This is Lyft FM, where I share stories, interviews, and lessons from the trenches building multiple billion dollar software products, 40Xing my career and compensation along the way. Thanks for joining. So last week we talked about the 25 factors for career success, the 25 factor framework for career success. And your homework was to choose three areas to work on. This week I want to talk about the next steps for that, which is how to actually meet your goals or make progress on those things. And so we'll cover three things today. One is a general framework that you can use to meet your goals, sort of a framework and practices. Two is how you apply this framework sort of in a corporate setting for organizational goals. And three is how you adapt this framework for individual goals, for either professional or personal goals. So these are the ones you picked last week, for instance. So let's just jump right in. So, I tend to use a framing that's sort of a composite of sort of three others that I found out in the wild. And it's a combination of what's proposed in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, a pretty popular book out there, and another one called The Four Disciplines of Execution. So I sort of mash these two things together and I came up with an eight step practice that I use for most of my goal setting. sort of at the organizational level and then also at the personal level. And the eight things are these. First is, I'll just go over them and then I'll go into them each in depth. One is focus on the wild, the important. This comes from 40X. Two is create a believable proximate objective. This is from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. Three is establish a coherent guiding policy. This is an adaptation of 40X. Four is organized for outcomes. This just comes from work experience, although I suppose it's probably in either one of those books as well. Five is create owners all the way down. This is also from experience at companies like Amazon and Oracle. Six is act on lead measures. This is from 40X. Seven is keep a compelling scoreboard. This is also from 40X. And eight is create a cadence of accountability, also from 40X. So I'll go on each one of these and I'll explain what they are and then we can talk about how they're applied in a corporate setting first as I explain them. And then after that, we can talk about how you adapt them to personal goals. So the focus on the wealthy important. This is kind of what we talked about last week. What is the most important thing that we need to be doing and why? And how you arrive at those things can vary company to company, although ultimately it comes down to some form of working backward from an outcome and figuring out what the... what the big thing is that you need to move to be successful. The big thing here is focus. You can only do so many things and so you have to focus on the things that are most important and there can usually be one maybe two of those and then you cut everything else. The second is related to this, which is create a believable proximate objective. You may have some huge company level goal to be the best in the industry or to be number one in this particular segment. But to actually get there, you need to ground your efforts in a more tangible goalpost. And so creating a believable proximate objective, the goal of that is to sort of... take a thing that will get you close to that larger goal, or it will force the type of behaviors that you'd need to adopt to get that, will get you to that goal, but it puts it in a more concrete time-bound goal. And so, the famous example from, I think, the Good Strategy, Bad Strategy book is, putting a man on the mood before the end of the whatever, right, like that was a very, it was sort of a moonshot goal, but it was very concrete in its implementation and its timeline. similar for companies, you may have the goal to become number one in a particular industry overall, but a more believable proximate objective might be to be in the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, for instance, within two years. And so that gives you a more grounded set of deliverables, should drive a more grounded set of deliverables that you have to execute on to hit that quadrant, for example. This not only helps you sort of bring it back to earth and start to build coherent policy, but it also helps with on the ground decision making. Because if people on the ground can wrap their heads around the approximate objective, even if they can't really understand the overall goal, they'll make better decisions. You can't make good decisions about things you don't understand. And so even if the thing they understand is slightly off or slightly removed from the ultimate goal, you're going to get better decision making on the ground if the approximate objective is close enough and if people get it. So once you have your sort of macro goal and you have your approximate objective, then you need to, number three, establish this coherent guiding policy. And I like to use two things for this. So you have one, the sort of key outcomes that ladder into that objective. You know, whatever your goal is, you just ask yourself, what are the things that get us closer to this? So what are the things that I would measure in terms of in terms of actions or outcomes that will get us closer to that objective? And the second thing is a set of tenants or principles that are sort of guiding behaviors or guiding tenants, guiding biases, essentially, that again, help guide decision making for many people across an organization. And so just like the proximate objective, these help guide that on the ground. decision making that people have to make. At Amazon, we actually, you know, every org, every team used to have like team tenants and they used to be like, you know, until you know better, these are the tenants until you know better. And the goal there is to just get everyone sort of thinking about the problem in the same way. And I'll go into some examples when we break this down or adapt it to individuals, but having both clear sort of project goals or objective goals, essentially key results, and a set of guiding principles or tenets. They really help when you have large teams of things and they also help even when you're just on your own to sort of remind you where you're going to even if you have to make many different decisions. So once you have these things, then you, in the context of an organization, you'll organize for those outcomes. So you sort of picked your goal, you picked your objective, you picked some outcomes that you're driving, sort of leading outcomes. then you need to break down the work and get people to actually do that work. And so once you know what you're doing and how you're doing it, it's time to get the people together to do that. That really comes down to understanding the sort of the divisions of the work that will ultimately drive that key result. So in the context of like a project, for instance, it may take the shape of specific components that need to be built. in the context of a program, it may be different phases of a program, like sort of an understand, research gathering, synthesis, execution, that kind of thing. In the context of a major breaking into a new category of products, it may be kind of a combination of two where you're doing some amount of upfront gathering of information and synthesis and some amount of customer conversations. And then each of those things that can be broken into a distinct body of work. that has minimal dependencies on each other, you wanna organize teams around those things or people around those things where you have a one owner for each of those and then they can further break the problem down and delegate further owners for each of those subcomponents. And that's the next one, just create owners all the way down. Once you've broken the problem into those subproblems, you need to make sure every one of those has a strong owner and it's one strong owner. And the reason for that is that you don't, if you wanna move quickly and effectively, You don't want to waste a ton of time on sort of unnecessary, unproductive debate. And it's good to get input on things and it's good to have, it's good to have debate that spurs discussion and spurs thinking, but what you don't want is to have, you know, multiple people who have different incentives who are jointly responsible for a decision, trying to come to an out, trying to come to a decision. And that's because you end up with sort of perverse, uh, perverse overall incentives that don't really, they're not always coherent when you take them all together. And so you end up with either like really diluted outcomes or you end up with outcomes that don't make sense for the ultimate goal or something like that. And so, you know, one of the biggest sort of factors when you're thinking about a very large effort that's being undertaken that requires, you know, dozens or hundreds of people is making sure that you have those cut lines and you understand everyone's incentives all the way down. making sure all those incentives make sense in the context of what they own. And then ultimately there's one person who's accountable for the quality of an outcome. And then again, that person can break it down, they can make one person accountable for each of the sub parts and so on and so forth. And the person who's sort of up the tree, they're responsible for making sure everyone who's underneath them, those sub problems all fit together coherently. And to do that, they have to be the one that's sort of accountable for those pieces. And you may find that for that the tree. there's disagreement, I'll push it back down, you'll go up and down a little bit, but what you don't want is that sort of like situation where things are moving forward without that reconciliation of sort of misaligned clarity. So you need a strong tree of owners for a large problem like that. Once you have your owners, then you're kind of doing the work, you're executing. To do this part effectively, especially if something lasts a lot of time, if it takes more than like two weeks, if it takes a month. three months, six months, a year, along with owners, you need each level or each area to have some picture of what their leading measures of success are. And so, establishing this alongside the ownership areas is very helpful because it helps you understand where there are dependencies and that kind of thing. Ultimately in a business, you tend to care about revenue, but when you're building a product, you're building a... running a program or something like that, there are leading measures that result in the lagging measure. And so as an example, if you're in a sales organization, you're running a new sales training program, and you're trying to measure the efficacy of the sales training program, you might say, especially during the first couple stages when you're going from discovery call to jumping the gap between the marketing and the sales organization, where it's going from a meeting... you know, lead coming in and meeting getting booked and then, um, uh, a call happening and then, you know, you're qualifying the customer and then you're moving them down the funnel as a qualified lead. You know, you, you may as a, as a salesperson may be going on the lagging measure of, of qualified leads. Uh, but the leading measure would be meetings or would be, um, you know, calls booked or something like that, right? Like, or calls even that you make. And so those are the things that lets you. decide with data faster in its sort of coarser resolution and coarser quality, but you can act on it much quicker instead of saying, well, we can't judge the efficacy of the training program until we see sales. I think that may be way too far down the funnel. In the context of a product, it may be user metrics, right? Like are they engaged in the product? How quickly can they get in the product? How quickly, how much time does it take for them to sort of receive their first unit of value that they find valuable, right? That's a leading indicator for a legging metric, which is ultimately like either purchases or renewals or something like that. And so you wanna make sure you have these lead measures set up so you can iterate much more quickly. In an ideal world, you're also choosing metrics that are sort of production metrics or metrics you control. And so legging metrics tend to be the result of a bunch of actions. You want to find the set of actions if you can, that are things that you're doing directly. So like in that sales conversation, it may actually be like advertising dollar spent, or it may be a sales calls made versus the legging metric, which could be, you know, anywhere down the funnel, basically any resulting thing down the funnel of meetings booked or, uh, deals closed something like that. Cause those are the things, again, if it's something you control, you can make the action, um, to, to improve or increase it every week. Um, these metrics, once you have them, you know, you have owners all the way down to them, has a set of metrics or measures. Um, then you need to have some way of, of keeping those measures or metrics top of mind for everyone in the organization throughout the duration of the execution. And so in the context of a program that may, may take the shape of like a weekly, um, a weekly meeting where you're just going over the metrics and you're saying, Hey, why is this up or why is this down? And you're trying to you're trying to show people's progress, especially with those lead measures where it's actions and actions are taking, and you're trying to essentially force a little bit of peer pressure amongst the people who are in the program. And so, if you have a program and it's broken into four sub parts and you have four owners, each owning a piece of that, and they have four owners for each of those, you may have 16 plus the four is 20 plus you is 21 people in a room. going over each of these metrics and you're trying to show everyone how all the pieces fit together, right? And show everyone how all the pieces are dependent on each other. And you're trying to show all the pieces how like if they mess it up, how it impacts everyone else. So it's a little bit of peer pressure but it's also just about getting people in a room so they can discuss where they can make things better. You know, if you have people who have some amount of experience in other areas but they're focused on their own thing, they can still chime in, they can still say, hey, where can I help with your thing? He is at the right place to fix it down the funnel. Can we fix it further up funnel? So the scoreboard, this compelling scoreboard not only helps you track metrics, but it also helps you explore the problem week to week. Which goes into the next point, which is that cadence of accountability. The scoreboard is something that's not just off in a corner and it's something everyone looks at every single week. And so when you create this cadence of accountability, this usually takes the shape of a weekly metrics review meeting or a weekly business review where you're going every week and you're assessing wins and areas for improvements. you're proposing areas to fix and then before the next meeting next week, you're fixing them and then you're reviewing the data again the following week. And so again, this gets people into this cycle of finding, fixing, improving every week. And it's these little iterative improvements that nudge you closer and closer and closer to a more optimized process overall. And so that's kind of it. That's like the framework in a nutshell. And that's again, that's in the context of an organization. When you adapt this down to an individual, things change a little bit, but it's mostly the same. And so, last week we talked about sort of these individual goals, these 25 factors. And those 25 factors had two types of factors. One was sort of decision action levers that you could take. And these are sort of things where you decide the change, you pull the lever, the deed's done. You don't have to do much after that. These factors, for example, in the 25 factor framework are like. going to move somewhere. That's something where you just kind of decide to do it and you don't have to do much after that. There's no behavior change involved. The other kind of lever is these sort of behavior posture change levers. And communication is a good example of that from the framework where this actually requires you change some behavior or improve some skill. And so this two levers framework applies to organizations as well. Some actions are just decision action levers, which projects you fund or don't fund. which people you keep or don't keep. Do you open the office or close the office? These are sort of decisions you just make and then you're done with them. The behavior posture levers are much harder to do. They actually require you change behaviors of not just one person, but many people. And so this eight-step framework is best for those behavior action change levers. As you adapted for last week's exercise, Let's just pick one. So let's say we're focusing on the well-being point and let's decide that the framework you chose to figure out what's important is you're choosing something with high importance, high control, where the median is very low relative to the top 10%. So remember that last week's framework sort of had all that written out. There was a PDF from the accompanying podcast that accompanied the podcast that showed these written out. And let's say that listening communication are good examples of this, right? So that's something where. As an individual, you have a high amount of control over your ability to listen and communicate well. That's very important. And relative to the top 10%, the median is pretty low. Excuse me. So as approximate objective, you might say, I wanna be able to write a project proposal document that wins people over to my project, right? That's a much more grounded version of, I want to be a good communicator. I want to be able to listen and communicate. And it puts it in a goal that sort of roots it in an action or a set of actions that you can do over and over again, small and large. So once you have that approximate objective, and let's say maybe the end goal is a specific project, I wanna be able to propose a one-year project as in a project that takes one year to an org of 20, and I wanna be able to do that successfully within the next six months. Then you might say, to do that I have to establish some sort of, again, coherent guiding policy. You might decide. to reinforce habits in your life that build this proposal-making skill. In most large companies, proposals happen as documents of some kind. So for instance, you might focus on writing as one of the key things. An example tenant you might put together would be, have a target audience and goal in mind, put the bottom line up front, write simply and concisely. include necessary data to assess the situation, to explore options and to make a decision, proactively mitigate and raise risks, or raise and mitigate risks, include options in a recommendation and with a call to action. So these are tenants that you would use in your writing that you would start to use in all forms of communication, in an email, in a Slack, in a longer document, in a reply to an email. You could basically apply these tenants to every time you have to write in a sort of a group context. Um, secure. So once you have these tenants, then it's really about organizing for outcome. So again, this is as an individual, you're not organizing a group of people, you're more organizing yourself. And so you might wanna organize your schedule, organize your projects, organize your information sources, organize your thoughts. So for instance, organizing your schedule, that might just mean making time to study, practice reading and writing good proposals, but set aside time to read a book on writing for instance. Organizing your projects, you might want to free up time, free up some capacity so you can explore new opportunities, so you can practice writing. Making sure your projects are at the right level so that you're sort of stepping up in complexity and then by the time you are proposing this year long thing, for instance. People already have some experience reading things from you and making decisions with you that you have some wins under your belt, you build some credibility. Organizing your information sources that might be, you know pulling on your network so you can get a better picture of what's broken in your org You might follow a consultative method of investigation Once you have that network and you need to organize your thoughts You might meet with a bunch of people draft a hypothesis about what's broken or where the big opportunity is And you need to validate that as much as possible So these are sort of organizations that you do within your sort of steps of work and you're the owner for all of them in this in this case, but They're each distinct bodies of work that you need to do sort of in sequence to make progress on your overall goal in this example. Act on leading measures. So this is the things that you do to track your progress as you're doing this, right? In the context of improving your communication, this might just be practicing communication and getting feedback. So this might be for written docs, you just practice getting feedback on things that you wrote. Having one-on-ones and getting feedback on, hey, I read the email, did you, you know, what were your thoughts on that, for instance? It could also be recording a video of you reading the document out loud and then watching it, whatever the document it is, right? And so as you do this, you're, you know, you're, you're essentially scoring yourself week to week, and then you're making time. You know, this is the compelling scoreboard, making time to practice this regularly and taking notes on your practice. And then once you have that, you're creating a sort of a weekly assessment of that work. And you're saying, well, here's where I was soft. Here's where I could, you know, here's where I did pretty well. And you're finding areas to improve. And so you're, you know, because you've taken time to note the progress and you've sort of systematically built a schedule for improving your communication. You actually know where you're, you start to build a picture of where you're soft or like, Oh, I wrote this, but they misunderstood it, or I wrote this and it caused this issue. Um, and then you know where to fix things. Um, it sort of builds self-awareness of where your gaps are. And then, you know, writing things down like this is nice because in over the course of three or six months, you have a larger picture of your progress. And so. Again, that's how you adapt a much larger framework for execution down to the individual level. And you can do this for any improvement area as an individual, I think. It may feel like overkill, but once you figure out how to right size it for the specific area you're trying to improve, these are the major things that you have to do kind of no matter what, I think. Maybe there's more, but these are the minimum required set, I think at least. Hopefully they can be effective for you. So again, this has been LiftFM. Thanks for listening. I'm going to be out of the country for a few weeks, six weeks, something like that. Well, three weeks, but then a couple weeks on either side. So this will be the last podcast for a while, but I appreciate you listening in and I'll see you in October. Bye. Ahem.