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📣 A Guide To Crafting Your Brand Voice. A step-by-step guide on creating a tone & identity your audience will love.
🥅 Ted Lasso: The Lasso Way. Manager of AFC Richmond. Empathetic leadership. A fictional interview.
🌟 Unfiltered: How Do Chiefs of Staff Measure Success? Chiefs of Staff give us the juicy inside scoop on their success criteria.

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Lexy Franklin - CEO at Sidebar

On the Facebook growth team, I learned the power of excellent execution. Each week we would have a standup meeting where the core team would outline asks and deliverables. There was no way you were showing up to that meeting without results. The social accountability was so powerful. I brought that same feeling to Sidebar. You set goals and have people counting on you to see it to completion.

Let’s take an example. We are working on top of funnel growth metrics. Overall, we broke down the three major components that go into top of funnel growth: marketing efficiency, conversion, and member nominations. Within Marketing Efficiency, there is both a efficiency increase we want to see and correlation to paid spend we want to reach. We decided to set the goal around paid spend conversion because that was the best proxy we could measure for the overall goal we want to achieve - top of funnel growth. This goal is assigned to one driver on the team however we talk about it in every team meeting.

Any person on the team in any meeting should be able to tell you what the marketing efficiency goal is if asked. That’s the barometer we use to tell if the team is using the goals to drive impact.

Emmanuel Nataf - Co-Founder & CEO at Reedsy

Having run Reedsy for nine years, we now understand how cyclical our business is, and when and how we can expect to grow. It’s allowed us to remove a lot of the uncertainty that comes with setting general goals. For instance, using historical growth, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what our top line revenue should be for the year ahead, allowing us to set achievable goals.

However, we know that all those plans can get affected by macroeconomic events that are out of control—COVID for example—and we avoid setting goals for the sake of it.

Also, as we’re looking to grow fairly organically, we operate in a more flexible way to most—things are ready when they are, not because of an imaginary deadline. We do not use OKRs and other methods of goal setting and will never implement those framework.

A Bezos-ian note on ambition

As I wrote in our recent piece on Jeff Bezos, “Failure is a tool. For if you are not failing, you are not trying hard enough.” And I think it’s worth a short re-exploration of the note of goal setting and failure at Amazon.

• Amazon Destinations (2000): The online travel side of Amazon never gained traction against established players like Expedia. Killed after three years.

• Amazon Wine (2004): Yes, this did exist in 2004. Despite early popularity, they eventually scaled back and killed this service.

• Fire Phone (2004): The Fire launched at a hefty price ($649), but flopped due to buggy software and lacklustre features. It cost Amazon an estimated $170 million write-down.

• FireOS (2007): This operating system for the Kindle had sucky apps and a bogus ecosystem. Eventually, switched to Android.

• LivingSocial (2012): Amazon acquired the daily deals website for $350M. Killed in 2018 due to losing subscriptions and competition from Groupon.

• Amazon Wallet (2014): This mobile wallet for storing gift and loyalty cards sucked and struggled to compete with Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Discontinued in less than a year.

I just love the idea of failure being a part of the journey. Set your goals, drive hard towards them, succeed—or not—learn and try again.

Olympia Yarger - Founder & CEO at Goterra

We set OKRs quarterly. The goal of our OKRs is to connect company, team and personal objectives in a hierarchical way to measurable results. Helping us work together in one unified direction. A big part of OKRs is making sure each individual knows what's expected of them at work. OKRs are public, in front of everyone, so people and teams move towards the same goals and know what others are focusing on.

We start by defining 3-5 key objectives on company, team or personal levels. Objectives should be ambitious, qualitative, time bound and actionable by the person or team. We find it keeps us accountable within our own teams, and helps with cross-team collaboration and understanding.

Ross Chaldecott - Co-Founder & CEO at Kinde

At a team level we’re not particularly goal driven right now. We don’t have OKRs or any other formal goal tracking mechanisms in place. Since we’re a small time we all know what we’re trying to achieve and when it needs to happen by. The team themselves own figuring out how to execute on that. Goals feel like a waste of planning time in that world.

We plan releases in high detail. We use an approach called Swarming where every 6 weeks we plan the overall work that needs to happen and then the individual team members themselves pick up the work they feel they can bring the most value to within that. Goals on top of this just feel like adding additional oversight on the team that we don’t particularly need. If we ship the release or drive the visitor number where we want it to be, then this means success.

As a company we’re all aligned around a high level set of focus areas and measures. We have a one page document - our strategy on a page - which is our top level strategy across everything that we do. If you’re working on something that isn’t on there it means that you may well be working on the wrong thing. Everything in our swarm plan should line up to one, or more, of our focus areas.

Keeping the number of areas we focus on to a limited number that can fit on a single page really makes sure we’re not doing more than we should.

A tool we built - just for you

If you are managing all of your goals on a clunky spreadsheet or Google Doc, worry not, for we have built the tool for you. Meet our Awesome OKR Template.

Our full suite of tools have been downloaded close to two thousand times now and this is one of our better ones. If you use it—I hope you enjoy it!

Ajay Prakash - Founder & CEO of EntryLevel

We used the OKR model which has been helpful, especially in 2023. We used to have OKRs across the organisation and for each department but it kept breaking down. This year we’ve just only set global OKRs and focused on 1-2 objectives which have been incredibly helpful in focusing us as a team. Being able to link things such as customer support to company growth has helped everyone have a better ‘why’ when doing things.

I’ve done a lot of brainstorming for the upcoming quarter. What are the most important things that we need to get done? What do we need to start doing or changing? What do we need to stop doing?

Usually, the team and I have a dozen ideas or so then we try to prioritise and group these things to form 1-2 objectives. In the past, operations, customer support, and engineering have been tricky to loop into high-level objectives but we’ve been better at this by just being clear about how it impacts something like user experience or growth.

Ananda Aisola - COO and Co-Founder of Composer

Initially we tried to implement OKRs and it was a complete failure. The process was too time consuming and quarterly planning didn’t really work for us in the early days. We adapted and have begun to set goals on the cadence of monthly and annual. Basically where do we want to be as a business a year from now and where do we want to be in the next month. This has been much more effective as we have a long-term benchmark to focus on and a short term goal that we are rapidly executing against. We then spend some time at the beginning of every month to see how we tracked against the previous month’s targets and then course correct.

Tyler Denk - Fo-Founder & CEO at Beehiiv

I’m a huge fan of Traction, which is a book and framework based on EoS. We first kicked off this process at the end of 2023 and are working through our quarterly goals as we speak.

TL;DR we have a long-term 5 year vision of where we want the company to be. We have a 3 year goal, a 1 year goal, and then break everything up into quarterly goals that align with the trajectory we have outlined in the longer-term goals.

Bill Kerr - Founder & CEO at Athyna

We use OKRs on a six-month cycle, and we attack the problem from both a top-down and bottoms-up approach. Top down wise, we meet as a leadership group and spend a session white-boarding on FigJam for our biggest problems and areas we want to put work into. We write the elements we want to work on, group them and then vote on them.

After we do this I go back and create—with feedback from other leaders—our organisational goals. Then from the bottom up our leaders go back to their teams and do the same.

Each team will end up with internal objectives and key results that are tied to our organisational goals. We try to keep the org goals to around four each cycle. This has worked so far for us but we are testing and iterating on this and trying to find our sweet spot as goal setting is actually a pretty recent phenomenon at Athyna.

In sum

Let’s be honest, as much as we all probably hate the process, being rudderless is no fun either. And having a clear path people can get behind is important.

From what we have seen today, goals setting is still seen as quite useful. And there are more than a few ways in which you can get your organisation heading in the right direction.

And that’s it! You can also find all of our original interviews with all the founders and leaders above here.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

This is a banging thread from David Perell. Open it up if you want to read some serious wisdom and inspiration. I am really digging David’s new podcast, How I Write, right now as well.

And hey—I don’t usually make many requests in here but today I have one for you. I am trying to build my audience on Twitter, so give me a follow here if you want more tech memes like this one in your feed.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

I listened to a great episode of The Startup Podcast last week: Doing More With Less - Critical Tactics For Capital Efficiency. Highly recommended listening. These guys have some of the highest signal to noise on the airwaves today.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Sidebar - a leadership program I use to accelerate my growth as a CEO.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you—hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
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And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️