This is my attempt at answering the fifth question of the chapter on Clarity from the book “The Advantage”. This is probably the question that we should re-evaluate more frequently as the answer will change multiple times per year.
It is probably true for many organizations that they have too many priorities. I once read that the term “priority” did not even have a plural in the past. The plural (“priorities”) was invented in modern times and it is a testament to the fact that we tend to split our focus and get distracted.
I can imagine that larger organizations could have too many priorities because there are so many opinions. On the other hand smaller organizations can have too many priorities because of the confusion, lack of certainties, and eagerness to grow. You have less people, but some people, and in the owner in particular, are wearing so many hats and play so many roles that they are trained to split their focus. This reflect on the priorities being identified.
There are very few advices I read, and heard, and read again as frequently as the advice to focus. So, answering this question is very important.
Now, the thing to be identified as the main priority, according to the author of the book should be:
- Singular (and this is obvious)
- Qualitative (and this is surprising). We can latter objectives which can have numbers associated
- Temporary. It should last 3-12 months
- Shared across the leadership team. Which is less relevant for a company as small as ours
Now, what is the thing that could make a difference for us, if we accomplished it?
There are a few candidates:
- Developing editor technologies
- Developing parsers
- Developing transpilers by examples
- Improving marketing
In general three of them goes in the direction of building products or components which could act as a differentiator, and make us more efficient. Regarding editors, there are some developments going on, and some interesting projects we are leading, but I think we need more reflections and time to pick confidently a direction.
Transpilers by examples could be a very interesting direction to go. I would like to talk more about those in the future. However they will require some R&D to verify they are feasible in practice.
Parsers are the only products we could see as-is in the short term. They will be used as components by our clients to build products which deliver value but we are receiving requests for them, so we are reasonably sure we can sell them. Selling parsers would be a way to get more used to sell products. We could then often attach to the parsers other offers (training, consulting, and coaching). Also, they could be a stepping stone to later offer products such as code assessment tools, transpilers, linters, formatters, and interpreters.
Improving our marketing could also be something that would make a huge difference. However if we do that after we have products, we could be able to actually serve more customers. So this is absolutely key, and we are working on acquiring the skills to do that later.
In conclusions, building parsers is our priority. In the last months we worked on improving or rewriting several we have. I am working on one and we should have several off-the-shelf parsers available for sale by early next year (before the 1st of March). To be clear, we have already several parsers, which we have already sold, but we aim to enlarge the collection, refine the ones we have, standardize them more, and promote them better. But we are getting ahead of ourselves as this is what should go in the objectives associated to the priority.
Defining objectives:
- Ensure all parsers respect our guidelines on documentation, architecture, etc.
- Ensure all parsers are tested well enough
- Promote the parsers
- Define the sales process (including ways to test them)
- Complete the list of parsers we have in mind (mostly me completing the one I am working on)
After they defining objective for our priority we should instead identify the Standard Operating Objectives. These are the things we should always monitor and work on to keep the company going.
Typical categories include:
- Revenue
- Expenses
- Customer retention or satisfaction
- Product quality
- Cash flow
- Morale
In our case:
- I would focus on profits, not tracking revenues per se or expenses. The reason is that for us is easier to grow revenues and to cut expenses. It will be a concern later, as we grow. We should also not focus so much on revenues at the risk of getting unprofitable projects. We should consider overall profits on a monthly and quarterly base, and profitability per project. We are working on improving how we track this data
- I would also track the percentage of profits (or at least revenues) coming from products and for service. Our goal is to increase how much we make from products and to focus on less and less areas so we should aim to have few services making most of profits and reduce the others
- The best way to track customer satisfaction would be to consider how many customers return. We should also track how many are willing to give us a testimonial
- I think our main metric to track is the number of new leads we attract as this is what would make the difference for us in the medium and long term
- We should track the morale of employees, but I am not sure how to do that reliably
- Cash flow is less of a concern given we do limited investments and we have good margins
And we are done! Now we have only one questione left out of the six we started with.
It is nice to reflect and put thoughts down on virtual paper. It gives a sense of progress.