Serverless Craic Ep6 Purpose

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

The team looks at clarity of purpose and the North Star Framework and why orgs don't understand the reasons behind transformation or trying to improve and the fact that it's not based on core understanding of purpose for why you doing the things you're doing.
Businesses talk about wanting to corner the market or drive up the rate of business. But the broader organisation doesn't feel part of it, or doesn't understand the mission.
A lot of teams or development squads don't understand how they're going to contribute to that mission and how what they're doing is having an impact on the overall mission.
A big part of the problem is that successful transformations need to involve everybody in the company.
We've run North Star exercises and the North Star playbook. It's a phenomenal practice or tool for getting that level of understanding for where you are in the overall transformation. The framework is brilliant because you find the one metric that matters, and then you work at how you can work backwards from it. And for many companies, the one metric that matters is not 'making money'. Every company will have some kind of goal for profitability.
A lot of the time people are trying to chase the lag metrics. They don't think upstream. They don't think about the North Star or the input metrics that actually make a difference. There's a detachment from the people on the ground doing the work, trying to work as hard as they can with the best intentions. Because they don't have that purpose or that alignment to the actual real purpose or the real North Star. And their efforts are in vain. They're not actually influencing any of the input metrics that could affect the real North Star.
Metrics are important to the organisation from a financial perspective. But what are the lead measures that have a proper influence over those lag measures. What sorts of things could we be doing more effectively, how do you instrument your transformation and how do you know that those lead measures are having an impact on the overall 'money in the in the bank' or core outcome. We can move the needle on this North Star metric and that should result in successful outcomes. But the interesting pieces out on the left of the North Star are the lead measures. If you don't have those metrics, and that team doesn't understand how it's playing into the overall big picture, the management side can become really difficult. Whereas if you've got those lead measures, and the teams know what they're trying to do in relation to the influence of the overall North Star, it becomes very easy to pivot or understand the impact that a squad has in terms of customer value. It's very odd that a lot of organisations don't operate that way because it's super efficient and effective. It gives you a lot of opportunities to crack.
Organisations need to be brave with discussing Purpose on their North Star. Once you make this visible, make metrics observable, start talking about the North Star and important metrics, and start to align your teams, the teams then become engaged with making a difference and seeing the benefits of the work. Then the teams will go out and start challenging the rest of the organisation by saying: 'that doesn't quite make sense, I don't think that input metric is quite right, can we change that to something better?'.
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