Company Alignment
If someone asks you "What are you doing at the moment and why?" you should have an answer to this, but the answer shouldn’t be "because I have to" or "because someone told me." We believe it’s important that everyone in a company can see the full picture, a chain of purpose, a clear why. This is what we try to achieve with our Alignment Framework.
A clear Chain of Purpose enables autonomy of accountable teams: We can give our teams the What and the Why and they can find out the How themselves.
The Framework
Our Alignment Framework consists of four levels of goal setting (a part of Governance), our Values and the Actual Work (Operations). This gives us the fully transparent Chain of Purpose from the beliefs of our shareholders to the actual work we’re doing in our day to day job.
Values are the basis for how, Beliefs the basis for what and why we do.
Values
The Values govern the how we behave over all levels of Goals and Operations.
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Set by Shareholders consulting all VSHNeers
Company Beliefs
We call beliefs the direction we’re heading and the intentions we aspire to achieve. Other companies call them "vision" and "mission."
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Set by Shareholders consulting all VSHNeers.
North Star Goals
North Star Goals are long-term, high-level, aspirational goals. They’re more tangible than Beliefs but it’s still highly unlikely we’ll ever achieve them completely.
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Set by Shareholders consulting all VSHNeers.
Two Year Goals
What we want to achieve in 2 years from now. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound (SMART).
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Set by the Board, proposed by the Management.
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Management reports progress to Board.
Product Bets
The governance backlog Product Management uses to create and maintain the high level product strategy for Product Development.
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Created, maintained and prioritized by the Products Delegate Circle.
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Implemented as the Products Bets process in Jira.
VSHN Improvement Proposals
The written governance backlog for organizational drivers for all circles and an implementation of our Decision Making Process to make good enough for now, safe enough to try decisions.
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Used and maintained by all accountable Teams, Delegate Circles, Interest Groups or Roles.
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Implemented as the VSHN Improvement Proposals in Jira.
Actual Work
This is where the actual work happens (Operations) to win our Product Bets or implement VSHN Improvement Proposals, usually in the form of Jira issues (Tasks). Teams have other sources where work comes from, like their daily business with customers or any other work which is within their Domain.
Chain of Purpose
The chain of purpose through all the levels in our alignment framework always give you the why when looking up and the how when looking down.
An engineer in a team could be working on a task that’s about developing one of our products. The task links to an epic that team defined, this epic links to a Product Bet. With the Product Bet you can identify which 2-year Goal this aims for.
On the other hand, the Management has to report progress on our 2-year goals towards the board. They can look at all the VIPs and Product Bets that aim at a 2-year Goal to find out what we’ve planned to reach a specific goal.
Goal Setting
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Company Beliefs, North Star Goals and Two Year Goals are set top down, including more VSHNeers through consultative decision making further down.
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Product Bets and VSHN Improvement Proposals are aims or bets how we could reach the Two Year Goals from the VSHNeers (bottom-up).
Credits
Our framework is inspired and based on the great work of Henrik Kniberg, for example read more here.
This framework is tracked and reviewed as VIP-12