Week #6 - MBA 6101 - Ascend Your Start-Up, Chapter 6: Align Strategy with Process and Measurement Camp

In Align Strategy with Process and Measurement Camp of Ascend Your Start-Up, Helen Yu discusses implementing methods that match strategy to execution and creating metrics to gauge success.  For the organization to succeed, it's important that priorities are aligned and cross-functional accountability is established. 

Decision #17: How will you apply your strengths to your weaknesses to find your superpower?

Yu recommends finding ways to use an organization’s strengths to overcome weaknesses.  Gauging your organization’s attributes and finding a unique strength is critical to establishing a competitive advantage.  A good start is considering categories like your organization’s offering, sales, engineering, business vertical, brand, customer, vision, service, and leadership.  According to Yu, finding and leveraging that unique strength is a “measurable process” that leads to important “engagements with customers and partners.”

Decision #18: How will you fill the process disconnect?

According to Yu, a “data-driven decision-making process” is crucial to driving growth.  The first step towards establishing accountability is creating internal, cross-team cooperation with well-defined processes.

Decision #19: How will you fill the measurement disconnect?

Yu suggests several metrics to assess how well the organization is functioning.  Metrics and indicators extracted from financials, sales, marketing, customer success, services, training, support, product, and human resources can be used as a barometer for how congruent strategy is to execution.   

To better orient strategy to execution, Yu offers considering compensation and employee incentives.  For example, ensure that compensation and incentives are rewarding the proper behavior.  Yu also suggests considering metrics like net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), and customer offerings such as through the service level agreement (SLA) as a litmus test for customer fulfilment.  While this data is helpful, it’s important that it’s distilled and shared across the organization to meaningfully direct strategy and execution.     

Decision #20: How will you measure the company as a customer-centric company?

For Yu, the first step towards understanding an organization’s commitment to customers is having a foundational, underlying comprehension of your customer.  This includes tangible aspects of the whys, whats, and hows of the customer’s integration of your solution and prospective chances like “upsell and cross-sell opportunities.” It’s also important to have an understanding of the customer’s internal and external environment including a knowledge of the customer’s strengths and weaknesses, and potential threats and opportunities. 

Measuring customer-centricity also extends to the internal employee experience.  According to Yu, it’s pivotal to acknowledge and understand high- and low-level relationships between your organization and your customer’s organization.  It’s also important to understand how your organization’s employees feel about their role.  Yu notes that imbuing employees with a sense of “[empowerment]” and “[trust]” is crucial to creating a positive customer experience.        

Decision #21: What does your summit look like now?

While start-ups face many challenges, for Yu, the “need to prioritize and accomplish operational must-dos with fewer resources and a limited budget” is the most difficult hurdle to overcome.  However, to be successful, it’s important to be able to reassess and reevaluate, acclimatize and adapt, as your organization faces internal or external change.