Execution on Strategy
At SimpleSite, we’ve set ourselves the ambitious strategy of getting closer to our customers and create much more real-life value for them. It will bring us on a long journey that involves getting to know the real-life challenges and needs of our customers and understanding how we can help them achieve their goals.
We must look at our product in an entirely new way and evolve from being just another website builder to a preferred choice for small businesses to develop an online presence that results in visitors and customers.
And like any other growing company we have numerous things to take care of in operations, product maintenance, tuning of product metrics, and much more. Our key challenge is not to decide to execute on strategic goals – our key challenge is how to prioritize available resources such that in the end, we really get what we want – maximum strategic progress.
Maximum Strategic Progress
We’re using a very specific set of tools to plan the execution for maximum strategic impact.
The first tool is a question we continuously ask ourselves.
Does everything we do increase the probability that we succeed with the strategic goals?
Answering this question guides us in our planning in quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as well as in our daily prioritization of tasks.
We cannot ask this question naively. Not all projects and activities are directly strategic at face value – Operations keeps our servers running, a good work-place environment retains our strong staff and attracts new and competent colleagues, needed for future work on the strategy and so on.
Some of our activities are – although not directly strategic – naturally important and necessary sub-goals in obtaining our strategic goals. But we do ask ourselves at every planning event whether our combined set of activities are optimized for maximum strategic output.
The second tool is quarterly planning through OKRs.
An open OKR planning process enforces that all resources in the company execute on the strategic goal.
OKRs are a great way of communicating important projects on a company level, for each department and even for each individual employee in SimpleSite.
Each project on the company level is explained in the context of the strategic goal and the direction of execution chosen to achieve that goal.
The transparency of the planning process through the OKRs makes it possible to communicate why each project and task is important for the company to reach the strategic goal.
All employees can map individual goals to department goals, department goals to company goals, and company goals to strategic goals. This transparency makes it possible for the employees to make intelligent micro-planning decisions and makes it possible for SimpleSite to execute on the strategic goal in concert having only a very small management overhead.
The third tool handles the balance between “must-do” activities and strategic activities.
We’re a self-funded SaaS business and must finance what we do – including strategic development – through the money we make. We must ensure that we both on short- and long-term basis have enough “gasoline in the tank” to take us where we want to go.
We have decided on two “self-funding dogma” that our short-term and long-term future cash projections must conform to. We continuously and diligently monitor these two requirements and have formulated a rule that protects the short- and long-term health of SimpleSite:
If we break either of the two self-funding dogma on future cash projections during an OKR period, the next OKR period must fix it.
Note that the formulation of “the next” here is deliberate. Our planning and communication is set up such that we can finish ongoing projects and tasks and ensure that the OKR period is finished in an orderly fashion – even if the dogma say to look more closely at the “gas in the tank”.
Then in the next OKR period we switch to shorter-term projects that put “extra gas in the tank” – and secure that we always have enough resources to work in this well-structured way.
The planning method ensures that we are dedicating the maximum amount of resources to execute on long-term strategic value. And when we work on shorter-term goals, it’s happening in a structured, well-planned manner that does not suddenly disrupt the long-term strategic projects.
The process eliminates enormous amounts of waste from context-switching and from half-finished projects that would go away to die on the heap of “never finished” work.
Closed Loop
SimpleSite uses the three tools in a closed loop to maintain a continuous execution on the strategy. We ask the question in the first tool, we plan accordingly in OKRs - and on a daily basis - and we make sure that we keep our business healthy. Then we repeat.
