How we designed a framework for our aspirations
Every company defines its goals within its context and capacity. Setting goals gives your company purpose, particularly if you have recently embraced remote working. And to meet the goals, having the right guidance helps.
A few years ago, we created a framework to define our goals based on our core values as a product organization. We call this framework ‘Aspirations,’ which we employ to craft aspiring goals while staying true to our values—such as being a customer champion, creating a happy work environment, and practising craftmanship.
Transparency
As a company, we pledge to provide a transparent view of our progress against the goals—and we stay true to it. We present our key performance indicators, or KPIs, to our stakeholders and teams so they can see how we are doing and we as a company can embrace what we need to get better at.
Context
The problems that we solve are based on a certain context, and the constraints of each team are unique. We respect that, and we help the stakeholders and the teams understand the context of the domain and the constraints within which we operate. This gives us an opportunity to understand the context and gain meaningful insights.
Collaboration
Collaboration can get really chaotic as teams scale. But it’s important to collaborate effectively to align the teams together for bigger goals. Be it looking for different ways of working or attempting to solve a technical problem together as a team, collaboration matters. When we collaborate—not only within a team but across teams—we will be able to achieve more than expected.
Platform orientation
One of our key goals as a product company is to ‘Innovate at scale’. To enable that we need multiple teams coming together. We have platform teams to build technology services that can be consumed by products. We are able to accelerate our journey while delivering great product experience without having to build things within each product separately. This is an area where we align ourselves to the platforms in order to collaborate and resolve dependencies and play as one team.
We have monthly ‘cadence’ meetings wherein teams talk about their progress. With pride we showcase the things that we built and the lessons that we learned—and we generally come together to celebrate as a team.
While we were experimenting with ‘Aspirations’ initially, we started with a focused set of people including functional leads and technical architects. Then we opened it to whole teams so each and every member, irrespective of their roles, could participate.
We usually keep it dynamic and spirited to keep the energy levels across teams high. Here are some of the things we discuss:
Business overview
- Revenue goals and our progress (current annual recurring revenue, forecasted ARR, trends in ARR, and monthly recurring revenue)
- Business metrics such as average revenue per user, and customer acquisition cost:lifetime value ratio
- Net promoter score, user engagement, and churn metrics
Roadmap and vision
This is to set the context for ‘why’ and ‘what’ we are building and to inspire teams to reach their goals.
Look-back
- Top accomplishments/features delivered in the previous quarter
- Top challenges faced in the previous quarter
- Retrospective items across teams
Key performance indicators
- Predictability percentage
- Product velocity
- Innovation epics
- L2 statistics, such as tickets that need assistance from product development teams
- Adherence to service level agreements for performance/security incidents
- Squad health check (overall)
Product demos
Learnings/failed experiments
The purpose of this is to:
- Promote the culture of ‘fail fast,’ and learn from it; and
- Share the lessons across teams to enable them to learn from each other.
Appreciations
This space is to make teams proud of their accomplishments/contributions and to motivate the employees and recognize their efforts. ‘Culture Cards’ are given to employees who exhibit values as per the Freshworks culture code.
In summary, here are some of the key reasons why ‘Aspirations’ has worked for us since we started it more than two years ago:
- Teams are able to see the ‘Big Picture,’ which gives them purpose;
- Teams collaborate across the board to stay updated on what their colleagues are working on;
- Though we have multiple squads working across different modules, we all come together as one team and celebrate our milestones;
- Teams get motivated to understand the importance of their contributions and get recognized for them;
- Teams showcase what they have built with pride and talk about failed experiments— with even more pride, confident that they will learn from their failures.
