Invisible Q2 OKR Review
Stress and Recovery… Prepare for Supercompensation
Summary
Q2 Review >> Stress (and Recovery)
Q2 was tactical on the surface and strategic underneath. Hard work got done to keep us alive and keep our customers happy, and time was taken strategically to enable us to leap to the next level. It was a team effort, and we made it through that set of trials together.
Operations and customer success did an incredible job to deliver outcomes and happiness to clients with tools that were not yet suited for the complexities of the work. For that, they get a gold star. It was hard and stressful work, but they did their part and deserve the rest time (relative) coming their way. Thank you all.
Technologies was upgrading the machine while it was being used, and finally hit escape velocity toward the end of the quarter, giving operations the much-needed boost. In the process, we upgraded our security, analytics, and product foundations to prepare us for the upcoming leaps. We went from “not a tech company” to “a tech company” and we’ll be feeling the effects of that acceleration even more in the next quarter. Blast off.
People operations, like operations, put forth a heroic effort to handle challenges of hiring, training, and a million other things without the ideal level of support, and somehow pulled it off. Wow. Prepare to see major changes in people operations in Q3 as they receive the support and analytics to take their team (and our whole company) to the next level. #mvpwatchlist
Growth took time to go to the drawing board (while keeping up strong efforts) and reassess the very foundations of product-market-fit, pricing, marketing and sales strategies, and much more. It’s a long game, and growth is working hard to hit the daily numbers while planning for even faster growth. Growth is the dark horse here — be on the lookout for a huge leap in Q4 fueled by the foundations they’ve set and support from the other teams.
And finance… well, they’re keeping us alive, so can’t do much better than that :) Big shoutout there. Mountains have been climbed in this area to make sure we keep doing what we love here at Invisible, and it doesn’t go unnoticed.
Overall, Q2 was a huge push and a stressful time, but we emerged through the fire and with better foundations to take us to the next level. That’s something to celebrate.
Beginning of Q3 Focus >> Supercompensation
First, take a look at my notes on Strategic Stress, one of the most important ideas I’ve ever learned, and applicable in almost every part of life.
Q2 was stressful, and our systems broke in many places. This is a very good thing. This gives us visibility into where we need to improve, and what we need to handle in the future.
Stress adaptation follows a model of
— Stressor added (things break)
— Stressor removed (things stop breaking)
— Recovery (things are fixed)
— Supercompensation (things are improved)
We pushed ourselves. We broke things. Things stopped breaking. And the majority of things are fixed.
Now is the time to improve. Every system that broke, every mental model that was flawed, every subpar communication that was problematic… now is the time to examine those and level up.
The first month or so of Q3 will be spent examining those systems and creating plans to improve them. Then through the quarter we will improve our communication, teamwork, reminder systems, tech, security, analytics, hiring, training, pricing, legal documents, automations, content output, and especially ourselves. Always level up.
Foundation Building >> Dominos
Invisible is one of the most complex companies ever. But that’s why we’re here — we want a challenge worthy of our passions!
Day 0 at Invisible was Friday, June 28th, the end of 2019Q2, at which time we officially rolled out our analytics platform. Until this point, we were flying blind, with the amazing intuition of everyone here. Now we’ll fly with both intuition and data (this is better than either alone as proven by the best chess player combinations being human and machine… sound like anything we know? #syntheticintelligence)
The days before Day 0 were critical in getting us there. And the days coming next are critical in us reaching the next level for us as a company. Here’s a quick snapshot of company milestones, and the order in which our teams will hit their dominos on our way to success:
— All: The MVP (Idea for Invisible, Customers are interested, We manually deliver) (done)
— TNG: Create foundational products that meet our company’s complex needs (done)
— OPT: Stabilize and make Invisible a quality service (done)
— AXT: Day 0 — Create a company dashboard (done)
— POT: Systematize our hiring, training, and development into a scalable system (big push in Q3)
— FNT: Balance the efforts of all teams with budget and prep legal
— GRT: Grow at unlimited speed without being limited by the other teams (big push in Q4)
Once these are reached, we’ll iterate depending on where needs a boost, but for now this fairly accurately describes the order of dominos to hit.
OKR Review
Look at the column near the right with [Failed, Partial, Completed, Skipped]
EXT — Executive Team
Close the funding round — Done
FNT — Finance Team
POT — People Operations Team
GRT — Growth Team
Growth transitioned leadership and direction during the quarter, so the initial plan was not as fulfilled as other teams’.
OPT — Operations Team
TNG — Technologies Group
- Data management = company wide analytics dashboard
- Coordination system = updated DAL to handle operational demand and features
- Client Health Dashboard = know the status on each client, pulling in metrics from the DAL
- Agent Performance Dashboards = know the ability of each agent, pulling in metrics from the DAL
- Security = rollout Teramind
- Client Dashboard = our webapp
- Results Based Pricing = make the underlying foundational changes to prep us for our new pricing model
Overall
We had a crazy number of OKRs. We know this. We’re also trying to solve hundreds of problems in parallel, so this was known going into it. The main issue was switching focuses along the way as things came up. For next quarter, we will be able to set up much better OKRs for two reasons:
- We now have a company-wide analytics dashboard with all metrics from which we can track our progress
- We have put in place substantial foundations so that we are fighting a battle on less fronts and can consolidate our focus
Look for an OKR set this quarter that
- Rolls up into whole-company OKRs
- Is tied to metrics throughout the company
- Focuses us on the highest leverage moves
“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials” — Bruce Lee
