This is a simple post, but it took many years to write.
One of the challenges that seems to constantly gnaw at you as a leader is the never ending search for profound — yet eloquently succinct — way for you and your team to focus squarely on what matters most.
Valid and important work is done to define your company’s vision, mission, and values. From there, you launch into mapping out near and long-term goals, strategic initiatives, and the related actions across every department that ladder up to those core initiatives in support of your company’s core goals.
This all hangs together because typically it’s these business goals that define success for you, your team, your investors, your board, your family and friends, and frankly anyone else you’re trying to convince (or impress?). But sometimes this feels too complicated and too heavy compared to framework that aligns everything that matters to your team in terms that define success — and how you go about achieving that success — in a simple way all of you can rally around.
Recently we took stock of all our moving parts at Remind. We’ve evolved dramatically and now operate deeply across the key functions of an education SaaS (software-as-a-service) company. In fact, it was the realization of how many moving parts we now have that brought us together to craft a simple way to describe how we come together to support students, educators, and parents. Indeed, it came to us somewhat easily: Remind is about One Team, Two Goals!
Our Two Goals combine our “Why” and our “What”. Goal number one defines “Why” all of us are at Remind, working so hard to help evolve and transform education by developing a communication platform that enables personalized learning. Thus:
Goal 1: We want to Impact the life of every student in K-12 and Higher Education in the U.S. and ultimately around the world. Impact in education is “Why” we come to Remind every day.
In order for us to deliver Impact in the way we envision requires that we build a sustainable company, and to operate as a sustainable company means we need to scale to become a profitable company. And so it follows of course that for us to be profitable requires that we create value for our school, district, and higher education customers so that we might be compensated for this value. Thus:
Goal 2: In order for us to deliver the Impact that we care deeply about we must focus on customer value that enables us to scale our Revenue. Thus, revenue becomes the “What” we need to grow to become profitable, which allows us to become a business that sustainably delivers impact for all stakeholders in education for decades to come.
So there are our Two Goals: Impact (our “Why”) supported ultimately by our ability to grow Revenue (our “What”), the proxy for the customer value we create in our product and service.
And these leaves the final crucial element — the “How”? How do we achieve these two intertwined goals? We get there as One Team. We operate as one cross-functional team focused on the relationship between Impact and Revenue. Every one of us at Remind — regardless of where we sit and what specific initiatives we focus on daily — align our efforts to collaborate with our colleagues to achieve these Two Goals as One Team.
Sometimes the simple way to describe your company’s Why, What, and How is right under your nose. For us, looking at all the complexity inherent in everything we do at Remind and trying to define a way for all of us to gather around a simple framework seemed daunting. In fact, it seemed almost impossible. And then we forced ourselves to step back and imagine how we could crystalize the core essence of what matters for us at the company. When we did that it became obvious what we’re about.
One Team, Two Goals.
Originally published on Medium on June 9, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.