Sharing The Company’s Vision With Everyone

Problem

It's been really useful to gain a line of sight in terms of the goals and vision of our company as a whole. One of the challenges Neto has faced in the past is making the company's strategy relevant to individuals. In the past, Neto was pretty product-centric. However, the CEO was very focused on customers, so he wanted to shift the focus to them. He saw Salesforce's V2MOM as a mechanism to both articulate his desire to be customer-focused and to align department heads and teams.

Actions taken

Our CEO went to the US for some conferences and networking and while there he visited Salesforce. Salesforce have a mechanism they used called V2MOM - visions, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. This is basically a high-level strategy document for companies that their CEO creates. To use V2MOM, the CEO created and shared a high-level strategy slide deck consisting of just five slides - visions, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. Using this approach ensures you are succinct and prevents you from waffling because you only have a limited amount of space. From there, each department head and each team built their own V2MOM that was relevant to them, but aligned with the vision set out in the CEO's V2MOM. This makes it clear to individuals what they are doing to provide value to the organization. This gives purpose, leads people to be more aligned and more effective and can assist individuals and teams to become high-performing. The CEO's slide deck is a living document, so we do periodic reviews and adjust it if we need to pivot in our strategy. In turn, the teams then adjust their documents.

Lessons learned

To make teams understand where they fit in, align them with where the business is trying to go. This has been a really interesting and productive mechanism for making the company's vision relevant at an individual level. Writing code is not enough - it's important for engineers to understand why they're writing code and how it contributes to the business being successful. Using V2MOM makes our teams think about the outcome of their work, rather than just the technical aspects of it, and it helps to keep them aligned by clearly showing them how they add value to the business.