: Warm Mission, Sharp Standards

To shift culture, leaders must master two equally important modes:

Mission persona:

- Reinforces purpose and shared goals.
- Recognizes specific wins.
- Builds genuine connection.

Standards persona:

- Cuts through vague explanations.
- Insists on data and specifics.
- Holds the line on process.

When these two personas coexist, people feel both supported and accountable.

### The Transformation

Over time, persistent positive mental sword fights produce visible changes:

- People bring problems with specific evidence.
- Excuses become rare and detailed rather than vague and emotional.
- Tool adoption becomes normal.
- Change rolls out faster.
- Productivity and retention rise.

Culture becomes self-reinforcing. High performers help reinforce standards. Weak performers self-select out. The team moves from heroic individual effort to a scalable operating system.

Real talk, done right, is not harsh. It is the most respectful form of leadership: refusing to let capable people stay stuck behind vague narratives, and insisting on the clarity that helps them grow.

That is the path from foundations to true excellence.

### Best Practices for Using Positive Mental Sword Fights to Shift Culture

Separate foundations from results

- Foundations are the tools, processes, and clarity that enable good work.
- Results are hard metrics like retention, revenue, and productivity.
- Do not confuse "we are working hard" with actual performance improvement.

Define productivity in concrete terms

- Measure outputs such as campaigns per CSM, revenue per head, NRR, and GRR.
- Ignore high-level narratives about busyness unless they show up as measurable gains.
- Use a simple definition: more impact with the same or fewer people.

Treat culture as behavior plus systems

- Culture is what people consistently do when leaders are not in the room.
- It shows up in process adoption, consistency, openness to change, and response to data.
- A culture of "everyone does their own thing" cannot scale, regardless of individual talent.

Use positive mental sword fights as a leadership tool

- Sword fights are direct, specific, reality-based conversations about behavior and standards.
- They are fundamentally collaborative: two people aligned on a mission stripping away excuses.
- The stance is not adversarial; it is disciplined, honest, and focused on growth.

Go from general excuses to specific facts

- Do not accept vague explanations like "I'm too busy" or "there's too much going on."
- Ask for specifics: which accounts, which tasks, how many minutes, what is actually hard.
- Once specific, either fix real constraints or expose weak narratives.

Choose who to invest in

- Invest deeply in people with low entitlement, high openness, and willingness to grow.
- Promote these people, empower them, and use them to help scale the new culture.
- Do not drain energy on those with chronic entitlement or anti-process mindsets.
- People who consistently resist the system eventually need to move out of the organization.

Make tools non-optional and continuously improvable

- Tools like JAM and MAP should be used 100 percent of the time.
- The standard is: full adoption, looking for specific issues when something is broken.
- Low usage without complaints indicates a culture problem, not a tooling problem.

Anchor everything in clear "so what" outcomes

- Every project must map to increasing revenue/retention or saving meaningful time, quality-of-life or important data generation.
- Ask explicitly: does this produce measurable impact? If not, rethink it.

Concentrate effort when building the business

- Day-to-day operations run on weekly cadences.
- Transformational projects move faster with concentrated workshops, not scattered effort.
- Compress work into structured deep work blocks to reduce calendar drag.

Lead with two personas

- Mission-driven persona: recognizes specific good behavior and reinforces purpose.
- Standards persona: has low tolerance for vague excuses and drives clarity.
- The combination creates a culture of honest accountability and shared ownership.
I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# How Great Leaders Create Rhythm, Velocity, and Evolution (The Drumbeat)

*Published: 2025-11-03 | Categories: Operations*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/the-organizational-drumbeat/*

As a CEO or senior leader, your single most critical skill is creating and maintaining the organizational drumbeat — the rhythm that keeps your company operating with discipline, evolving continuously, and improving with purpose.

This article builds on three foundational frameworks: Getting Ahead and Staying Ahead, Leading "Building the Business" Projects, and Meta-Leading "Building the Business" Projects. If you haven't read those yet, start there. They define the principles this article relies on.

You run a successful business through three interconnected dimensions:

- Running the Business — executing current operations effectively.
- Building the Business — evolving systems, structures, products and capabilities.
- Leading the People — motivating, aligning, and empowering teams.

To create a great organization that evolves rather than stagnates, your drumbeat must connect and harmonize all three.

### Running the Business: The Foundation of the Drumbeat

Running the business is about maintaining operational performance — making sure the company consistently delivers on its promises. It's about stability, quality, and accountability.

#### Define Cadence by Scale

The frequency and granularity of your involvement depend on company size:

- Small teams (5-20 people): daily rhythm.
- Growing organizations (20-100 people): weekly rhythm.
- Mid-size companies (100-500 people): monthly rhythm.
- Large organizations (500+): quarterly or semi-annual rhythm.

A clear rhythm creates accountability and visibility. It defines when you expect updates, how you respond, and what happens next.

#### The Operational Protocol

Every department should have a defined monitoring and reporting "machine":

- Insightful systematized reports sent on a regular cadence (weekly/monthly) from each leader with you as a CEO reviewing them and responding within hours (or days).
- Real-time visibility into dashboards and KPIs, with automated alerts that trigger when critical issues arise.
- Organized risk management that is tracked and managed.

This cycle — the consistent act of looking, understanding, reacting, and improving — is what creates the "beat."

If your managers send reports but you never read or comment on them, the rhythm collapses. A drumbeat only exists when both sides play their part.

#### Test the Numbers Against Anecdotes

You must form a perspective about the reports and summaries you are reading. To do this you form an independent statistical perspective by comparing the reports to your "on the ground" understanding. Conduct activities which give a sense of what's happening "on the ground" for example:

- Skip-level one-on-ones to assess team engagement.
- Hallway conversations.
- Ask adjacent leaders for observations on other teams' performance.
- Pair data with conversations — metrics without context lead to blind spots.

Every surprise, ambiguity, or underperformance in running the business is a potential building-the-business project.

### Building the Business: Ensuring Future Performance

If running the business preserves your present, building the business creates your future. Like a muscle, if you stop exercising it, it atrophies. Do it continuously and you get faster and stronger. Building the business includes everything that makes tomorrow easier, faster, or more valuable than today: automation, role design, product innovation, process redesign, or strategic reorganization.

#### The Purpose

Building the business means systematically identifying what needs to evolve — then turning that insight into tangible projects that:

- Increase efficiency or quality.
- Reduce risk, cost, or time.
- Create new value for customers or employees.

#### Cadence and Capacity

Each department has its own optimal ratio between running and building, depending on its role and maturity:

- Customer Success: 70% running / 30% building — mostly focused on core metrics like renewals and expansion, with some time dedicated to automation or onboarding improvements.
- Sales: 80% running / 20% building — focused on selling, with periodic process upgrades or training initiatives.
- Marketing: 50% running / 50% building — equally split between execution and experimentation to figure out better performing marketing initiatives.
- R&D: 30% running / 70% building — primarily focused on new products, features, or systems, with a small allocation for maintenance.

These ratios evolve as your organization matures. The key is ensuring every team has real bandwidth for improvement, not just maintenance. This is critical, the world around us is moving at break-neck speed.

#### Tracking and Leading Building-the-Business Projects

Every leader should maintain visibility into three layers:

- A backlog of ideas and potential improvements.
- A pipeline of active projects with owners, goals, and milestones.
- A dashboard summarizing progress and results.

Each project should clearly define:

- The problem being solved.
- The desired outcome and success metrics.
- The owner and their accountability structure.
- The plan, timeline, and interdependencies.

If surprises arise — capture them. If an idea surfaces — log it. If an opportunity appears — prioritize it. The backlog is your long-term growth engine.

You should also manage this backlog on a defined cadence — review it weekly or monthly depending on your organization's size. Ask questions like: Are we moving fast enough? Which projects are stalling and why? Do we need to accelerate specific initiatives based on changing opportunities or competitive pressures? This rhythm of review ensures that your organization isn't just recording opportunities but acting on them with urgency and clarity.

### Leading the People: The Cultural Drumbeat

A company's rhythm depends on its people believing in it. Culture defines whether the drumbeat feels like a march forward or a forced march.

#### Leading Leaders

Not every leader has the same ability to drive or create change. You must tailor your drumbeat to three levels of leadership:

- High-Seniority Leaders: self-driven, strategic, and capable of originating initiatives. Support them through ideation, feedback, and clearing barriers.
- Mid-Seniority Leaders: capable executors who need help with pacing and accountability. Set expectations collaboratively and manage velocity.
- Early Leaders: developing leaders who still need direction. Work with them hands-on to model how to plan and execute effectively.

Adjust your involvement to match each leader's maturity. As capability rises, your control should shift from directive to empowering.

#### Leading Employees

The cultural layer ensures everyone aligns around growth and improvement:

- Reinforce that change equals progress.
- Make it clear that improvement creates value — for individuals, teams, and the company.
- Reward those who initiate ideas, embrace new processes, and help others adapt.

Every improvement project begins imperfectly. Employees must learn to help shape new systems rather than resist them. This mindset — not perfection — is the essence of a healthy drumbeat culture.

### Final Thought

The organizational drumbeat is how leaders turn time into traction — how great organizations convert repetition into evolution. A strong drumbeat creates momentum, alignment, and adaptability.

May the drumbeat — and the change force — be with you.

### Resources

- Getting Ahead and Staying Ahead
- Leading "Building the Business" Projects
- Meta-Leading "Building the Business" Projects
I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# Meta-Managing: How to drive compounding growth through your leaders

*Published: 2025-11-02 | Categories: Operations*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/meta-managing-projects/*

As you advance in senior leadership and have other leaders reporting to you, your management of those managers will determine a tremendous amount of your impact and their success. When your direct reports are themselves managers or senior leaders, part of your role shifts to meta-management: guiding and evaluating the strategic projects they propose and drive. In this post, we focus on how to evaluate, manage, and lead "building the business" projects that your leaders are pushing forward (or should be). These are initiatives aimed at growing or improving the business, as opposed to "running" day-to-day operations.

Why This Matters: Choosing the wrong project or failing to define its goal clearly can waste enormous time and resources. "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all." In fact, analyses show that 37% of projects fail due to a lack of clear goals. As a senior leader of leaders, it's your job to prevent that failure mode by ensuring your managers work on the right problems with the right approach.

If you haven't done so already, we highly recommend you read the following two articles as context:

- How to Manage Your Managers
- How to execute projects that generate compounding growth

Below is a framework in structured steps, from initial idea to execution, for meta-managing your leaders' projects. We also discuss how to track progress, handle surprises (the "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns"), and even leverage AI tools to improve project outcomes.

### 1. Ensure the Problem and Goal Are Well-Defined

Every project should start with a clearly defined problem or opportunity. Make sure your reporting leader can articulate why this project is worth doing and what success looks like. This means validating that:

- Is the problem real and significant?
- Is it quantified by data or supported by strong anecdotes — or will it generate new data to improve the business?
- Is the goal specific and measurable?
- Does the project align with company strategy?

Ask your leader to pitch the project in one or two sentences — covering the problem, the proposed solution, and the expected benefit. If they struggle, the idea may not be fully thought out or important enough.

#### Critical Tool #1 — "What Do We Have to Believe?"

If any of the above checks fail, use the "What Do We Have to Believe?" tool. This means explicitly writing down the key assumptions or beliefs that must hold true for this problem and goal to be worth pursuing. For example:

- We have to believe that at least 40% of our customers face this issue.
- We have to believe the solution will cost less than $100K to build and under $10K/year to maintain.

Then collaborate with your leaders to identify the fastest and cheapest ways to test each belief. Ask:

- What's the quickest experiment we can run to validate this assumption?
- What data or signal would increase our confidence to move forward?
- How can we measure results objectively and fast?

Keep it simple, fast, and evidence-driven — the goal is quick validation, not perfection.

### 2. Evaluate Multiple Approaches to Solve the Problem

Once the problem and goal pass muster, turn to the solution approach. There are always multiple ways to solve any problem.

Ensure your leader considered different options and can explain why the chosen approach maximizes value. Understand how your leader defines "best." Are they optimizing for speed, cost, quality, or innovation?

Evaluate approaches through:

- Impact vs. Effort (80/20 analysis) — How much impact will this have, and what's the effort and cost?
- Risk profile — What are the execution risks? Can we quantify them? Have we done something similar before?
- Time to Value — How fast will this start generating value for us?
- Resource and skill requirements — Do we have the right people and skills in-house? Do we know exactly who to hire, or do we need to search for new talent to build this?
- Maintenance — How much effort will be required to maintain this approach? Are the business needs changing often? How much effort is it to adapt given our selected approach?

Encourage structured reasoning: "We considered building in-house vs. buying vs. partnering. We chose in-house because it differentiates us and offers long-term ROI despite a longer timeline."

#### Critical Tool #2 — "Statistical Noticing"

When discussing approaches, raise additional ideas of your own. Then notice: if you can easily generate valuable alternatives on the spot, it signals insufficient depth in your leader's work.

If this happens:

- Probe how long they spent on the analysis.
- Ask whether they believe they've explored all top options.
- Consider whether they need external expertise.

If they believe the work is strong yet you add significant value quickly, it signals a critical gap in the leader's ability to evaluate their own work — a major risk for future blind spots.

When meta-managing, you'll only sample parts of a project plan. So if you review 10% and find 10 issues, assume there are 100 in total. Statistical noticing means extrapolating from small samples to detect systemic quality issues early.

### 3. Require a Structured Plan with Clear Milestones

Once the goal and approach make sense, require a well-structured execution plan:

- Clear milestones and deliverables with owners and dates.
- Definition of Done for each step.
- Realistic timelines with visible buffers (separate from work time so they're not consumed).
- Dependencies and critical paths mapped clearly.

Ask: "What happens by this date? What if X is late?" You're not micromanaging; you're validating coherence and accountability.

### 4. Ask Smart Questions to Pressure-Test the Plan

Smart questioning is your most powerful meta-management tool. Probe for:

- Assumptions: "What are we assuming and how do we validate it?"
- Alternatives: "What else did you consider?"
- Risks: "What could go wrong and how are we mitigating it?"
- Uncertainty: "Which parts of this plan are least certain?"
- Success metrics: "How will we measure progress and quality?"
- Stakeholders: "Who else must be aligned?"
- Resources: "What do you need from me?"
- Learning: "What did we learn from similar projects?"

Use Critical Tool #2 — "Statistical Noticing" here too. If you're adding too much value in the discussion, it signals underlying weaknesses in the leader's planning depth.

### 5. Monitor Execution and Manage Change

Establish a regular update cadence (weekly or biweekly) focused on:

- Progress vs. milestones
- Quality of outputs
- Upcoming risks

When plans change, analyze why:

- Poor planning? Adjust estimation processes.
- Poor execution? Coach and address team issues.
- Valid discovery? Celebrate learning and re-scope intentionally.

#### Distinguish Good and Bad Surprises

- Known Unknowns: anticipated uncertainties. Manageable.
- Unknown Unknowns: true surprises. Use buffers and agility.
- Bad Surprises: predictable but unexamined risks.
- Good Surprises: unexpected opportunities — capitalize on them.

Goal: fewer bad surprises, faster adaptation to good ones.

### 6. Bonus: Teach Your Best Leaders to Meta-Manage Themselves

For your strongest senior leaders — the ones ready for the next level — share this article with them and challenge them to apply it to themselves.

How to Do It:

- Self-Reflection: Ask them to meta-manage their own project portfolio using this framework.
- Review Together: Act as their meta-meta manager — validate reasoning, probe blind spots, reinforce standards.
- Cascade the Method: Have them apply the same process with their direct reports to create a culture of strategic meta-management.

This exercise:

- Builds meta-cognition — self-diagnosis and self-correction.
- Prepares leaders for next-level leadership, where they manage other senior managers.

### Conclusion: Lead Through Leaders

Your role as a senior leader is to multiply impact by doing the right projects right.

This framework ensures your leaders run projects that matter — with rigor, clarity, and adaptability. Over time, your leaders internalize this thinking, and you build a culture where high-quality project management and leadership become the norm.

### Resources and Related Articles

- How to Design, Validate, and Execute High-Impact "Building the Business" Projects
- How to Manage Your Managers
I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# The Art of Getting Ahead and Staying Ahead

*Published: 2025-10-22 | Categories: Strategy*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/getting-ahead-and-staying-ahead/*

In business, your ability to solve a problem or drive a key initiative to completion drops dramatically once you've hit the last minute. At that point, you're reacting, with limited time, emotional tension, and fewer options. Even great decisions only limit the damage.

The real power lies in seeing problems and opportunities early, months before they surface, and executing initiatives in an organized, strategic way well before deadlines, acting with calm, quality, and precision. That's how companies stay ahead, and how great operators build compounding advantage.

### Being Ahead Creates Massive Leverage

Most problems and initiative failures don't appear overnight. They build quietly, in small signals, ignored data, subtle tone shifts, minor frictions, and slipping milestones. If you can see and act during that phase, you operate from strength: you have time, optionality, and emotional clarity. The moment the problem explodes, or an initiative is pushed to the eleventh hour all three vanish. You're left firefighting.

The rule:

- The earlier you act, the higher your leverage.
- The later you act, the higher your cost.

Winning organizations are built on leaders who consistently act early — not because they're lucky, but because they've built the skill to see around corners and drive work to "done", they create the internal urgency to solve the work before the deadline and avoid the external world forcing urgency upon them.

### The Destructive Cycle of Being Behind

When you're behind, it doesn't just feel hard — it gets harder. Falling behind sets off a destructive feedback loop that compounds over time. You're behind, so more fires emerge. The fires consume time and focus, which means you fall even further behind.

That delay spawns more issues — missed deadlines, unreviewed details, unclosed loops — which, in turn, create new fires. Each day you lose altitude, your field of vision narrows, and your options shrink.

It's a self-reinforcing trap:

- Being behind leads to more chaos
- More chaos leads to less clarity
- Less clarity leads to worse decisions and slower recovery
- Slower recovery leads to even further behind

Soon, your best people are stuck firefighting instead of creating. Your team stops thinking ahead because every week feels like survival. You stop seeing leading indicators — because every signal is buried under noise.

Breaking this cycle requires deliberate intervention:

- Pause the churn. Stop adding work.
- Contain the fires. Buy time through triage, not heroics.
- Rebuild clarity. One view, one plan, one focus.
- Protect slack. It's not luxury; it's your only escape velocity.

If you don't stop the loop, it will stop you.

But once you stabilize and climb above the chaos, momentum starts working for you again — and every step ahead compounds in the opposite direction: more clarity leads to fewer fires leads to more control leads to better execution leads to faster progress.

That's the flywheel of getting ahead — and it's just as powerful as the cycle of being behind, only in reverse.

### The Real Skill: Seeing Ahead and Generating Internal Urgency

Spotting problems early isn't luck or intuition, it's a trained capability. It's the ability to detect weak signals, recognize which ones will matter, and prioritize them before they metastasize — and to translate that foresight into steady, on-time execution of initiatives (no last-minute scrambles).

This skill is rare because:

- Most leaders are surrounded by noise, not signal.
- Cognitive bias makes small issues feel "normal."
- Emotional discomfort pushes people to delay tough calls.
- Weak systems hide the data that would reveal early decline or schedule risk.

Developing this skill means rewiring how you sense, interpret, and act — and how you sequence and land initiatives — before the crisis arrives.

### Get Ahead and Stay Ahead

You can't see the future when you're drowning in the present. If you're constantly firefighting, reacting to today's chaos, you simply don't have the mental bandwidth, time or horizon to notice the weak signals that predict tomorrow's problems or manage initiatives to conclusion in a calm, predictable way.

To sense early, you need altitude — the space to step back, look at KPIs and anecdotes, and think. That means your first job as a leader is to get ahead of the work, and then stay ahead building systems and leaders that keep you there.

### First Assess If You're Ahead or Behind

Before you can fix where you are, you need to see where you are. You can measure it precisely by looking at three things:

- A. How much control you have over your own to-dos
- B. How many fires emerge in each function and how well they're organized to preempt them
- C. How much time does the company spend on forward-looking initiatives and executes them with internal urgency

Together, these show whether you're truly running the business — or it's running you.

#### A. Your Own To-Do List: The Personal Lag Indicator

Your to-do list is a mirror of your operational state. If you want to know how you're really doing, start here.

1. Do You Have a Centralized, Organized List? If your tasks live across email threads, sticky notes, and memory — you're already behind. Capture every task, decision, and idea in one system, and review it daily and weekly.

2. Are You Solving Faster Than New Work Arrives? If you're closing tasks slower than new ones appear, you're accumulating operational debt. There's no way to win if your inflow consistently exceeds your throughput. If you are a leader and behind on your personal work you can be certain that your organization will start to fail as well. You are the drum beat. You must be ahead of your personal work to help others succeed.

3. Are You Finishing the Right Things? Classify your recent tasks:

- Strategic: creates future value
- Maintenance: sustains current performance
- Reactive: responds to fires

If less than 20-30% of your own time is focused on strategic work, you're falling behind and not pushing the organization forward. (And if strategic initiatives only move at the last minute, you're borrowing against the future.)

4. Check the Emotional Tone If your list feels heavy, infinite, or guilt-inducing, that's not emotion — that's data. It means your workload has exceeded your control system.

#### B. Assess "Fire" Volume and Readiness of Each Function

Ask yourself: "How many fires am I fighting right now, and how surprised was I by them?"

The number of fires matters less than how predictable they were. If every crisis feels like a shock, you've lost visibility. If most fires are ones you saw coming, you're still in control, even if you're busy.

Surprise is the purest signal of blindness. You can't preempt what you can't see coming, and if functions lack structure, clear ownership, or early warning systems, you're guaranteed to stay reactive.

Look across the organization function by function. For each, ask two questions:

- Can I clearly see what's coming? (leading indicators, early warning metrics, qualitative signals)
- Am I spending active time predicting and preempting?

Functions to assess: Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Operations, Customer Success, Finance, People, Partnerships

Most companies are "ahead" in some areas and "behind" in others. That's your roadmap: the behind functions are where tomorrow's fires will start — and where key initiatives will slip if you don't intervene early.

#### C. Forward-Looking Initiatives and Internal Urgency

A company that's ahead doesn't just plan the future — it works on it early and with energy.

The test isn't whether you have strategic initiatives; it's whether they move forward every week with internal urgency before deadlines force action.

Ask yourself and your leaders:

- Are forward-looking initiatives visible, owned, and reviewed with the same cadence as urgent work?
- Do projects progress steadily, or only in bursts when they become critical?
- Is there time on the calendar for long-term work — or does daily noise consume it?
- Are deadlines respected because of discipline, or only because of pressure?

You can tell how healthy a company is by when and how it executes its future-oriented work. If progress happens calmly and consistently, you're ahead. If progress comes in frantic last-minute pushes, you're behind — running the future on borrowed time.

### Second — Take Massive Action if You're Behind to Get Ahead

Once you've diagnosed that you're behind, the only way out is massive, focused action.

You can't think your way out of being behind — you have to act your way out.

That means generating time, regaining control, and executing with discipline and speed until momentum returns. This stage is about creating space to breathe, organizing your chaos into a system, and then pushing hard to complete the most important work first.

The goal isn't perfection — it's to break the inertia, rebuild control, and shift the company from reaction to traction.

#### 1. Generate Time to Get Ahead

The single biggest bottleneck to getting ahead is time. If you stay fully booked reacting to the day-to-day, you'll never escape the destructive cycle — being behind creates more fires, which keeps you behind.

To break out, you must intentionally create capacity. That means:

- Working harder for a short period — evenings, weekends, whatever it takes.
- Cancelling or postponing personal and family commitments temporarily.
- Pausing all non-critical initiatives, even valuable ones, until you regain control.

You're not doing this to "work more." You're doing it to create the oxygen needed to think, plan, and execute strategically again.

Without a burst of reclaimed time, there's no path from survival mode to leadership mode.

#### 2. Organize Your Own To-Do List ("Put Your Mask on First")

Before fixing the organization, fix your own control system.

- Get all tasks out of your head — into one trusted list or system.
- Eliminate duplicates and noise; group tasks by priority and time requirement.
- Identify which items truly move the business forward, which ones are fires that must be dealt with now and which initiatives can be postponed, even for a few days or weeks until you get ahead.

If your own system is chaotic, your leadership energy leaks everywhere. Regaining control of your personal workload gives you clarity, authority, and momentum.

#### 3. Prioritize and Execute Ruthlessly

Once you've freed time and regained focus, shift into decisive execution mode. Progress now depends on speed, clarity, and discipline.

- Finish small (under 1 hour) tasks first — build quick wins and momentum; motion creates energy.
- Prioritize what must get done soon, and push out everything that isn't critical.
- See what you can pay for or delegate — buy back your time wherever possible.
- Execute, execute, execute — eliminate distractions and move things to completion daily.
- Keep clearing time to stay ahead — getting ahead is not optional; otherwise, you'll fall right back into the destructive cycle of being behind and staying behind.

#### Note: How to Pay for Work When You Need to Rapidly Get Ahead

Sometimes, the fastest way out of firefighting isn't time — it's money. When you're behind, every day costs more than you realize: lost focus, bad decisions, slow execution, team exhaustion. Those invisible costs multiply faster than any invoice. If you can buy your way back to clarity, do it.

That might mean bringing in a trusted consulting firm, implementation partner, or senior operator to help you get back ahead — not forever, but for now. Yes, you'll probably pay a premium. But the cost of staying behind — missed opportunities, delayed recovery, and poor-quality decisions — is exponentially higher. You're not paying for hours. You're paying to get back into control.

Here's how to do it right:

- Choose Trusted Executors, Not Experimenters — professionals who land results fast and quietly.
- Set a Clear, Tight Scope — hand off one critical area that's keeping you underwater.
- Pay for Acceleration, Not Exploration — this is about getting one thing done so you can think again.
- Keep Ownership of Direction, Not Execution — you hold the "why/what," they own the "how/when."

The cost of getting ahead is visible. The cost of staying behind is invisible — until it's catastrophic. When you're behind, one fewer problem on your plate can be the difference between chaos and clarity. Paying for that leverage is almost always worth it.

### Stay Ahead and Get Further Ahead to Build Buffer

Getting ahead once isn't enough — you need to stay ahead and widen the gap between you and chaos.

The goal is to build a buffer: time, systems, and habits that keep you from slipping back into firefighting. Staying ahead means maintaining personal control, institutional slack, and organizational foresight so you can operate with calm and consistency instead of urgency.

1. Always Stay Ahead of Your Personal To-Do Never fall behind for more than a day or two. If you do, clear out time immediately to get your personal to-dos back under control. Prioritize and execute ruthlessly — personal disorganization always trickles down into team disorganization.

2. Work Super Efficiently Before diving into the full amount of work, slow down to speed up. Start by brainstorming and outlining your approach in a few clear bullets. Validate those bullets with experts, peers, or other leaders to ensure alignment. Only then commit to full execution — this guarantees that your time is spent on the right work, done the right way.

3. Ruthlessly Reduce the Firefighting Cycle — Fix Problems So They Stay Fixed Audit what's consuming your energy: recurring fires, bottlenecks, or dependencies. Fix them structurally — not faster, but permanently. The goal isn't to manage chaos better; it's to eliminate the need for chaos management so initiatives can finish on time.

4. Build a Forward-Looking Operating Rhythm Replace reactive cycles with proactive ones: Monthly "leading indicator" reviews, Quarterly "pressure mapping" sessions. These cadences force you to look ahead rather than just catch up and create a drumbeat for initiatives to progress steadily.

5. Build a Team That Scans and Is Ahead with You Delegate operations so you can focus on system health and early detection. Teach leaders to think in time horizons: now, emerging, inevitable. When everyone is slightly ahead of their domain, the organization becomes anticipatory, not reactive — and major initiatives land without last-minute heroics.

You can't preempt what you can't see. You can't see when you're behind. Getting ahead, and staying there, creates the visibility, calm, and leverage to win consistently and to finish what matters on time.

### From Firefighter to Architect

When you master preemption, you stop living in reaction mode. You move from firefighter to architect — shaping the environment so fires never start and big rocks get finished early. You gain leverage, calm, and compounding returns. You build teams that operate with foresight. And you transform from being the person who fixes problems into the one who prevents them and consistently brings initiatives to conclusion without drama.

### Final Thought

Most leaders wait until pain forces action. Exceptional leaders act before pain even arrives — and they ship their most important work before it becomes urgent. They win not because they hustle harder, but because they see sooner, decide earlier, execute steadily, and solve deeper.

I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# Writing High-Quality Specifications for internal projects

*Published: 2025-09-23 | Categories: Operations*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/writing-high-quality-specifications-for-internal-projects/*

Writing great specification documents is both an art and a science. They are not static templates but dynamic tools that align people, clarify intent, and accelerate execution. The best specs create shared understanding, provoke constructive challenges, and strengthen conviction around what to build or do next. They transform ambiguity into clarity and momentum into meaningful action, turning early-stage ideas into well-defined, executable plans.

### The Role of Specs in Every Kind of Project

Specifications are valuable because they create the bridge between inspiration and execution. A good spec translates abstract intent into tangible clarity, allowing everyone, from executives to implementers, to see the same picture and row in the same direction. It forces prioritization, surfaces trade-offs, and gives structure to creativity. Without it, teams waste time debating interpretations instead of making progress.

Specs bring order to complexity and create a shared language that speeds up decisions, reduces rework, and ensures alignment.

They are not limited to product development. They are equally powerful tools for:

- Building new internal processes
- Designing recruitment or growth systems
- Defining operational improvements
- Defining new reports or metrics for success

Every project that turns an idea into action benefits from a thoughtful, well-written spec that aligns vision with action and helps teams move from uncertainty to confident execution.

### The Iterative Nature of Spec Development

Spec documents evolve iteratively. They allow teams to move from an idea to increasing levels of detail in a structured, aligned way while continuously gathering feedback. This iterative rhythm ensures that the project stays grounded in real insights and collective learning. Skipping the iterations just to produce a polished-looking document misses the purpose entirely. The process of iteration is where the real clarity and alignment are built.

### Levels of Fidelity and Timing

Fidelity defines how much depth and detail a spec should include at its current stage. Choosing the right fidelity level ensures that feedback and engagement are appropriate for where the project truly stands.

#### Low-Fidelity Specs

Typically short (under two pages). Their goal is to create a shared initial understanding and gather high-level feedback. These specs help decide whether to pursue the idea further, a go/no-go or directional conversation. They focus on why the project matters and its potential impact, not on execution.

#### Medium-Fidelity Specs

These come after initial feedback and early validation. Their purpose is to clarify the approach or options for approaches, how the project could be implemented in principle. They define the main approach options, early costs, timelines, and trade-offs. They balance detail and agility, encouraging productive debate about execution while staying open to iteration. Typically 2-5 pages long.

#### High-Fidelity Specs

These are detailed, precise, and execution-ready. They follow once an approach has been selected. Their goal is to document implementation details, edge cases, dependencies, and the rationale behind design or operational decisions. Feedback at this stage focuses on how to execute with excellence, not whether to proceed. The trick here is not to try and write everything because that could become tens or hundreds of pages which is unhelpful. But to define all the key critical things so the implementers can then implement with accuracy asking the right questions as they progress.

#### Common Pitfalls

Selecting the right fidelity is a leadership judgment call. It is about matching the spec to the project's maturity, the audience's attention span, and the type of feedback you want to invite.

- Too detailed too early: readers disengage.
- Too shallow too late: poor execution and bad decisions.

### Guiding Questions After Defining Fidelity

Once you have defined your fidelity level, pause and reflect before diving into writing. This is the moment to test alignment, validate assumptions, and ensure clarity across the team. Consider including these questions in the spec itself.

- What is our goal? Why are we writing this spec?
- Who is the primary audience, and what decision or action do they need to take after reading this?
- What must be true for this project to succeed? (these are the core assumptions)
- What data do we have, what data do we need, and how will we get it?
- What are the fastest ways to invalidate the riskiest assumptions?

### Key Sections to Include in the Spec Document

Use this as a checklist and tailor depth to the project fidelity. Each section should enable a clear decision or action.

#### Goal and Why It Matters

State the problem, the opportunity, and the business context in two to three sentences. Explain why this matters now and what happens if we do nothing.

Best Practices:

- Write the goal as a measurable outcome, not a task.
- Include the primary customer or user and the business unit impacted.
- Define the decision this spec is meant to enable.

#### Proposed Approach and Alternatives Considered

Describe the recommended path and the realistic options that were explored. Summarize trade-offs and reasoning.

Best Practices:

- Present two to three viable options with short pros, cons, and implications.
- Note any principles or constraints that shaped the choice.
- Call out what will not be done and why, to prevent scope creep.

#### Expected Impact and Success Metrics

Define what improvement you expect and how you will measure it. Link outcomes to company goals.

Best Practices:

- Use a small set of leading and lagging indicators with baselines and targets.
- Specify the measurement method and reporting cadence.
- Include guardrail metrics to avoid local optimizations that hurt the wider system.

#### Level of Effort, Cost, and Timeline

Provide a credible estimate of people, money, and calendar time. Be explicit about dependencies and assumptions.

Best Practices:

- Use ranges early and narrow them as fidelity increases.
- Show key milestones, critical path, and review gates.
- List resource owners and minimum viable scope for a first release.

#### Key Risks and Open Questions

Make the unknowns visible. Invite targeted feedback and mitigation ideas.

Best Practices:

- Separate risks you accept from those you will mitigate.
- For each risk, add likelihood, impact, and a mitigation or trigger to act.
- Convert open questions into explicit next steps or experiments.

### As the Spec Evolves, Consider Adding

- Tables that compress complexity: Use them to compare options, map dependencies, or track scope.
- UI sketches or flow diagrams to visualize structure: Show the happy path first, then edge cases. Label inputs, outputs, and ownership at each step. Keep diagrams simple enough to read on one screen.
- Impact summaries that tie execution to business value: Summarize the chain from action to outcome to metric. Highlight the expected payback period and the few assumptions that matter most.

### The Compounding ROI of Great Specs

Investing a few extra hours in writing the right specification can save weeks or even months of wasted effort. A well-crafted spec prevents premature overwork, reduces the risk of executing the wrong idea, and acts as a powerful alignment tool across teams. It is the moment where thinking crystallizes, decisions become visible, and collaboration deepens. The clarity achieved through a strong spec compounds over time, shaping better decisions and higher-quality outcomes.

### Spec Culture: Embedding Clarity into How Organizations Think

Great organizations do not treat specs as paperwork. They treat them as a thinking discipline. A strong spec culture recognizes that clarity drives velocity.

What Defines a Healthy Spec Culture:

- Writing specs is viewed as an act of leadership, not bureaucracy.
- Teams expect clarity before execution and reward precision.
- People take pride in surfacing unknowns early rather than hiding them.
- Every project, big or small, starts with a written articulation of why, what, and how.

When specs become a shared organizational habit, they elevate collective intelligence. Teams move faster, stay more aligned, and make higher-confidence decisions. Over time, this culture of clarity becomes a lasting competitive advantage.

### References

- Building the Business - How to execute projects that generate compounding growth
- How to manage building the business projects your leaders are driving

### Prompt to Review and Improve Specification Documents

Use the following prompt to review, refine, and improve any specification document interactively.

AI Prompt: You are an expert in writing and improving specification documents. I will provide you with a spec document. Your task is to:

- Review the document for clarity, completeness, and alignment with best practices.
- Ask any clarifying questions needed to fully understand the intent, audience, and stage of fidelity (early, mid, or execution).
- Provide a structured list of recommended improvements — organized by clarity, structure, logic, and impact.
- Ask me if I want to apply these improvements. If I say yes, implement them one-by-one, pausing after each to ask if I like the change or want to adjust it.

Output Format:

- Section 1: Summary of overall feedback.
- Section 2: List of improvement suggestions with reasoning.
- Section 3: Interactive improvement flow (implement suggestions one-by-one).

This ensures iterative enhancement while preserving author intent and learning from each revision.

I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# How to Manage Your Managers

*Published: 2025-08-29 | Categories: Operations*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/how-to-manage-your-managers/*

Managing managers is one of the hardest, and most critical, transitions in leadership. You're no longer directly running the business. You're leading the people who do. Your success depends on how well they both run the business (day-to-day operations) and build the business (strategic growth and innovation).

This framework breaks management of managers into three lenses — Running the Business, Building the Business, and Leading the Leaders — and provides concrete diagnostic questions you can use to assess and elevate your managers.

### Part I: Running the Business

Your goal: ensure your managers have strong, disciplined operational systems, people, process, and performance that actually work.

#### 1. People

- Are their people happy and engaged?
- Do employees have clear, documented career plans that are updated and visible?
- Is there a structured EPR (employee performance review) process that's consistent and fair? Is it updated for all employees?
- Are people being measured and coached, not just managed? Can you clearly see results per person and their utilization levels?
- Are they motivated and aligned with the mission?
- What's the attrition rate, and what's driving it?
- Are there people "hiding," doing minimal work under the radar?
- Are there toxic behaviors or "anti-system" actors undermining trust?

#### 2. Processes

- How does their PES (process execution system) look? Is it clearly defined and step-by-step?
- Can you follow their processes end-to-end and see accountability at every step?
- Is there documentation — not in someone's head, but written down and maintained?
- Are there systems and tools (CRM, dashboards, templates) running the process, or is it manual chaos? Is it easy to view reports from these systems that tell you the actual story of how well the business is running?
- Is there a training and onboarding system for new hires?

#### 3. Performance

- Are the KPIs tracked weekly or monthly — and can you see them easily?
- Is there clarity on what's driving the numbers — why they're up or down?
- Can managers drill down into the underlying data and explain what's happening, not just report results?
- Are they sharing insights, not excuses?

When you can answer "yes" to these, your managers are running the business effectively.

### Part II: Building the Business

Running the business keeps the lights on. Building the business creates the future. This is where you see how strategic, creative, and disciplined your managers really are. Each manager should be owning and driving a portfolio of building the business projects and your role is to assess, prioritize and help them drive those with high velocity and quality.

#### 1. Project Portfolio

- What current projects are under way?
- Are there clear project plans with timelines, owners, and deliverables?
- Are those plans high-quality, or just vague task lists?
- Do projects create more leverage and value, or just add more work? Are some projects focused on reducing work?

#### 2. Strategic Value

- Are projects tied to specific data-backed problems the team understands?
- If not, will they at least generate new data or insights that help improve decision-making?
- Are projects aligned with company priorities, or are they pet projects disconnected from impact?

#### 3. Execution Quality

- Are projects executed with clarity, elegance, and velocity?
- Can you see progress visually (roadmaps, dashboards, demos)?
- If you don't know how to assess the quality of execution, can you bring in an expert to evaluate it?
- Do managers know how to course-correct quickly when things stall?
- Are projects executed to completeness, and is their impact then evaluated?

When your managers consistently deliver high-impact projects that reduce friction, improve clarity, or unlock new value, they're not just managing the day-to-day; they're building the business.

### Part III: Leading the Leader

Managing managers isn't just about their teams or projects — it's also about them as leaders. This third lens ensures you're building trust, motivation, and growth at the leadership level.

#### 1. Motivation and Alignment

- Are they genuinely motivated and inspired by their work?
- Do they deeply care about the business and its success?
- Are they personally connected to the mission and outcomes?

#### 2. Career Growth and Ownership

- Is there a clear career path for them that they are connected to and are excited by? Is it recent and updated? (Tip: they should build it with your support, not the other way around)
- Do they know what success looks like at the next level?
- Are they getting meaningful stretch opportunities to grow?
- Are they owning their own growth and pushing ahead on their own?

#### 3. Trust and Relationship

- Have you built a relationship of trust and honesty with them?
- Can they come to you with challenges without fear?
- Do they feel supported, not only managed?

Leaders who feel trusted, valued, and stretched will multiply that energy across their teams.

### How to Use This Framework

Tips:

- Run a monthly "Manager Check-In" using this structure. Review people, process, performance, projects, and leadership systematically.
- Identify red flags early. A drop in motivation, lack of documentation, or fuzzy KPIs is often the first signal of deeper issues.
- Coach, don't rescue. Your job isn't to fix their problems — it's to develop their capacity to fix them.
- Bring in experts wisely. When you're unsure about execution quality, bring in a domain expert to evaluate and coach.
- Celebrate excellence in leadership. Reward managers who make systems run smoother, grow their teams, and build initiatives that move the company forward.

### Final Thought

Managing managers isn't about oversight — it's about multiplication. You're scaling your impact through others who themselves lead systems, teams, and growth engines. Do it well, and your organization will run elegantly — with energy, clarity, and purpose.

I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# How to execute projects that generate compounding growth

*Published: 2025-08-08 | Categories: Strategy*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/building-the-business-scaling-yourself-and-your-business/*

Running the business keeps things alive. Building the business makes things better and is the key to winning over time.

As a leader, your success compounds when you invest energy not just in daily operations but in systematic improvement, creating systems, tools, and innovations that make tomorrow easier and better than today.

If you spend all your time running the business, the world evolves while you stand still. Competitors adapt, technologies shift, expectations rise, and suddenly, maintaining performance takes more effort. You work harder just to stay in place.

When you consistently build the business, improving processes, launching growth projects, and investing in productivity, you create leverage. You work smarter, not just harder. You set yourself and your team up to achieve more results with less effort over time.

We have very limited time each week, which means that if you waste "building the business time" on projects that don't make an impact, not only do you not move forward, you actually move backwards. So it's critical to get them right, and it's non-trivial.

This guide teaches you how to define, plan, and execute the kinds of projects that actually build your business, the ones that make the next quarter easier and more successful than the last.

### 1. Define the Right Problem and Goal

Every great project starts by solving a problem that matters.

#### Clarify the Problem

- Prove it's real. Use data, customer feedback, or operational pain points. Quantify the impact of not solving it.
- Prioritize it. Ask: Why is this worth solving now? Tie it to strategic priorities or evolving needs.
- Think long-term leverage. Will solving this make your team faster, more effective, or more scalable?

#### Define a Concrete Goal

- Be specific: "Reduce onboarding time from 10 days to 4," not "Improve onboarding."
- Ensure it's measurable, with clear success indicators.
- Define how you'll know when you've won — the clear "Definition of Done."

#### Use the "What Do We Have to Believe?" Test

Before committing, write down your assumptions:

- What must be true for this project to be valuable or feasible?
- What do we assume about user behavior, costs, or risks?
- What would make this project not worth doing?

Then test those beliefs quickly and cheaply:

- Run data pulls, small pilots, or expert interviews.
- Validate assumptions early so you build confidence — or pivot fast.

### 2. Generate and Compare Solution Approaches

Building the business is not just about action, it's about choosing the right action. For any problem, there are many ways to solve it. The difference between a good project and a great one is how well you compare and select among those options.

#### How to Explore Approaches

Generate at least 2-3 fundamentally different ways to solve the problem, seek external input if this is not a topic you are an expert on.

Compare them by:

- Time to value — how fast do we see benefit?
- Cost — to build and to maintain.
- Risk — technical, operational, or strategic.
- Leverage — how much does it improve scalability or advantage?
- Maintenance — how much effort will be required to maintain this approach? Are the business needs changing often? How much effort is it to adapt given our selected approach?

#### Ask the Smart Questions

- What trade-offs am I accepting by choosing this path?
- What evidence gives me confidence this is the best approach?
- What's the smallest, simplest test (MVP or pilot) to prove it works?
- What would make me change my mind or pivot?

#### Avoid the "Shallow Work" Trap

If your project plan changes dramatically after feedback, it's often a sign that your exploration was too narrow. Acknowledge and learn from it. Don't dive into execution if your plan isn't good. Do the thinking upfront — so you can execute with confidence later.

### 3. Build a Structured, Realistic Plan

Once you know what to do, the next question is how to do it — clearly, credibly, and efficiently.

#### Key Elements of a Strong Plan

- Milestones and Deliverables: Define tangible outcomes and ownership for each.
- Definition of Done: Describe how you'll know when something is complete.
- Timelines with Buffers: Add slack time explicitly — don't hide it in estimates. If you're not sure how to estimate a task, it means there's higher risk, and you might not have the knowledge. Seek external input from peers or experts.
- Dependencies: Make them visible. Know what relies on what.
- Measurement: Define how progress and quality will be tracked.

#### Make the Plan Adaptive

Ensure your plan is detailed enough to execute but flexible enough to evolve. Use short feedback loops to detect if your assumptions break — and adjust before damage compounds.

### 4. Validate Before You Execute

A great project leader doesn't just plan — they pressure test.

#### Run a Pre-Mortem

Ask your team: If this fails, what probably went wrong? Capture those answers and build mitigations now.

#### Invite Skeptics Early

Share your plan with peers or cross-functional partners who will challenge your logic. If they find holes, fix them early — before investing the time.

#### Model the Risks

- Identify Known Unknowns (expected uncertainties) and manage them actively. Write them down to show yourself and others that you're aware of these risks.
- Acknowledge Unknown Unknowns (unforeseen challenges) and use buffers and iteration to absorb them.
- Notice how frequently you get input and feedback that you agree with and haven't thought about it before? If you are getting a lot of feedback in every meeting, it means there are still a lot of unknown unknowns. It is critical to notice them.
- Have clear triggers for re-evaluation — know when to adapt versus persist. If things are not working according to plan, sometimes the best approach is to stop or kill a project. Often times, this is not a sign of bad management, but of actually good management if this happens early on. If this happens late, then that's a sign of poor management.

### 5. Execute, Learn, and Scale Smarter

Execution is where you turn clarity into results — and learning into leverage.

#### Operate With Rhythm and Visibility

- Hold weekly or biweekly check-ins: review milestones, risks, and learnings.
- Track not just progress but quality — are outcomes matching intent?
- When plans change, document why (planning miss, execution issue, or new discovery).

#### Separate Signal From Noise

- A project that changes for good reason (new discovery) is learning.
- A project that changes for bad reasons (poor planning) is waste.
- Know the difference and learn from both.

#### End Every Project With a Retrospective

- What worked? What didn't? What surprised us?
- What can be automated, simplified, or systematized next time?
- How did this project make our business more scalable, efficient, or resilient?

When you consistently close this loop, every project makes the next one easier. That's how you build a self-improving business.

### Building the Business as a Habit

The leaders who grow fastest are the ones who make building the business part of their weekly rhythm.

Ask yourself regularly:

- What's one friction point we could remove this month?
- What could we automate, document, or delegate to save 10 hours next quarter?
- What would make our next 3 months easier, faster, or more effective?

If you're not improving, you're falling behind. If you're only running the business, you're eventually running uphill.

When you invest in building the business, you create a compounding advantage — each project makes the next one faster and easier to win.

The goal isn't to impress anyone, it's to win smarter.

Great leaders use building projects to expand what's possible, not just what's expected.

And over time, those who build consistently are the ones whose results keep accelerating — even as their effort stays the same or shrinks.

### Resources and Related Articles

- How to Design, Validate, and Execute High-Impact "Building the Business" Projects
- Meta-managing projects: How to manage leaders that are driving projects like the above
I published this as part of my work building and growing [Asfiro](https://www.asfiro.com).


---

# A team contract to overcome mistakes and become a better leader

*Published: 2022-04-11 | Categories: Leadership*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/a-team-contract-to-overcome-mistakes-and-become-an-incredible-leader/*

#### A framework and social contract for growing stronger from mistakes.

Lessons from managing over 700 employees while making mistakes – Resilience is more important than perfection.

You are an extraordinary leader, a founder, a manager. You and your team members are also human, so mistakes are bound to happen. When you try to run fast and achieve more, you will make even more mistakes. That’s ok and it happens to everyone. The trick is how to grow from mistakes vs slowly crumble. Use this framework to grow stronger from your mistakes rather than have them pull you and your team apart.

If you let mistakes linger, they develop a life of their own, lowering motivation, velocity and harming your culture. The worst thing about these mistakes is that you are often not even aware you made them and have no opportunity to fix them.

To deal with this fact you can slow down and try to be perfect or own up to the fact that you, and everyone else, will make mistakes. Then be proactive about creating a social contract to makes you and your company stronger rather than weaker when mistakes happen.

So how do you get it done? it’s a 5-second drawing and a 5-minute conversation you have with almost everyone in your company.

##### The 5-second drawing (only draw the black):

![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/40c9c2ca6669.png)
Growing stronger from and overcoming mistakes in leadership

##### The 5 min conversation – explain what you drew:

- The squiggly line: all of us working fast together to achieve amazing things.
- The X: when I or someone else makes a mistake.
- The ?: This is critical, this is the point where the person “harmed” has the option to: ↘️ stay quiet and hold his grievance/annoyance in secret, or WITHIN 24 HOURS to ↗️ speak up and share the issue with the person who made the mistake (or their manager) so that they is aware and has a chance to fix it.
- ↗️ The upwards arrow: represents relationships and team getting stronger as they quickly overcome mistakes and are less afraid to make them in the future. They trust each other more and grow.
- ↘️ The downwards arrow: represents the relationships and team getting weaker since mistakes remain hidden, unfixed, and fester unhappiness.
- Your personal commitment: end the explanation by sharing your personal commitment to always respectfully share within 24 hours when someone has made a mistake so that they can fix it and become stronger. Then EXPLICITLY ask your employees to do the same with you, to let you know within 24 hours when you made a mistake so that you can have the opportunity to fix it. This allows you to continue to run at a high velocity and vastly reduces the damage caused.

Do this with the team several times. Eventually, you only need the 5-second drawing and not the conversation. Celebrate when the full-cycle happens, and the ↗️ is selected. It’s a fantastic feeling to know that mistakes are a critical part of compounding and constructive growth and that it is not only ok to make mistakes but rather a necessary step of mutual growth. Everyone can achieve more and be themselves and learn how to grow in a safe environment.

Be amazing, make mistakes,

Amit


---

# Startup fundraising playbook – running a thoughtful competitive auction

*Published: 2022-02-02 | Categories: Fundraising, Go to market*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/startup-fundraising-playbook-running-a-competitive-auction/*

#### TLDR:

Startup fundraising starts well before you are actively raising (lessons from +$100M raised). When done well it is a competitive Auction. There are 3 main phases: a) build an interested investor pool,  b) do “price discovery” regarding the amount, valuation and terms and c) run a competitive auction that simultaneously brings interested investors to the table. This meaningfully increases the likelihood of closing quickly, with the right investors and good terms. Much more below including practical steps and templates.

### Startup fundraising playbook – running a competitive auction

Many people say startup fundraising is similar to enterprise sales, after raising over $100M with 8 different startups, I disagree. Fundraising is a thoughtful process that ends with an Auction where the founder is the auctioneer (specifically, fundraising is a[Sealed Bid Auction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_auction)). Your goal is to bring many interested bidders (VCs) to bid on leading your round at roughly the same time so you can choose and improve the best offer.

So what do you need to do to succeed, first always be building an amazing startup. Second, organize a compelling and competitive auction every time you raise money.

A few essential facts to begin with:

- The auction itself is the last stage. There is foundational prep work that must to happen to enable a successful auction.
- Not doing an organized process increases the likelihood of a poor outcome (lower valuation, lower amount raised, bad terms, lower quality investors, or not being able to raise at all)
- You are always engeged in fundraising but very differently depedning on your stage. This is what this post is about.

### Fundraising has three phases:

- Phase One – “Not raising” ~6-12 months before you start to run the Auction (Phase 3)
- Phase Two – “Preparing to raise”, ~3 months before your start raising
- Phase Three – “Running the auction and actively raising” – running an organized, high velocity, competitive process to close a round (takes ~8 weeks)

![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/a559d222c073.png)
Original napkin drawing of the process 😉

#### Phase 1 – “Not raising” (except if an investor preempts)

You are not actively raising but are setting the groundwork. You do this ~6-12 months before you plan on raising/running the auction, with the main focus being:

- Meeting potential investors for friendly and informative conversations – create an investor CRM (sheet) and have open conversations with potential future investors. Share with them your business and ask for advice on topics that matter to you. Have real and honest conversations about your business, and also about them. Their areas of focus, investing style, typical amounts they invest, whether they lead or not and when, etc. You are not yet raising, be clear about that from the get go and build rapport. You are: a) giving the investors more data points for their time series (investing is a line not a dot) so when the time comes they have a much more informed opinion and
- b) hearing the perspectives of highly-intelligent people who see a lot of startups and can share interesting advice
- c) signaling that you are doing this with other investors so when the auction begins it will be competitive.
- Meeting connectors/advisors: similar to investors, create a connector CRM of a) people you know and trust b) people in your industry or solution space and c) other high-profile people who want to see you succeed. Schedule short touchpoints with them regarding your startup. Share your progress and discuss topics that matter to you where they could have interesting perspectives. This is an incredible resource to cultivate generally, but even more so as preparation for fundraising, when the time comes they will provide high-quality intros and signaling to investors that there is an auction and that investors should pay attention and compete to invest.If you are seeing lack of excitement and limited followups (from investors and connecters), there is either a problem with your startup or the way you share your story and progress. It’s ok for many of the people to reject you, but some need to love what you are doing and offer introductions, followup meetings, client references, etc. One of the worst feedbacks you can get is a “Sounds interesting, but let’s keep in trouch” it means it’s not interesting enough for any action to be taken. Don’t give up of course and this person and keep in touch, BUT figure out why your not generating more excitement. This post might help.
- You should also start paying attention to “Price discovery.” It will become critical in Phase 2. In our case, you want to “discover” the amount to set for your next raise, valuation, terms and goals that you need to achieve to correspond. You’ll hear clues to these in the conversations with investors and connectors. Look for details on comparables (e.g., company X just raised $20M and they were similar to you except they had 15 paying clients, a strong pipeline, etc). Also, take note of the interest level people share regarding your startup and progress, these will become critical indicators later on.
- The only way a round should close at this stage is if an investor wants to preempt. They need to be very excited (and likely also feel FOMO that if this reaches an auction they will not get an allocation or the price will be way higher than what they are able to get by pre-empting). If they raise this option, you say you are not really raising, but if the investor insists, you negotiate not only the investment amount and valuation, but also minimal disruption to the business and a short due diligence process. If they want to do through business due diligence and for you to create materials for them, it’s almost always a mistake to progress. This will hijack your auction, cause you to spend a lot of time with them and not give you the opportunity to create a competitive process/auction. You should only progress if they are willing to:Share a term-sheet quickly with terms that you like
- Progress with the information they mostly have already (as opposed to starting a business DD process)
- Commit to a very fast “Confirmatory DD” (i.e., only checking for legal/accounting red-flags)
- VERY important to know the difference between a real preemption/conviction and a masqueraded hijacking. If you are not sure ask directly, tough questions of the investor even at the risk of losing the pre-emption. If the intent to pre-empt is real, not only will you not lose it, you will in fact increase the likelihood of it happening.

If this is not the case, they don’t really want to preempt, but want you to launch the process specifically for them and before you are ready.

#### Phase 2 –  “Preparing to raise”

In this phase, you are more actively meeting prospective investors, starting to finalize your “price discovery” and are also starting to create a deck & data room for Phase 3.

Main actions are:

- Continue to bulk up your Investor and Connector CRM:Follow threads of trust and willingness to help to grow your network and having good (and typically short 30/60 min) conversations with additional potential investors and connectors.
- The framing is NOT we are raising a round let’s chat, but rather, X is a super interesting startup/founder I’m sure you’ll enjoy chatting with them (and “they are starting to think about fundraising so if you want a shot when they do you should chat/help them”). Again, friendly conversations, ask interesting questions and get advice.
- Start qualifying investors while you talk with them (ask questions along the lines of how interested are they in investing in your space? How much do they know the field? Have they done any investments in the field? Do they have a specific thesis? Who’s the partner focusing on this?) Don’t let any investor hijack or kick off your process for you before you are ready (unless they are credibly trying to preempt – see Phase 1 commentary). Track who is being helpful or at least trying to help you push your startup forward. Ones that are interested in potentially being a lead will start expressing that interest trying to get closer and offer help (introductions, research, ideas, etc.).
- Categorize investors to value add vs. pure financial investors – you can be implicit or explicit about it. The proactive value add investors will rely on their network (LPs, strategics, customers, etc.) to preemptively DD you which may actually help in the form of introductions to customers. Alternatively you can implicitly state that you find most value in getting to know investors through their networks and value add. The most aggressive approach would be in the form of stating that to proceed you would expect significant value in addition/advance to capital. .
- Focus on price discovery – at this stage you want to start narrowing down the amount and valuation you are going to ask for based on your achievements and investor interest. Go too low and potentially leave a lot of money/equity on the table, too high and no one will bite and give you a term sheet. This is both an art and a science and deserves it’s own separate blog post. It’s critical to note that until you have a “good sense” of Price discovery and interest from enough investors you should NOT launch the auction, it requires both to be successful.
- Create and commit to your internal fundraising plan and timeline, use this template as a starting point:The key steps are to finish preparing the materials, then thoughtfully reach out first to your connectors then to all relevant investors all within a very short time-span (i.e. days) so that you launch the auction at the same time.
- Here is a spreadsheet template you can use as a starting point, make it your own.
- If you don’t commit to a plan and process, your fundraising will manage you instead of the other way around.
- It’s ok to change the plan as new information comes in, but actively go back and change as opposed to transitioning to week by week “let’s see approach” that rarely ends well.
- Expect this to take most of your time, plan on having others on the team pickup day to day responsibilities as much as possible so you can focus on driving the process with high velocity and focus.
- Start preparing your deck and data roomYou need an impressive deck, not to present it, but to share it ahead of time so you can then have intelligent conversations with investors. Your deck needs to share a story that is Radically Simple. Instantly Credible. Can’t-sleep Exciting (see my other blog post). You never share it externally until phase 3, because it will create the perception you are already running the action and will “start the signaling clock”. When you are in Phase 2- you can pull up a slide or two if relevant during investor conversation saying “great question, we’re starting to put our deck together and we can take a look at a draft slide, would love to hear your thoughts”.
- Data Room (see a template of assets):Business Data Room – this is optional, but I highly recommend it. The benefit of having it is that it can accelerate the process and create more FOMO. If you have a data room covering a variety of topics, investors will assume that you organized it since others have asked for different data points and you are sharing it with them as well. OTHERS…. INTERESTED = FOMO. Below is a sample set of topics for your data room. I highly recommend having at least some of this ready, in the grand scheme of things it’s not that much effort and improves the likelihood of success (here is an explanation of what’s inside each folder).
- Legal Data Room – assuming you are more than a 3 person operation you will need this, but it’s not worth the effort just yet, it can be pulled together rather quickly with your lawyer and accountant after there are term-sheets. If you have big legal red-flags (e.g. an active lawsuit against you) you will want to mention it earlier and prepare materials to allow potential investors to evaluate it ahead of time and have it factor into your “Price Discovery”. Otherwise it could disrupt your process later on.

#### Phase 3 – “Running the auction and activly raising”

It’s money time, literally.

You are ready, have interested investors, deck, most of the data room, it’s time to make it happen.

Your goal is to bring everyone to the table at roughly the same time [(follow the timeline you committed to.)](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19gysxNpAMA9ZZ1goGOKi9jy7iWnYteuTQeuLnNtpaSw/edit?usp=sharing) This creates FOMO, it creates positive signaling value and doesn’t allow any single investor to hijack your process. Meetings will need to happen quickly in rapid succession. When an investor gives you a term sheet you set up the process well so that you are able to tell other investors that you have a term sheet and they will be “ready-enough” to compete if they are sufficiently interested. Your goal is to move all of those “I’m really interested, would love to chat more” to a hard YES (i.e. Term sheet) or a hard NO. You are happy with both.

You do this by following the key steps we outline in the [fundraising timeline sheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19gysxNpAMA9ZZ1goGOKi9jy7iWnYteuTQeuLnNtpaSw/edit?usp=sharing):

- Reach out to all relevant investors on roughly the same day (personalized notes of course)
- Schedule meetings for the following week. If you get back people telling you they can only meet in a month you can now credibly respond that it won’t be relevant by then so if they are potentially interested you should find a time next week.
- Be polite, but very clear that there is a lot of interest and the process is moving forward quickly. You should also be able to articulate to each investor why you would love for them to be “The One”. Valuation matters but it’s not only about valuation, there are many more factors. Find the ones that each investor possess and articulate it to them. This is important. When an investor considers giving out a term-sheet / competing in the auction, they want to know that if they do so there will be a high likelihood that you will choose them.
- This is basic, but never agree to anything related to deal terms when you first hear of them on the phone. Always polite, tell investors you will process it offline and get back to them. This gives you both the ability to be more thoughtful and also more control of the timeline.

If you prepared well, built up the investor and connector CRM and have done “Price Discovery” well the auction should now progress at a high velocity with meetings and progress happening in rapid succession.

It’s critical not to pause or slow down since if the fundraising process doesn’t start and end quickly, the process itself will be a negative signal to investors. Investors will ask themselves “oh, I’ve heard they are fundraising, they haven’t raised and it’s been a while, which must mean that they’ve met a bunch of people…and a bunch of people have said no… I wonder what they know that I don’t?”. Also, investors will know there’s less competition for the deal, which means they can take their time to dive in more, negotiate more on valuation, try to get better terms because there is no urgency. I’ll end with a note on luck and perseverance. Building a startup is hard. It takes a ton of effort, skill and also a meaningful amount of luck. So remember to take everything seriously, but not too seriously, we only live once.

Now go be amazing,

Amit


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# The Key for Successful Go To Market: Rational Needs-Based Segmentation

*Published: 2021-09-22 | Categories: Go to market, Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/the-key-for-successful-go-to-market-rational-needs-based-segmentation/*

Companies that clearly define their target audience and focus on conquering that addressable market can become very successful, especially if their target audience is part of a focused well-defined market. On the other hand, lack of clear segmentation and understanding of your customers will likely lead to massive waste (and failure). It is almost impossible to know how much to invest and how measure results without it.

My first startup [Socrative](https://socrative.com/), did just that…eventually. We focused on helping K-12 teachers by saving them time and showing them what their class understands via a real-time mobile testing app (Acquired by MasteryConnect June/2014). At first it wasn’t clear to us who we were serving (schools, principals, students, teachers or parents) and we had even less clarity as to how to segment our users within each of these groups. However as we advanced we decided to focus on teachers and within that we developed distinct teacher segments.

For example: Tech-savvy teachers that were adopting a variety of tools, then down-selecting to only a few which they use consistently. The challenge there wasn’t to reach them but to keep them engaged, and when we did, we got tremendous amount of referrals. Another, very different segment, was tech-averse teachers who needed to use tech in their classroom to satisfy school mandates. As you can imagine we had a very different approach for them (more about Socrative [here](http://news.mit.edu/2014/socrative-app-real-time-data-student-comprehension-1211)).

More recently, serving as the SVP of Product Innovation at [Lifion](http://www.lifion.com/) and [ADP](http://www.adp.com/) (world’s largest HR company), we leveraged the same approach but now at an enterprise level. We deeply understood why our customers want to spend the time, effort and money to upgrade their HR software and had different GTM approaches based on their job-to-be-done (e.g., go global faster, be a more attractive employer, reduce HR operational costs, integrate systems, etc.) without these segments our journey to scale from 30 to over 600 employees would not have been as rapid and successful.

There are many more examples, but I’ll pause here for now and share my common-sense approach for identifying and segmenting your client base. Doing this (and iterating to get there) will impact almost everything else within your GTM strategy and execution and will result in reduced costs and higher velocity.

## What is GTM segmentation?

It’s an approach to slice and group your potential buyers into similar clusters. Each of these clusters will have buyers that are attracted to, buy and use your product to fulfill similar needs. Essentially they will be “hiring” your product for a similar [job-to-be-done](https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/12/the-jobs-to-be-done-theory-of-innovation.html) (i.e., a specific need or set of needs they want to satisfy).

It’s important to note that most products can do many things and are therefore being “hired” for many different jobs. For example: You could “hire” a CRM software to a) keep better track of high-value customers b) proactively address potential churn issues or c) create dashboards and reports that accumulate a lot of otherwise disparate customer information (or all of the above at once). All of these are different jobs-to-be-done with different competitive sets and value propositions. In the first example, your product might be competing with a “High-Value” Account Executives while in the second case it would be competing with customer success platforms and in the third example it would be competing with BI tools. Therefore, your approach to marketing and sales will change according to segments and jobs-to-be-done.

## What makes a great GTM segmentation and where to start?

Clarity, specificity and ability to categorize customers efficiently into different groups (segments) is the goal.

To get there, you start with segment hypothesis (e.g., Segment 1: Fast growing companies “hiring” my product to recruit faster , Segment 2: low-margin retailers “hiring” my product to keep recruiting costs low, etc.) and then answer the following questions for each potential segment. A good segment is one that is large enough, and that has tight answer to the questions below:

- What Jobs-to-be-done are customers in this segment “hiring” your product for?
- What pain-points are you solving?
- What is the impact you are having? (e.g., Cost savings vs. revenue, how is the impact being realized: more customers, reduced hosting costs, etc?)
- Who is your typical champion? Buyer persona? (i.e., who will be the person/committee making the buying decision and driving the buying process)
- Is there an efficient way to identify customers within the defined segment? (e.g., it is much easier to identify fast growing company vs. companies that have culture challenges)

Segmentation (especially B2B segmentation) is a mix of science and art, there is no mathematical process to reach the best results and it requires both a deep understanding of your customer base and creativity.

## Test on your current customer base

Once you have reached several potential segments “test” them on your customer base:

- Choose customers from current customer base, assign them to a segment and see whether your answers to the question above hold true for the customers you selected.
- If a single client can easily fit in multiple segments then your segments are not distinct enough and may need to be combined or broadened.
- Are there many customers that don’t fit into any segment? that’s fine as a starting point, but will eventually need to be dealt with.

## Do the math and prioritize

Once you have a few segments as a starting point and you’ve categorized your customers into them, do the math to prioritize. Using your data about your existing customers, measure the key metrics your care about (e.g., sales cycle, deal size, CAC, NPS, margin, up-sale potential, etc.) and combine with data about the segment (e.g., size, growth, geography concentration) to prioritize where to focus.

[![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/c725d177c8e4.jpg)](/assets/img/0907b43a3542.jpg)Once you have segments you can start understanding your GTM options from a Cost of Acquisition, Life Time Value and many other perspectives

What’s next?

Now you can start defining the Go-To-Market strategy and execution (e.g., Sales, Marketing, Customer Success) per segment and across segments, but always in context of your GTM segmentation (see example below). I will cover more of this in future posts.

Example: Your segmentation can show you how you investment in Customer Service/Success is paying off in each segment.

Your segmentation can and likely will change as your business grows and your product evolves, no shame in making changes and adjusting, it’s a required aspect of scaling. If you have comments, ideas or want to connect further please reach out to us at info@lionsip.com.

## Additional Reading:

[https://jobs-to-be-done.com/market-segmentation-through-a-jobs-to-be-done-lens-5ef9242de65](https://jobs-to-be-done.com/market-segmentation-through-a-jobs-to-be-done-lens-5ef9242de65)


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# 3 Must follow rules for fundraising storytelling

*Published: 2021-07-18 | Categories: Fundraising*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/stop-losing-because-of-bad-storytelling/*

> Every business story needs to be: Radically Simple. Instantly Credible. Can’t-sleep Exciting.

Success in almost every new initiative or startup begins with telling & selling a story. Then, over time the story materializes and is replaced with data and results. I have seen too many amazing ideas fail before they even begin since they don’t deliver the message.

For example, I recently met a founder, let’s call him Jonathan. When we first met, it seemed like a terrible start-up and more of a bootstrapped business. Luckily for both of us, I decided to dig a bit deeper. What I discovered can be summarized as follows: 1) huge market that’s currently overlooked by investors 2) the company helps customers 6x their revenue in the first year! 3) CAC/LTV of 7+ and a rapidly growing top line. The founder knew most of these, but they were lost in the complexity and I did not HEAR them in our first meeting. Don’t let this be you, make your own luck.

Every story and then every key-point within it should be:

> 1. Radically Simple to understand for the audience, especially when have limited context and will only pay limited attention.2. Instantly Credible, by providing the key insights, highly synthesized3. Can’t-sleep Exciting – raises your heart-rate, and interrupts your ability to go to bed at night.

You need all three and you need them in sequence. If it’s not simple, I won’t understand it, and the rest doesn’t matter. Then, if I don’t believe you, our conversation stops there. Finally, if I understand it and believe you, I need to get excited to move into action.

## Framework deep-dive:

#### Is it Radically simple?

- You are deep into your work. Things that are simple to you will not be simple for others.
- You need to be able to say your key point in one (ONE) short sentence
- Test it out on a friend or employee, don’t add much, tell them the sentence and ask them to explain what they understand. Then ask them questions about it. If they are not 80% correct, it’s not simple enough.

#### Is it Instantly credible?

- Credibility comes from many places: your background, reader’s background, facts, anecdotes, pattern recognition, and even common sense.
- Start with common sense and your background and ask yourself: how much do I need to strengthen this key point? If you are considered an expert in the space, you can sometimes assert aspects with little explanation, which keeps things simple ⬆️. Same for common sense.
- If it doesn’t pass the personal background or common sense test, it’s time to figure out how to add credibility. You are looking for 1-3 (no more than that) key facts, figures, borrowing from other domains (Uber for Trucking), or strong anecdotes that will explain your statement.
- If the only support you are finding is complex or convoluted, don’t stop. Consider changing your key statement. If it’s not simple and credible, it doesn’t support your goal.

#### Is it Can’t-sleep exciting?

- What? Start with defining what is exciting to your target audience: making money? Saving the world? Eliminating poverty? A specific cause?
- Big Enough? Then ask yourself: Is this big enough? Does this make a material change so that people invest their time/effort in it?
- Likely to succeed? Does it seem likely to succeed given the setup so far? What assets and unique advantages do you have?
- Effort/Investment required? How much effort or investment will the reader require to be a part of this fantastic success. It needs to be a great value prop (“for limited effort or investment your will be a part of all of this…”)


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# Questions for growth — Introducing Our Growth Assessment Tool

*Published: 2021-01-19 | Categories: Go to market, Innovation, Org design*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/questions-for-growth-introducing-our-growth-assessment-tool/*

Reflection drives ideas, which drive action which drives growth. Reflection starts by asking great questions, deciding which are valuable to answer then diving in deep until you find the truth.

Throughout my career and life I was lucky to be surrounded by people who thoughtfully challenged me, from my engineering professor father at home to colleagues at [McKinsey & Company](https://www.mckinsey.com/), through incredible professors at MIT and Harvard (including the amazing Clayton Christensen who was a mentor at Socrative, my first startup) to very thoughtful senior executives at [ADP](http://www.adp.com/) (where I lead a group of 600+ employees to drive innovation and it’s next-gen business). At some point throughout the journey I fell in love with questions, frameworks and mental models that help capture critical thinking about the state of the world in a systematic, repeatable and improvable way.

To that end, we created the Growth Scorecard ([sample here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18PrU6Hmfox0v1_y6Cozcv_UlT-xuvADhwr1aeppjot0/edit#gid=905570229)). It is a set of guiding questions for CEOs and leadership teams that want to grow their business. It starts with the basics and dives in deeper and deeper to allow leaders to reflect, generate new ideas and prioritize actions. This is a key part of our framework for working with founders to dig in to their business in a structured way and figure out the biggest gaps and opportunities where we can help drive value.

[](https://medium.com/@amitmaimon?source=post_page-----bc16f2aa8f6e--------------------------------)

[![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/5b9680c5e0fa.png)](/assets/img/90f17c517451.png)Growth Scorecard — sample available [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18PrU6Hmfox0v1_y6Cozcv_UlT-xuvADhwr1aeppjot0/edit#gid=905570229)

Over time we will publish more and more of this assessment online, but for now feel free to check out our ~60 question sample [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18PrU6Hmfox0v1_y6Cozcv_UlT-xuvADhwr1aeppjot0/edit#gid=905570229).

If you have ideas for improvement or want to chat further feel free to reach out to us at info@lionsip.com

Amit


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# Next-Gen HCM from ADP honored with “2019 Top HR Product” from Human Resource Executive

*Published: 2019-10-05 | Categories: Innovation, Leadership*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/next-gen-hcm-from-adp-honored-with-2019-top-hr-product-from-human-resource-executive/*

The platform also takes wins “Awesome New Technology” at Annual HR Technology Conference

Originally published at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/next-gen-hcm-from-adp-honored-with-2019-top-hr-product-from-human-resource-executive-300928843.html

ROSELAND, N.J., Oct. 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Announced today at the 2019 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas, ADP’s ‘Next Gen’ human capital management (HCM) platform earned “Top HR Product” recognition and the “Awesome New Technology” award.  This marks the fourth time in five years that ADP has earned the “Top HR Product” recognition and the fifth year in a row it has received the “Awesome New Technology” award.

In designing this new global HCM platform, ADP recognized that as organizations become increasingly agile the next evolution of HCM needs to drive team performance and adapt to changing needs.  Built cloud-native from the ground up, this new platform supports a personalized experience that cultivates fluid, dynamic work to unlock greater value for the organization.

This achievement further showcases ADP’s ongoing commitment to deliver innovative HCM technology for both business leaders and HR professionals.

“The world of work has entered a new era of unprecedented change; long gone are traditional, hierarchical organizational structures. Today, most work is done on dynamic teams with organizations functioning as networks, and we’ve designed our solutions to better meet this growing demand in the marketplace,” said Don Weinstein, corporate vice president, global product and technology of ADP.  “We’re incredibly humbled by Human Resource Executive’s continued recognition of our products.  We are proud to showcase all the great work being done by ADP at this year’s HR Technology Conference.”

“Human Resource Executive has been evaluating HR products and conducting this competition for more than 30 years,” explained Steve Boese, co-chair HR Technology Conference.  “Our goal has always been to identify products and services that clearly deliver value to the HR community while demonstrating true innovation.  This is the first time in our history that a company has won the same award five years running, and this level of excellence is a testament to ADP’s drive to address key pain points in the HR community with major tech innovations and solutions.”

Winning solutions at the HR Technology Conference are selected based on several criteria, including their level of innovation, value add to the HR professional, intuitiveness for the user and ability to deliver on what they promise.


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# Why ADP’s Next-Gen HCM Is A Disruptive Force In HR Technology

*Published: 2019-09-30*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/*

Fantastic to see ADP and Lifion Team continue to progress and make waves in the industry. World leading HR Tech analyst Josh Bersin’s view on ADP and it’s next-gen technologies and business below. It was a unique pleasure founding and leading Lifion by ADP.

Excerpt form Josh’s article (full article at [https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/](https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/))

ADP, An Unexpected Tech Leader

This industry is not for the faint of heart. Building an enterprise platform takes years, and once you start you’re stuck with the architecture you start with.

Workday’s architecture is fourteen years old and quite innovative, it feels proprietary. SuccessFactors is similar in age and is now being re-engineered around SAP Hana and a new Experience interface. Oracle recently re-engineered its HCM platform and it took almost five years. So when a company like ADP starts from scratch, it can upset the apple cart.

While many customers rushed to buy cloud-based HCM systems, their satisfaction has been mixed. The platforms are highly complex, they don’t accommodate new organization and performance models, and buyers want more innovation.  HR departments want a stable, reliable HCM platform but they also want to be able to mix and match the best of breed on top.

Today, using what is called “[cloud-native](https://pivotal.io/cloud-native)” systems, vendors can build modern applications faster than ever. And technologies like AI, cognitive interfaces, natural language processing, and graph database are readily available from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft.

Enter ADP.

ADP you say? Aren’t they a 70-year-old payroll company?  What are they doing in the cloud architecture business?

Well yes, ADP does pay more than 40 million people in the US (one in six). But behind the scenes, the company is filled with technologists, and its new Lifion group has assembled some of the most senior tech architects in the world.

As Carlos Rodriguez the CEO and Don Weinstein the head of Global Product and Technology put it, ADP used to be a “services company fueled by technology.” Now it is becoming “a technology company with great services.” In other words, the company has heavily invested in its platform.

The new platform, today called ADP Next Gen HCM (a real name will come), has the architecture other vendors only talk about, and as it picks up speed it could become a major disruptor in the market.

What Is ADP Next Gen HCM?

Let me explain what ADP has done.

Through a skunk-works development team in Chelsea, NY, the company has been rewriting its payroll engine and HCM platform for several years. The project, originally called Lifion, is a “cloud-native” platform which embraces the latest technology stack needed to scale for the future.

Full article at: [https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/](https://joshbersin.com/2019/09/why-adps-next-gen-hcm-is-a-disruptive-force-in-hr-technology/)


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# My Next Adventure

*Published: 2019-04-23 | Categories: Innovation, Leadership*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/my-next-adventure/*

Originally published [here](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-next-adventure-amit-maimon/).

Hello world. It’s time for the next adventure. It has been an unbelievable journey at ADP and Lifion over the past 5 years. A journey that I will miss and reminisce about throughout my entire life. Moving on has been an incredibly difficult decision after all we have achieved and are about to achieve in the coming months and years.

I feel tremendously lucky to have had the opportunity to be part of ADP, building and leading Lifion through exponential growth, and am tremendously thankful to all of the amazing people that were a part of this Journey with me.

Our past several years building Lifion have been challenging and high velocity as we have been creating a world class platform, product and organization. While the work is not complete and there will still be many challenges ahead, it is hard to believe how much ground we covered in such a short time. I believe that Lifion is better positioned than ever to transform ADP and the HR industry ([and so do the leading analysts](https://joshbersin.com/2018/09/adp-unveils-one-of-the-most-exciting-hcm-systems-ive-seen-and-more/)). The team and our ability to recruit amazing talent has never been better. Our clients are starting to share positive feedback and our product, platform and business continue to mature every day.

While I’ll be cheering from the sidelines, I can’t wait to see where ADP and Lifion are 3 years from now. The world needs a better HR solution so that millions of people can have better careers, build better lives and have a brighter future. I feel tremendously lucky to have had the opportunity to be there when we just started.

More about the next chapter coming soon, feel free to reach out to me, especially if you are interested, or know people/organizations/funds who may be interested in investing in the Israeli technology sector in a way no local investor has done before.

Never stop creating,

Amit


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# ADP Unveils One Of The More Exciting HCM Systems I’ve Seen.. And More

*Published: 2018-10-26 | Categories: Innovation, Leadership*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/adp-unveils-one-of-the-more-exciting-hcm-systems-ive-seen-and-more/*

Have been quite for a bit, busy with big creation at work, here is a recent analyst review of what we have accomplished so far. As always feel free to reach out and discuss more, the community engagement is what keeps me going here.

Originally published by by [JOSHBERSIN](https://joshbersin.com/author/joshbersin/) · PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 23, 2018 · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 25, 2018 – [here](https://joshbersin.com/2018/09/adp-unveils-one-of-the-most-exciting-hcm-systems-ive-seen-and-more/).

#### ADP Unveils One Of The More Exciting HCM Systems I’ve Seen.. And More

Most of you probably think ADP is kind of an old payroll company, focused primarily on small businesses. Boy, are you wrong.

ADP, in fact, is the world’s first ever cloud-based HCM company (the ADP payroll is a cloud system), and the company is more innovative than ever.

I just attended ADP’s latest half-day analyst meeting and I want to share some exciting things with you, primarily because they’re innovations I’ve been looking for over the last few years.

1) Brand New Network-Based HCM Platform

Let’s start with the most exciting:  over the last 3-4 years ADP has been secretly building an entirely new HCM platform to go along with the company’s completely new re-engineered payroll engine (below). This new platform, which doesn’t have a name yet ([originally code-named LIFION](http://lifion.com/about/)), is what I’ve been looking for.

![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/2b2c61122f29.jpg)

It’s a true team-centric system built on a [Graph Database](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database) using what is often called [“low code” development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platforms). In other words, you can change it by moving objects on the screen and the system reconfigures itself.

A Graph Database is a huge new technology, pioneered by a vendor called Neo4J. If you’re a geek like me you’re going to want to read about this. You can [get the book from Neo4J](https://neo4j.com/graph-databases-book/) and if you’re a SQL database person like me it will blow your mind. This is the technology underneath Facebook, Google, and most big social network systems because it models large groups of people based on relationships, not tables.

I wont get into the details here but I really do think this is the disruption that could change the entire HCM market. Current systems, including Oracle, SAP, Ultimate, and most others, are built on various versions of tables and fields, which force designers to build business relationships that consist of links and pointers. The result is that really modeling relationships and teams is very hard.

(Note: Workday is truly an exception.  Workday actually built a graph-oriented database in 2005, when the company first introduced its object model. At that point in them Neo4J and other “graph databases” were not in the market yet, so Workday developed many of these features. Workday, for example, is non-relational, it is built on relationships, it uses microservices, and the company’s new knowledge and skills graph use this technology. So Workday is quite capable of delivering a platform similar to ADP’s new system.)

In a graph database every object is related in some form of relationship, like the real world. So applications like modeling a social network or understanding why some people buy blue shirts and others buy red shirts is easy.  The picture below may help.

![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/d44613e1674b.jpg)

I won’t try to explain the technology in detail but what it means for HR systems is that we can easily build a system that says “Josh is the CEO of Josh Bersin Inc” and “Josh is also leading the marketing team” and “Linda reports to Josh” and “Matt is a friend of Josh” and “Ashley is an associate of Josh” and “Ashley and Linda are on another team” and “Matt is on another team which Linda advises” and on and on.

All this may sound silly to you but in a real company this is how stuff gets done. The hierarchical structure of who you work for is irrelevant for most work-related activities, so it gets in the way.

If you’d like an introduction to the power of “relationships” in a non-relational database, I recommend you view Petros Dermetzis, technology architect at Workday, talk about how Workday works.  Jump ahead to minute 4:00 to hear about graphs.

The ADP platform has been in development for a while and I’ve been talking with them about it over the years. When I first saw it I told them it would be revolutionary, and I think it is.

There are many reasons this is needed, including:

- People work on multiple teams, so we need goals, workflow, training, compensation, and multiple leader models in the HCM system.

- Many people in the company are contractors, part-timers, gig workers, and other alternative workers and we need to model them in the system.

- People are often managed, paid, and trained based on their relationships and influence (ONA tries to solve this) so connections are part of value.

- Core HCM systems need to be more flexible so third party apps can plug in with different data models, which are very hard to do in traditional systems.

Here is ADP’s high level pitch page on the product, but let me give you an example. Have you ever tried to model a University?  Professors have their primary professor job, they’re also adjunct professors in other departments, they lead centers and other administrative groups, they have research grants they lead, and it goes on and on. I cannot imagine how you’d design that in a typical HRMS. It’s possible, but it’s not very flexible.  ADP’s system can model a University, a consulting firm, or any other organization where people have more than one reporting relationship and one role (just about every company I can think of).

The product is in early release (ADP has five big clients and is starting to seek more), and the big work now is to build up all the talent and processes around it. The system already has an agile performance management system built (OKRs, check-ins, assessment similar to StandOut, the product ADP acquired a year ago) – but they have to build modules for recruitment, career, compensation, and much more yet. But I think that will happen fast.

So stay tuned for more on this topic, I’m sure ADP wouldn’t let us write about if they weren’t pretty confident it was going to be a success. It will be piloted in 2019 and is expected to roll out in production in 2020.

![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/c4fd148a80be.jpg)


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# How Self-Managed Teams Can Resolve Conflict

*Published: 2017-08-07 | Categories: Leadership, Org design*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/how-self-managed-teams-can-resolve-conflict/*

Originally published on [Harvard Business Review](https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-self-managed-teams-can-resolve-conflict).

In a traditional team structure, conflicts can be escalated to the boss to resolve. Can’t agree on how to prioritize projects, or on which deadlines need to shift? Ask the team leader to step in and make a call. Think a coworker is acting snarky, or that their work is too sloppy? Advise the manager to give them some feedback. But for flat or self-managed teams, that’s not an option. Self-managed teams must identify different ways to find and address day-to-day conflicts.

Self-managed teams can focus on three things to help them successfully resolve conflicts. (Traditionally hierarchical teams may benefit from them too.)

Encourage openness to productive conflict. First and foremost, self-managed teams must commit to openly discussing their differences. Conflict should be seen not as an annoyance that leads to anxiety and alienation, but as an opportunity for growth and strong working relationships.

To create this culture of open communication, try turning conflict resolution into an organized group activity. A technique called [Planning Poker](https://www.planningpoker.com/) has opened my team’s eyes to just how productive having dissenting viewpoints can be. Using a point-based system, the technique encourages all team members to raise their opinions, weigh every option, and collectively vote on the best plan. Planning Poker is predominantly used by software developers, but it can facilitate virtually any business decision.

Come to a common understanding about which conflicts can be resolved without the involvement of others. For example, you might develop norms about what constitutes a low-risk decision (for example, it affects few people, or the related costs fall below a certain threshold), and encourage the team to resolve low-risk conflicts without group intervention.

Prioritize accountability over blame. Autonomous teams should win and lose as a group. When shortcomings occur, teams shouldn’t assign blame to the contributors closest to the debacle. Rather than looking at who was responsible, as people express only the symptoms, they should investigate why the issue occurred.

This mode of conflict resolution is akin to the [“blameless postmortem”](https://victorops.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Blameless-Post-Mortems.pdf) approach much of the technology world takes to understand why products and endeavors don’t reach their full potential. If a team is comfortable speaking openly about conflict and hardships, asking “How did this happen?” when conducting a postmortem won’t lead to the blame game; it will yield the root cause. As Etsy CTO [John Allspaw says](https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/), people are “the most expert in their own error. They ought to be heavily involved in coming up with remediation items.” Punishing them for contributing to conflict discourages this productive dialogue.

To further enhance the blameless approach, a team can discuss the situation with several other teams at the company and gather multiple unbiased opinions regarding the conflict’s root cause and how it could be addressed. Even if this doesn’t result in a unanimous opinion or a clear plan of action, it shifts the focus from the responsible parties and opens the remediation process to many diverse, productive ideas.

Quantify the impact of the problem. A team at [my organization](http://lifion.com/) was recently at odds because a developer preferred to work at night — which was inconvenient because everyone else worked during the day. This employee was absent from nearly every important meeting, and his teammates constantly found themselves taking extra time to fill him in on everything he missed.

The tension continued until the team quantified the impact of his absence. Each meeting the employee missed took 60 minutes, and the team would spend 30 more minutes recapping for him and hearing his thoughts. With six members on the team, that’s a combined three hours of unnecessary discussion. To top it off, the employee missed about 10 meetings each month, so his team was devoting more than 350 hours per year to these conversations. Instead of focusing on the symptomatic conflict and requiring the employee to work during the day every day, the team decided to develop a flexible schedule that worked for everyone. On meeting days, the night owl could arrive in the afternoon, share a few hours of overlap with everyone else, and then burn the midnight oil as he pleased.

Quantifying the impact of conflict provides several benefits. It encourages productive conversations, creates alignment around the gravity of the issue, and unlocks creative solutions as people identify both the source and the impact of their conflicts. Assigning a numeric value to waste helps teams find better ways to reduce it.


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# 4 Ways to Guide Your Employees Toward Empowered Decisions

*Published: 2017-01-05 | Categories: Innovation, Leadership*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/4-ways-to-guide-your-employees-toward-empowered-decisions/*

Originally published on [Entrepreneur Magazine](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/286971).

Traditional top-down management can create a single point of failure within each department: a middle manager held accountable for his team’s projects and products.

![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/d221b4a11395.jpeg)

According to a Harvard Business Review analysis released in September, U.S. companies are wasting more than [$3 trillion](https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-3-trillion-per-year) every year on excess bureaucracy and management — which is equivalent to 17 percent of our country’s GDP.

That’s an astonishing amount of money, and I believe one of the keys to reversing this trend is addressing a structure that has been an American business mainstay for decades: the corporate ladder.

Today, traditional [top-down management can hold companies back](http://www.ceo.com/operations/top-down-management-structures-are-crumbling-how-will-you-adapt/). It slows down decision-making, holds back brilliant talent from making an impact and can create an unnecessary single point of failure within each department: a middle manager who is held accountable for delivering all directives and approving all of his or her team’s projects and finished products.

Now that many mass communication and collaboration tools exist to facilitate real-time company-wide work, it’s time to remove the excess layers of approval from your business and thoughtfully empower each individual contributor to take action based on his or her skills and capabilities. Here’s how:

## 1. Modernize your company through empowerment.

In today’s fast-paced world, a company’s decision-making process needs to be streamlined, swift and agile. The traditional corporate hierarchy hampers all of these things. Its numerous layers cause traditional companies to move at a snail’s pace when making decisions and reacting to market conditions.

Embracing employee empowerment won’t just accelerate your company’s rate of innovation; it will lead to happier teams and attract free-thinking and creative job-seekers to your brand.

That’s important because many of those job-seekers will be millennials. In one study, [76 percent of millennials](https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-millenial-survey-2016-exec-summary.pdf) surveyed reported being more satisfied within a creative, inclusive work culture, while only 28 percent felt that the companies they worked for were making full use of their skills.

The message? You currently have a huge opportunity to attract these future all-stars.

Not that that opportunity will be easy: It takes hard work and dedication to create a culture of autonomous, empowered employees — and that certainly won’t happen overnight. My organization, [Lifion](http://lifion.com/), is devoted to achieving this type of atmosphere in our own workplace, and we are excited to help others do the same as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

These three strategies are our focus areas as we progress on this journey:

## 2. Showcase your mission, vision and values early and often.

An alarming [61 percent of employees](http://www.corporatespecialties.com/employee-engagement-truth-about-company-mission/) say they don’t know their company’s mission. How can these individuals ever feel empowered to make smart decisions without first seeking approval from a manager?

Go out of your way to make your mission, vision and values apparent to your entire team. These three foundational elements describe what you do, where you want to go and how you want to get there — and if employees don’t intimately understand them, empowered autonomy is nearly impossible to achieve.

Put up posters in your office that highlight your values. Frequently refer to your vision when interacting with your team. And post your mission statement on your website for the entire world to see. Then, take it a step further by building tools that help your employees assess whether they’re successfully embodying these principles.

For example, we’ve created surveys of self-reflection for our team that break down [our organization’s values](http://lifion.com/about) into simple bullet points and ask how frequently employees believe they practice each concept.

## 3. Develop a decision framework.

A decision framework teaches employees how to make decisions that benefit the company without first seeking approval from their  managers. In its most basic form, the framework [can be set up like this](/assets/img/ee0f7f16d11c.pdf): If you have high confidence that your initiative will be successful — and the actions you want to take are low-risk — go ahead and make the decision. However, if you’re looking to make a high-risk decision that you have low confidence in, make sure you talk it over with other people and seek approval.

Of course, not all situations are cut and dried, so there should be a gradient of low-, medium- and high-impact/confidence built in.

The key to instilling this framework is to lead by example. Articulate your thought process to your team when you make a decision. This will build their confidence and show (not tell) them how to act autonomously. As a bonus, in doing this, you’ll be coaching your younger employees to become better leaders themselves. [Ninety-one percent of millennials](https://workplacetrends.com/the-millennial-leadership-survey/) aspire to be company leaders, so they’ll appreciate this training.

## 4. Shrink the approval process.

If employees are accustomed to seeking managerial approval before taking action, it’s going to take a little time to break them of this habit. Consider this a weaning process in which they learn what types of initiatives are guaranteed to be approved and which ones tend to require discussion.

When employees come to you seeking approval during this transition period, ask them why they’re feeling unsure about their project, and then provide your input on whether you agree with their concerns. Eventually, this will help them understand your thought processes and priorities, making them more capable of anticipating what does and doesn’t require approval.

When approvals occur only on an as-needed basis, key decisions and pivots won’t be delayed — and this will lead to growth. A recent study shows that when employees are given the autonomy to make decisions, the companies they work for [grow four times faster](https://www.eremedia.com/tlnt/for-more-motivated-engaged-employees-give-them-more-autonomy/) than companies with traditional management structures. These companies also experience a third of the turnover.

In modern times, the traditional corporate hierarchy can be highly inefficient and wasteful. The business world moves a lot faster than it used to, so it’s essential for today’s companies to streamline their decision-making processes as much as possible — and thoughtfully empowering each individual contributor is a giant step in the right direction.

Instill your values and goals in your employees, and empower them to make decisions that propel your company into the future.


---

# How One-Person Businesses Will Transform Corporate America

*Published: 2016-11-28*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/how-one-person-businesses-will-transform-corporate-america/*

Not so long ago, taking a trip to New York City meant riding around in yellow taxis and staying at the Plaza Hotel. Now, for many, it means staying at an Airbnb and hiring Uber drivers to chauffeur you around.

This transformation illustrates the [incredible rise](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/13/gig-economy-is-growing-heres-how-much.html) of the gig economy — something that’s revolutionizing the way we, as consumers, live our day-to-day lives. Just by launching an app, we can instantly hire [couriers](https://www.instacart.com/) to deliver our groceries, [last-minute babysitters](https://www.care.com/) to watch our kids on date night, or even someone who will happily [move the 300-pound sofa](https://dolly.com/) that’s been gathering dust in the garage.

The gig economy is also vastly changing the way people work. Currently, [more than 160 million people](http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/employment-and-growth/independent-work-choice-necessity-and-the-gig-economy) in the U.S. and Europe engage in some form of independent work. These are individuals who commonly make a living by completing one-off tasks on their own terms. They decide their hours and determine their deadlines, and most can even choose their compensation. In other words, many of them can be considered “one-person businesses.”

While the gig lifestyle certainly appears to suit the wants and needs of modern consumers and workers, what remains to be seen is how corporate America embraces this growing trend.

![image](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*sbnqGgpMfV1T5zhBdeO50w.png)

It will be fascinating to watch corporations integrate one-person businesses into their operations

### 

### Gravitating Toward One-Person Businesses

On the surface, it may seem like this ongoing gravitation toward gig work poses a threat to the health of traditional corporations. What will happen if a majority of skilled workers shun the 9-to-5 model and elect to start one-person businesses instead?

Regardless of whether this scenario becomes reality, I believe tomorrow’s smart corporations will choose to embrace the gig economy with open arms and become consumers themselves. In the process, they will adjust their staffing structures and hiring practices by:

- Hiring niche skills with one click. At its core, the gig economy is comprised of hundreds of marketplaces that serve as matchmakers between buyers and one-person businesses. Sites like TaskRabbit, 99designs, and Upwork fall squarely into this category.Individuals or corporations can log in to these platforms, browse the available talent, and, with one click, hire a one-person business that suits their needs. Then, once the assignment is complete, they can click their mouse one more time to make a payment, and everyone can move on with their lives. Gone are the days of maintaining lists of preferred freelancers, calling them one by one, negotiating compensation rates, and dealing with capacity headaches.

Moving forward, expect the number of gig marketplaces to grow from hundreds to thousands — and expect them to become increasingly specialized around niche skills. Corporations can and will turn to the gig economy to accomplish tasks in virtually every department: finance, IT, human resources, R&D, and beyond. Also, expect to see one-person businesses emerge that can aggregate work from multiple marketplaces to deliver more complex value propositions.

- Scaling on demand. According to a LinkedIn study, modern employees — especially young ones — are job-hopping nearly twice as much as they did 20 years ago. This, paired with the growth of the gig economy, will lead traditional corporate staffing strategies to wisely undergo a fundamental shift.

One-person businesses will be able to perform many of the same functions as full-time employees — but at a lower cost and with a greater degree of flexibility. Therefore, corporations will be empowered to rethink their staffing models and move some areas of the business to “on demand” as opposed to “full time.”Thanks to the high-quality talent made readily available by the gig economy, corporations can choose to scale up and down in real time based on their current staffing needs.

- Refocusing middle management. Currently, at most corporations, a large portion of middle management’s time is spent on administration. These professionals are tasked with building teams, developing schedules, tracking accomplishments, and making sure employees are engaged. However, as the reliance on one-person business expands, many of these duties will either become irrelevant or highly streamlined.Gig marketplaces are transparent environments where scheduling, accountability, motivation, and quality are all managed by an invisible hand. One-person businesses are rated and reviewed by those who hire them — and this feedback can make or break the number of assignments that are sent their way. It’s in their best interest to always be punctual and produce excellent work; otherwise, their poor track record will quickly deter buyers from hiring them.

Because of this self-contained oversight, we will begin seeing corporations treat one-person businesses as autonomous entities and, therefore, refocus their middle management’s time toward innovation and progress rather than oversight and coordination.

The rise of the one-person business is an inevitable reality as technology evolves and the workforce becomes more global. Hopefully, all involved parties will be better off as employees gain more autonomy within their careers and employers are granted flexibility, convenience, and confidence in their staffing decisions. Still, a lot remains to be seen.

It will be fascinating to watch corporations integrate one-person businesses into their operations — and as they do, we’ll continue to see [traditional workplace structures](http://www.ceo.com/operations/top-down-management-structures-are-crumbling-how-will-you-adapt/) transform before our eyes.

Originally published on the [Observer](http://observer.com/2016/11/how-one-person-businesses-will-transform-corporate-america/) on 11/18/16


---

# Top-Down Management Structures Are Crumbling– How Will You Adapt?

*Published: 2016-09-30 | Categories: Innovation, Org design*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/top-down-management-structures-are-crumbling-how-will-you-adapt/*

Originally published on [CEO.com](http://www.ceo.com/operations/top-down-management-structures-are-crumbling-how-will-you-adapt/).

Not long ago, employees succeeded in the workplace by producing consistent, high-quality work as specifically directed by their managers. Once promoted into middle management, however, their measure of success became the productivity of their team, and their priorities shifted from completing the work to setting expectations and processes for others to follow.

This top-down structure inherited from the Industrial Revolution is rapidly changing. Only 38 percent of companies self-identify as “functionally organized,” according to a[new survey from Deloitte](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-03/the-office-hierarchy-is-officially-dead). In an attempt to reorganize, many companies are adopting flatter, more autonomous structures that operate under empowerment and alignment with greater agility and velocity.

Today, your smartest, most productive people will create the most value by both generating and executing on their ideas. As this new breed of employee permeates the workforce, it demands a different approach to management to drive competitiveness and company success.

## Defining Autonomous Management

Moving away from top-down leadership styles isn’t easy, and unlocking potential innovation while giving directional guidance and achieving business impact requires a deep understanding of your employees. Changing culture is tremendously hard, and the process can go wrong in myriad ways.

For example, unengaged employees perform worse in an environment that requires them to define expectation on their own. Also, when employees are expected to sort out their jobs with little to no guidance from leadership, they’re working in a dysfunctional environment — not an [autonomous one](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/254030).

In a productive environment, autonomous employees have a lot of freedom, but it is within the right set of guidelines provided by leadership that will ensure business impact and maintain strategy alignment.

## The Strategy to Empower Employees

As a leader, you need to drive meaningful, continuous change — keeping in mind the risks. A failed attempt to empower employees through autonomy could disrupt your company from within.

Tony Hsieh experienced internal discord moving Zappos to an employee-empowered holacracy business model. Rather than treat the structural change as a journey, the company went from one end of the spectrum to the other very quickly. The sudden shift rattled employees, and [29 percent](http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-holacracy/) of Zappos staff turned over. This year, for the first time since 2008, the company did not make Fortune’s list of Best Companies to Work For.

To prevent similar results in your own organization, choose portions of your company to drive this new approach. These “lighthouse teams” will guide those behind them until the initiative has spread across the entire company. This gradual approach will make sure whatever organizational structure you arrive at is the right one for your team and [won’t kill your business](http://www.fastcompany.com/3048522/hit-the-ground-running/3-ways-flat-management-structures-can-kill-your-business).

To help your business transition into a more autonomous leadership structure, keep the following tips in mind:

## 1. Identify your ‘autonomy’ leaders.

Review your workforce, and bucket employees into two groups: those who are eager to be autonomous and those who need different levels of guidance. As Zappos saw firsthand, abandoning strong contributors who need structure during a transitional period can be a costly mistake.

From this pool of top talent, identify your autonomy leaders — those who come to work, respect their own time, and want to enact positive change. Your autonomy leaders view their success through the lens of what they create, not how well they follow marching orders. They need to be comfortable pushing back on their managers in a logical, articulate way, and they should come from a place of achieving impact. One-on-ones, team huddles, and project performance reviews help you identify how people perform when given the freedom to achieve their own deadlines.

## 2. Give these employees permission to exercise their empowerment.

You need to begin to transfer your influence as a leader over to these individuals so they can begin to drive change themselves. Start giving them the authority to make decisions, all the while ensuring they have the information and guidance they need to make sound ones.

Create a forum where senior leaders can hear, guide, and empower these select few to take on big ideas. Then, recognize them in public — in front of their peers — for specific accomplishments. In doing so, you are communicating to others that you’re confident your culture leaders will create change and that you’re backing them up with your authority.

Eventually, this group of leaders will begin to see where they can provide value and guide themselves more independently. By starting with a core group, you’ll create a chain reaction of empowerment that reverberates across the company.

## 3. Make sure to set the right boundaries.

WordPress hosts about [20 percent of the world’s websites](https://hbr.org/2013/11/hierarchy-is-overrated/) on its platform, and this volume is handled by only a couple hundred employees at Automattic, who mostly work remotely. Instead of following orders, contributors to this commonwealth organization are empowered to do whatever they believe is right — as long as their actions [align with the company’s overarching goals](http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2015/11/05/5-leadership-attitudes-from-flat-organizations/#7f81f433762d).

Some “culture rules” are in place for a reason, and you’re paying people to produce high-quality work. This makes communication within the community key to aligning everyone’s interests and leveraging employee resources more efficiently.

At Lifion, our [culture rules](http://www.lifion.com/about/) (the Lifion Credo) guide the way we work. We live out this credo by allowing employees to run as relatively separate small groups, only setting standards for tasks that are a must (e.g., quality, customer focus, dependency management). Successful groups continue to gain more autonomy and have power over their areas of focus and ways of working, while groups that are less successful get less autonomy and are sometimes reconfigured to get them to a more successful place.

Like Automattic, our groups can make their own decisions and implement their own solutions, as long as our Credo is at the foundation and they’re aligned with our overall strategy. Rawn Shah (of Adobe and Ethos VO) and Davide Casali (of Automattic) dub this kind of environment a “[wirearchy](http://wirearchy.com/what-is-wirearchy/)” — a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility, and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

## Setting Expectations for Freedom

While it would be nice if everyone handled freedom the same way, that’s not a realistic expectation. After switching to an autonomous structure, Buffer learned the hard way that freedom without leadership can be harmful. Co-founder and COO Leo Widrich took to the [company blog](https://open.buffer.com/self-management-hierarchy/) to speak on the topic.

“People were easily lost, especially those who had just joined Buffer,” wrote Widrich. “More experienced people often didn’t quite see a place to help out and share ideas around which direction a project could take. The way I would describe it is that the amount of freedom people had, with absolutely no guidance, expectations, or accountability, was pretty overwhelming.”

Your business still needs to move forward. The tasks themselves aren’t changing — the way they’re being completed is. Even empowered employees need direction and motivation. A sense of job security still comes from knowing the system you’re supporting is functional.

Some people may not be a fit for the environment you’re changing to, and that’s OK. Set realistic expectations upfront, and continuously reiterate them as part of your new culture. Growing pains may be inevitable, but taking these three steps will help you empower employees to drive your company into the future.


---

# 3 organizational structure changes to strengthen your startup’s tech team

*Published: 2016-07-05 | Categories: Org design*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/3-organizational-structure-changes-to-strengthen-your-startups-tech-team/*

[Originally published on Ventureburn](http://ventureburn.com/2016/05/3-organisational-structure-changes-strengthen-startups-tech-team/).

Hiring experienced technologists [is difficult](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2969298/agile-development/how-to-fix-the-tech-talent-shortage.html). Many are happy in their current positions, and the others are inundated with offers. With software developer employment projected to [grow 17%](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm) by 2024–10% faster than the [average occupational growth rate](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/about/occupational-information-included-in-the-ooh.htm) in the US — it’s incumbent upon employers to ensure they stand out from the crowd.

The right organizational structure and workplace culture will help them do just that. There are three principles to enact:

#### Introduce small standalone teams to encapsulate dependencies

According to [Conway’s Law](http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html), any organization that designs a new system “will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” These structures often introduce unwieldy dependencies between teams, inhibiting productivity and limiting the control that technologists have over solutions.

Top talent can’t thrive in such environments. Good software architecture exhibits loose coupling and high cohesion, and organizational structures based on these principles empower developers to [make meaningful technical decisions](http://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/empowering-autonomous-teams/) without suffocating under the weight of bureaucracy.

Zaid Masud is one of our principal architects at Lifion, and he recognized the importance of this structure when decomposing a monolithic application into discrete, well-defined services with clear business purposes. We created cross-functional teams that take full-stack ownership of each area, minimizing cross-team dependencies and boosting our productivity. We haven’t looked back since.

#### Hire managers who are technologists first and leaders second

Great technologists are driven to hone their craft, and hiring managers with the technological and leadership skills to enable improvement are attractive to talented technologists. Managers who are strong technologists themselves can provide new insights for team member growth; an understanding of the costs, risks, and tradeoffs in technical decision-making; and a shared love of the craft.

This shared devotion goes a long way toward fostering a trusting, understanding, and mutually respectful organisational culture. John Marcantonio, one of our application architects, sees an example of this dynamic at Airbnb. The lodging website has a [culture of engineering](http://nerds.airbnb.com/engineering-culture-airbnb/) that ensures fluid responsibilities and career advancement opportunities.

Airbnb’s focus on that culture goes beyond its core product offering. The company’s co-founder and CTO, Nathan Blecharczyk, studied computer science at Harvard and [is a computer programmer and coder](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/airbnb-cofounder-nathan-blecharczyk-cto-work-family-decomposing-body). He embodies[Eliot Horowitz’s conviction](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/engineering-managers-should-code-30-of-t/240165174) that technology managers must focus some of their time on technological engagement. With such a committed innovator in charge, it’s little wonder that Airbnb has achieved so much success so quickly.

#### Foster a culture that promotes creativity, bottom-up decision-making, and proactivity

An [organizational culture](http://www.youngupstarts.com/2016/03/23/no-secrets-why-honest-frequent-feedback-is-the-key-to-your-culture/) is a company’s backbone. It guides how employees think, act, and feel. Ideally, it should generate a shared sense of purpose. The best will [encourage creativity and innovation](https://hbr.org/2016/02/build-a-great-company-culture-with-help-from-technology) and give employees the freedom to experiment with bottom-up decision-making.

Some of the greatest success stories of the digital age have embodied this culture. Google, Twitter, and [Amazon](http://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2013/08/14/the-secret-to-unleashing-genius/#2cd4e6891a83) catch the eye of Srdjan Strbanovic, another of our principal architects. In each of these companies, he sees a deliberate approach to innovation at every level of the organization. He also sees the deployment of creative thinking to attack problems both big and small.

We try to follow this lead at Lifion by promoting openness and embracing new challenges. Authority usually congregates at the top of an organization, but we’ve made organizational changes to offer greater autonomy to our teams and to help them act quickly and decisively at the lowest level possible.

Technologists need that freedom and trust in their working environment. They need camaraderie, too. They don’t want to be thrown into an organizational quagmire in which decisions are made at the top by managers who lack technological expertise and teams don’t work together toward personal and technological development.

Companies must ditch old-fashioned hierarchical approaches to attract the top talent in a crowded marketplace. Are you doing enough to promote the right culture?


---

# No Secrets: Why Honest, Frequent Feedback Is The Key To Your Culture

*Published: 2016-07-05 | Categories: Org design*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/no-secrets-why-honest-frequent-feedback-is-the-key-to-your-culture/*

[Originally published on Young Upstarts](http://www.youngupstarts.com/2016/03/23/no-secrets-why-honest-frequent-feedback-is-the-key-to-your-culture/).

Culture will make or break your startup.

You can’t just create a company culture, but you can direct it in the way you develop leaders, review, and give feedback to every person in your organization. A structure of fair and frequent feedback will lead to a strong culture your employees love.

Here are three things you can do to build it:

#### 1. Help Your People Develop as Leaders.

Helping employees become leaders will empower your startup to scale and allow you personally to focus on what matters most. One way to start is to have high-performing employees partner with a “buddy” for each of their major responsibilities.

The buddy system creates opportunities for employees to act as coaches and mentors and ensures support when employees go on vacation or in case anyone leaves. Over time, this also allows for faster promotions and growth because you don’t have to delay a promotion until after you find a replacement. It also helps employees develop as leaders because they have to teach and consult with their buddies about their responsibilities. When members of the team become leaders, others usually become more engaged and start to notice how they, too, can become leaders.

#### 2. Make Your Reviews Fair and Timely to Increase Engagement.

Businesses are questioning the value of annual reviews. Accenture [has shifted](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/07/21/in-big-move-accenture-will-get-rid-of-annual-performance-reviews-and-rankings/) to a “more fluid system, in which employees receive timely feedback from their managers on an ongoing basis following assignments.” Rather than once-a-year evaluations, they hold more frequent reviews to keep engagement high.

McKinsey & Company also applies a recurring approach. In its [whitepaper](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/dotcom/client_service/Public%20Sector/PDFS/McK%20on%20Govt/Change%20under%20pressure/TG_MoG_6_Full_Shall_we_talk.ashx), the company writes that its meetings “take place frequently enough to catch issues before they become big problems, but not so frequently that participants have no new information to share.”

Above all, the process has to be fair because people [measure themselves against others](http://markmanson.net/how-we-judge-others). Create a system that fits your organization, and make sure you communicate to all your employees what it is and how it works.

#### 3. Make Your Feedback a Productivity Tool.

Feedback can help employees develop faster and increase productivity if the companies [install structures](https://www.tmbc.com/standoutblogpost/) that make quick, reactive evaluation part of their cultures.

Our venture, Lifion, which is a relatively flat organization with teams no bigger than 12 people, has found success in encouraging employees to give frequent feedback to one another rather than waiting for it to come from a manager. We also encourage skip-level feedback so team members can see how their performance is viewed from above them, from below them, and from their peers. These check-ins have minimized unwanted surprises and wasted time.

One of our emerging credos is, “No secrets. Make everything known, and celebrate it all.” We encourage everyone to ask for help if needed, but we stress that it’s important to do so promptly. Problems are inevitable. However, big failures and delays are avoidable with transparency and accountability. Those are the keys to our future and freedom to innovate. Openly sharing allows us to get everyone pitching in to solve problems and continue learning.

It has become more important than ever to stay ahead of the game in people management. The price of falling behind is exorbitant, so rethink the conventional methods of reviews, feedback, and engagement, and apply new solutions to the modern problems that demand them.


---

# Deliver. Automate. Fail Fast. Succeed.

*Published: 2016-07-05 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/deliver-automate-fail-fast-succeed/*

[Originally published on Business2Community.](http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/deliver-automate-fail-fast-succeed-01530972#SYjESVtPbEcwpAVI.97)

Software development and startup companies have an almost endless list of things to do. Even if they complete all of their tasks, there’s no guaranteed formula for success. But in a landscape changing as quickly as technology is, adopting these four principles will give R&D groups the best chance to succeed.

1. Deliver Continuously

Once development on a feature is completed, quickly pushing through to production and delivering products to customers in small increments has huge benefits.

Not long ago, we set out with the goal of being able to deliver features to production multiple times per day. It was no easy feat, but the benefits of continuous delivery outweigh the costs. It allows companies to:

- Deliver value faster. Launching a feature that takes one day to build is no longer a three-month ordeal. Build it and ship it.

- Receive focused feedback quickly. Ship faster and in smaller increments to make it easier to get customer feedback you can act on.

- Build better relationships with customers. By addressing customer requests quickly, you can gain their trust and loyalty.

“Teams can release new features rapidly to their users in a frictionless, independent way through an elevated awareness of quality, security, and feature stewardship,” says Jason Melo, our chief architect.

2. Automate Everything

Automation is the foundation of a successful business model. It allows you to continuously free up time to work on innovative solutions. The moment companies stop automating is the moment they start falling behind.

Lohit Sarma, our principal architect, said, “Automation speeds up the development process and allows companies to bypass the manual processes that exist while converting a business-level wish list to a ready-for-market product. From code generation to infrastructure scaling, the software industry is adopting automation across the board.”

For example, to improve the way we communicate new available features, we created an automation tool that maps a short paragraph to our actual code. When we finish a set of features, their corresponding paragraphs are automatically pulled together into a single nicely designed PDF document that’s sent around. The product’s end users now have live access to these notes and can reference them to clarify the features we release on a daily basis.

Establishing a process of continuously identifying the root cause of work being done and automating it increases your velocity and output tremendously. If you gain just one minute a day for each person, you end up with five extra hours every day after a year!

3. Fail Fast, Learn, and Succeed

“Failing fast” includes these steps: Make a hypothesis, try it quickly and cheaply, and adjust based on what you learn. Just as it’s important to be vigilant and ruthless in finding things to automate, it’s important to be similarly exacting when learning about where you failed.

As Tom Rogers, our principal architect, says, “We use failing fast to solve technology and customer challenges on a daily basis.” He adds, “If someone on your team believes in a particular solution, challenge and encourage them to devise a small experiment to collect evidence to prove or disprove their approach.”

Above all, make sure that you’ve investigated exactly where the failure happened and for what reasons. An [objective examination of the contributing factors](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/fast-failure-the-secret-to-fostering-more-it-innovation-than-your-competitors/) involved in the failure will allow for quicker rectification of issues and prevent repeated mistakes in the future.

4. Have Opinions, and Be Ready to Change Them

Strong and free-flowing opinions are a vital aspect of R&D teams and the work they do. The problem is that, all too often, changing an opinion carries a stigma. For a development team to be successful, that stigma must be banished.

Team members must feel obligated to dissent when they don’t believe in someone else’s opinion or course of action. If dissent is based on facts and data, the original opinion can and should change. Company culture is the key to allowing people to share strong opinions and change them if need be. Fact-based opinions should be offered and exchanged freely so the practice becomes the norm. This sharing practice can’t just be something people say they’re doing; the company and all of its employees have to live it.

Implementing these methods and values and adopting technology practices to fit your company’s needs will create a platform for true internal company transformation. These approaches naturally rely on [company core values](http://www.youngupstarts.com/2016/03/23/no-secrets-why-honest-frequent-feedback-is-the-key-to-your-culture/), but it’s within your control to deliver, automate, fail, and share opinions to pave the way to success.


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# Tracking what students grasp

*Published: 2014-12-11 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/tracking-what-students-grasp/*

Originally published on [MIT News](http://news.mit.edu/2014/socrative-app-real-time-data-student-comprehension-1211) by Rob Matheson

December 11, 2014

Tracking what students grasp
Socrative mobile quiz app saves teachers time and offers real-time data on student comprehension of material.

As a teaching assistant at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2010, Amit Maimon MBA ’11 witnessed the origins of a technological phenomenon: Smartphones and tablets had started creeping into the classroom in the hands of students.

But instead of dismissing these devices as distractions, Maimon saw a way to leverage them to help teachers get a better idea of what students grasp during lectures.

That year, Maimon co-developed Socrative, an app that lets teachers design or select premade quizzes for students to answer, publicly or anonymously, on personal mobile devices during lectures. The app is now being used by about 1.1 million teachers and millions of students across the globe.

Read the full article [here](http://news.mit.edu/2014/socrative-app-real-time-data-student-comprehension-1211).


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# Improve your startup strategy by focusing on 3 time-horizons

*Published: 2013-07-22 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/improve-your-startup-strategy-by-focusing-on-3-time-horizons/*

Building a strategy is similar to solving a very complicated problem. The computer science approach to this is break the big problem into smaller ones, but that is not a simple task on it’s own. There are many ways to “break-apart” the strategy question (e.g., marketing strategy, sales strategy, dev strategy, etc.) While those are all valid, I think startup founders would benefit tremendously by first breaking their strategy into 3 time horizons:

Three time horizons for your start-up strategy:

1. Long Term (5+ years) – What is my company’s vision? What impact would I like to make on the world?

2. Medium Term (10-15 months) – What is the story and supporting metrics that I will have when for raising my next round of funding?

3. Short Term (3-6 months) – What are my priorities for next several months?

By first, breaking your strategy into these 3 distinct groups you are able to focus on different questions for each phase before you go into the specifics of each operational domain (e.g., marketing, development, hiring, etc.)

An important note to add is that your answers to these three questions should be fairly aligned with each other, this means that by executing your short terms strategy you will actively be getting closer to your desired medium term story and metrics. Similarly, by reaching your medium term goals you should be moving towards fulfilling your long term vision.

I would strongly recommend you write all 3 goals down on paper and not keep them in you head (feel free to use this [template](/assets/img/e4aca8d96ba7.pptx)). It’s ok to change your strategy over time but be cognizant about it. Also, writing it down will allow you to share it with people you trust and get feedback. This is critical in order to continue evolving and clarifying your strategy. In fact, I would recommend sharing your Long Term and Medium Term plans with potential investors well before you are actively asking them to invest. They will feel important, provide feedback and be much more open to investing when you come back to them in the future (showing them the results you intended to have.)

Example strategy deck (you can download and use the template [here](/assets/img/e4aca8d96ba7.pptx))

[![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/7380413806a5.png)](/assets/img/7380413806a5.png)

[![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/c56fbe38bf38.png)](/assets/img/c56fbe38bf38.png)

[![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/be2da3ec0617.png)](/assets/img/be2da3ec0617.png)

[![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/a5987e8eb520.png)](/assets/img/a5987e8eb520.png)

Hope I was helpful, share your thought below… (also, if you want to use the above template for your own purposes you can download it [here](/assets/img/e4aca8d96ba7.pptx))


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# For developers: How to build a business model and prove your idea is awesome in 10 minutes

*Published: 2011-10-23 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/for-programmers-how-to-build-a-business-model-and-prove-your-idea-is-awesome-in-10-minutes/*

So you have an awesome idea and you know it’s going to make a lot of money, but for some reason not everybody believes you. Well, first of all, that good since you don’t need everyone on your side. You do however want to make a good impression on potential investors, team members, advisers, etc.

That’s why building a quick business model is not such a bad idea. Especially if you can start by doing making a first version of it in about 10 minutes. These are the steps you need to take:

[![image](https://simplybroken.com/assets/img/1675db68b7b4.png)](/assets/img/1675db68b7b4.png)

Step 1 – Market Sizing: If every potential user in the US (or the world) used your product how many user would you have? (The goal is to have a very rough estimate.)

Example: Let’s say you are building a social running app ([Getyog](http://www.getyog.com)), we start with everyone and narrow it down. There are 350M Americans. The relevant age group is people between 15-35, so that gives us a 20 year range. The average life time of people is about 80 years.  So if we assume somewhat even distribution we get that ¼ of the total population are in the relevant age group. That give us 350M*1/4 = 85M. Ok, now let’s assume 10% of the people are runners and we get a total of 8.5M

Step 2 – Narrowing Assumptions: To be a bit more realistic let’s add some additional constraints, for example all our potential users need to have a smartphone. Later we can get the exact number for now let’s say 50% of our age group has one.  That gives us a total of 4.3M potential users.

Step 3 – Our piece of the pie: Not everyone is going to use our product so let’s say 10% will (which is optimistic, but can be done). This means that if we succeed we will have about 400,000 users.

Step 4 – Revenue Sources: How much money are we going to make per user, here goes another market sizing and assumptions setting exercise. Our goal here is to move from number of users to a dollar figure. So, how are we going to make money.  For simplicity let’s say we charge the users $2 a month to use our product and we put ads that will give us an additional 0.1$ a month per user. So in total we will make $2.1 a month for each user (which gives us $25.2 a year).

Step 5 – The total: So under this quick scenario calculation our total revenues will be 400K*$25 = $10M a year. Now is that enough?

Well… it depends. $10M isn’t a huge number, but it’s a good starting point and initial insight into your business plan. From here there are several additional steps you can take to continue evolving your plan such as understanding your cost of acquisition and validating the data above. This quick calculation also help us understand what levers we can pull to increase revenue.

There is much more information about this topic, which I will point to and add in the future. My goal here was to show that an initial calculation can be done in 10 minutes and is actually a good step forward in making your business a reality.


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# Build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) by focusing on User Stories NOT features

*Published: 2011-07-18 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/build-a-minimal-viable-product-mvp-by-focusing-on-user-stories-not-features/*

When building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) the goal is to build something as quickly as possible, release it to the world and get feedback. Then improve and continue building.

In this post I will explain how to build a MVP based on “User Stories” rather than “Features” and why it’s faster and better.

What is a user story?

A user story is literally a quick story about a user, how he will use your product and how will he capture value from it. For example, Facebook has hundreds of user stories, below are two:

- A user signs up, adds his friends and enjoys watching pictures that his friends uploaded.

- A user signs up, adds his friends and then gets value from using Facebook to communicate with them in real time via the messenger application.

Ultimately each user story describes a process (or series of steps) which explain how the user captures value and “enjoys” the product. Mature products usually have many user stories, but to create a MVP you can start from one or a few. Note: each user story must end with value captured by the user.

Why is focusing on user stories better?

Creating a good product means creating value for its users.  A single feature on its own does not create value to the user. Several features also don’t create value. Several features which are used in a certain sequence create value, and that is a user story.

Therefore, to create value for the users we should start from the end result, which is a user story and then go backwards to understand the features we need to build to support that user story. If we just create features without understanding the user stories they are supposed to drive there is a high likelihood we will develop unnecessary features and also increase the complexity and [Intrinsic costs](https://simplybroken.com/understanding-value-creation-and-value-capture-part-1/) of the product.

So how do we create an MVP based on user stories?

Step 1: Write down all the user stories which your product may end up having. Remember, each user story must end with the user capturing value from the product.

Step 2: Prioritize the user stories according to value and difficulty of execution. There are many methods you can use to prioritize, from gut feeling to focus groups. See my post on the [Prioritization Model](https://simplybroken.com/product-management-a-simple-model-for-feature-prioritization/) for more information.

Step 3: According to the user story selected (or stories) drill down to understand which features you must develop. That is going to be your MVP.

Example: Creating your MVP based on User Stories

Let’s say that our startup’s idea is to make running more fun by creating a mobile app that gives you challenges as you run (check out[Getyog](http://getyog.com)). Cool idea and you can build a ton of features to make it happen. But which ones should you build first and how many are enough to release your MVP?

Step 1 – User Stories: For our idea there are tons of possible user stories, here are a couple:

- User Story 1: A user downloads our app, opens it, puts on headphones and starts running. As he is running, every 5 minutes he gets a challenge – “run 200 feet in 10 seconds” and our GPS measures if he is successful and if so let’s him know.

- User Story 2: A user downloads our app, opens it, enters his goal for running speed, puts the phone in his pocket and starts running. Every time the user slows below the speed he entered the phone starts to vibrate and he knows he should speed up.

Step 2 – Prioritize:  Let’s assume that according to the [Prioritization Model](https://simplybroken.com/product-management-a-simple-model-for-feature-prioritization/) we decided to build user story number one first (since it provides the highest Value to Cost ratio).

Step 3 – Features:  Now that we understand exactly how we are going to create value, we can decide which features we need and which ones we don’t. For example, I definitely don’t need to waste time on user registration since right now it’s not needed for my user story. In fact, it will just add unnecessary complexity to the user and reduce the value he captures (See [Value Capture Model](https://simplybroken.com/understanding-value-creation-and-value-capture-part-1/)).

That’s it, I hope this makes sense and is useful. The theory behind this comes from Marketing Theory, specifically relating to [Behavioral Segmentation](http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2010/03/6-required-skills-to-be-a-great-marketer.html). Comments are more than welcome and appreciated as always.


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# How to add value to your customers not your product: The value creation and capture model

*Published: 2011-07-02 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/understanding-value-creation-and-value-capture-part-1/*

The goal of this post is to help breakdown value creation and value capture. At first glance we can see that there is more than one way we can add value and that not all value added will actually go to the user.
.
There are 3 fundamental ways to add value to your customers:
1. Add value to the product without increasing Intrinsic costs or Financial Costs
2. Reduce Intrinsic costs (e.g., complexity, training requirement, filling in forms, etc.)
3. Reduce Financial costs to the user (e.g., licensing costs, product maintenance cost, etc.)
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The model below illustrates how the pieces of the Value Pie are divided:
.

Note: An additional important aspect which I will cover in a future post is the timing element of value and cost creation (e.g. if the first task users have to do is registration then at time unit number 1 they are capturing negative value and only later on will start “enjoying” the product. This can seriously and negatively impact virility and adoption.)

Quick discussion on each of the elements:
note: As mentioned in previous posts I hope to continue to write in further detail on each of these in the future. 

Value created by feature– Here we take the assumption that each new features actually adds value to the product.  Therefore adding new features typically increases the total value created. However, we must differentiate between total value created and total value captured by the user. For example adding more features can make the product more complex and increase intrinsic costs thus, actually reducing the value captured by the user.

Note: To really understand value created it is important to segment and understand your users. For example a specific feature might add a lot of value to a 16 year old, but add no value and increase Intrinsic costs for an adult.

Intrinsic Costs – This is the big one and includes anything from: Training required, implementation, advertisments, asking 3 of your friends to join, installation, setting up a profile, filling in a form, giving your credit card details, figuring out new UI,
In order to measure Intrinsic costs I suggest to look at the length of time and effort required for the user to unlock the value they are looking for. Units can be number of clicks, time, etc.

Financial costs – This is one is easy, how much does it cost? This bucket can include anything from the actual licenses or subscription to the hardware needed.
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As always thoughts and comments are more than welcome.
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How to use this blog and where to go from here 
My goal in this post and others is to build a knowledge map for the main activities Software Product Managers are responsible for. I plan to continue discussing and breaking apart each activity. Slowly, I hope to turn some of the art behind product management into a science.  Take a look at the [Product Management Framework](/assets/img/pm-functionality-map.png)[page](/assets/img/pm-functionality-map.png) for more info.


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# Product management in 5 simple steps

*Published: 2011-06-24 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/product-management-in-5-not-so-simple-steps/*

My goal in this post is to break down the main activities great Product Managers do and briefly discuss each. This is meant to help organize and break apart the complex world of product management and allow further research into each area (this article does not cover aspect of Product Strategy and Portfolio Management, just managing and growing a single product).

The goal of a product manager is to help drive the product forward, make it better and create more value to the company and users. To do so there are 5 main activities involved (In really fast environments, like small startups, complete cycles can happen in less than a day!)(Quick Note: As the company gets bigger the below activities are usually divided among several product managers)

1. Discover features – Products are made of features. Each feature creates value to the user and allows him to interact with the product. Methods for feature discovery are abundant. From brainstorming with employees to adding a feedback mechanisms to you current product. I will cover this topic more in depth  in one of my future posts. (Note: Feature discovery could also include removing or iterating on current features.)

2. Prioritize– Since many times discovering new features creates a huge list of possibilities, this step is crucial in order to use resources well and deliver the most value. My thoughts and a model for prioritization can be found [here](http://channelingchaos.com/2011/05/11/product-management-a-simple-model-for-feature-prioritization/).

3. Execute– Getting things done. Agile, waterfall, sequential, parallel, alpha, beta, etc. There are many ways to execute and this is a huge topic covered by many writers. For some interesting reading I recommend looking into the book about the lean startup movment from [Steve Blank](http://steveblank.com/) and [Eric Ries](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump-to-new-vision.html).

4. Communicate – It’s not enough to add a new feature to you product. Company’s today must let the users know of it’s existence and educate the user base on how to use and derive value from the new feature. There are many ways to do so, and Google is one of several companies that has been doing an excellent job. I will cover this topic more in depth in future posts.

5. Measure– Now that you built it and put it out there, good PMs measure the feature’s success. Is it being used? by which segment of the users? etc.  A great resource to look at for inspiration on what to measure is [Metrics for Pirates](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version) although since each feature is different relevant metrics must be defined.

That’s it, all of these activities are usually done in a continues manner and all at the same time. When some features are being discovered, others are being executed and so on.

How to use this blog and where to go from here 
My goal in this post and others is to build a knowledge map for the main activities Software Product Managers are responsible for. I plan to continue discussing and breaking apart each activity. Slowly, I hope to turn some of the art behind product management into a science.  Take a look at the [Product Management Framework](/assets/img/pm-functionality-map.png)[page](/assets/img/pm-functionality-map.png) for more info.


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# A simple model for feature prioritization

*Published: 2011-05-11 | Categories: Innovation*
*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/product-management-a-simple-model-for-feature-prioritization/*

In this post I hope to quickly break apart the feature prioritization process. My goal is to help make prioritization more of a science and less of an art. Nothing below is ground breaking, but breaking it apart may help understand and manage the process better. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.

Prioritization Model:

There is always too much to do, but not enough time. In addition, the environment around us is constantly changing and PMs are fighting to keep up and create the most value. If value creation is the goal then we should proceed to do the highest value tasks/features, but in order to get the most done we must account for costs & time as well. Therefore the highest “Value to Time (V2T)” tasks should be done first.

Example – (Skip if the above is clear)

I will illustrate this in a quick example. Let’s assume we can choose amongst the following features and have a total of 60 development hours this month:

1. Better graphic design for the main screen. Value:200, Cost: 50 dev hours. V2T=4

2. Email alerts for new users. Value: 100, Cost: 20 dev hours. V2T=5

3. User tutorial. Value: 150. Cost: 25 development hours. V2T=6

If we choose only by value alone we will get 200 value unit by creating a better graphic design. If however we calculate the V2T ratios we will see that features 2 and 3 are of higher priority and will get us more value (250 units).

Understanding Value:

If we agree with the prioritization formula we should now try to understand it’s parts. Again, my goal here is only to give a high level overview allowing further investigation of each part.

Value is hard to calculate but is derived from the perception of the following stakeholders:

- Customers

- Management (who drive overall company strategy)

- All other company employees (the closer they are to the customer the more valuable they usually are)

There are many methodologies to understand perceived value from surveys to focus groups, but assuming the features are broken apart to small enough chunks it usually as simple as asking each of the stakeholders. [Conjoint analysis](http://www.surveyanalytics.com/) is another useful method which asks stakeholders to choose between feature-set producing a comparative ranking.

Estimating Costs & Time:

Estimating costs and time is crucial. This is a major topic on it’s own on which I won’t elaborate on. An interesting discussion on the topic can be found [here](http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=12774).

THE SECRET: Break tasks into smaller logical parts

In my view, the secret to software product management is being able to break apart the tasks into small, logical and understandable parts (i.e. strong logical modularity). Once you do that the road is paved to prioritization and execution. How to do so is a whole other issue and may change radically from project to project. I am still thinking of a simple model for this, but would love to hear your thoughts.

In future posts I will try to dive deeper into each of these topics and add additional models and frameworks. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading, if you liked it or have additional thoughts  please leave me a comments and signup for my mailing list for future posts.

How to use this blog and where to go from here

My goal in this post and others is to build a knowledge map for the main activities Software Product Managers are responsible for. I plan to continue discussing and breaking apart each activity. Slowly, I hope to turn some of the art behind product management into a science.  Take a look at the [Product Management Framework](/assets/img/pm-functionality-map.png)[page](/assets/img/pm-functionality-map.png) for more info.


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# Investment Portfolio

*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/investment-portfolio/*

Companies I have invested in and worked with.

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# About

*Canonical: https://simplybroken.com/about/*

Simply Broken was born following my experiences at  Socrative, McKinsey & Company, ADP, Lion Investment Partners, and many others.

Ok, but why?

- I’ve been lucky and want to help others be lucky as well.
- There is a ton of information out-there, but not enough knowledge, I hope to make a small dent.
- Always learning and always teaching is a value I deeply believe in.

Yours truly,

Amit Maimon