Here’s how we operationalize setting our priorities, and by nature, our roadmap and strategy at Parallax:

Vision, Mission & Strategy doc

• Goal: Align everyone towards our north star + a rough idea of what the quarters ahead look like.
• Structure: view details here Vision, Mission & Strategy doc
• Cadence: This should be updated rarely!
  • Every year or so for Vision + Mission
  • Every quarter or 6 months for Strategy
  • Every quarter or few months for Goals & Tactics

Monthly Goals

• Goal: Ensure ****our monthly goals align with the overall Strategy + Milestones we are trying to reach.
• Cadence: Monthly! Usually a week before end of month. We find monthly is not too long (quarterly in startup land is so long) but also still a good checkpoint before it gets broken down to weekly.
• Structure:
  • Leadership team comes together (incl. “department heads”)
    • Our departments are: R&D (Product, Dev, Design) + GTM + Customer Success + Compliance
  • Pre-meeting:
    • Me and our GTM head discuss our #1 topline goal ($ volume), and make sure it’s calculated both bottoms-up (current metrics) and tops-down (based on the Vision, Mission & Strategy doc)
    • Each “department” preps goals per department, with one owner per department.
  • In the meeting we:
    • Reflect on last month’s goals and give ourselves a letter rating. We do silent reflection writing for 5 minutes and then discuss.
    • Propose goals. We take 5 min. to write up goals for each department. We discuss those goals, making sure they are S.M.A.R.T. and align with our quarterly goals. If missing info, we leave as action items.
  • After the meeting:
    • I (CEO!) go through all the goals, clear out any action items, confirm and finalize the goals
    • We then present during all-hands.

Weekly Check-In’s

• Goal: Ensure our weekly priorities and operations match with our monthly goals.
• Cadence: Every Monday
• Structure:
  • Vibe Check - 1 personal + professional win; people love this!
  • Monthly Company Goals check - preview our goals so we know what our priorities are for the week. We only started doing this recently with feedback that sometimes people didn’t know how weekly goals matched with monthly.
  • Priorities - 1 by 1, every talks about:
    • Last week’s top 3-5 priorities - 🟢 Done! 🟡 Needed help/partially done 🔴 Didn’t do, and why. Sometimes priorities change or things are estimated to take longer than expected. We talk about this then.
    • Top 3-5 priorities for the upcoming week - we cap it at this # otherwise if too much, then they aren’t actually priorities!
    • If any ongoing project that takes more than 1 week to complete (with target date), a status check: 🟢 Going well 🟡 Needs help 🔴 Can’t be done!

Weekly Biz Review

• Goal: Ensure our weekly business metrics match up to our monthly goals, which match up to our longer-term goals.
• Structure:
  • Prep: Spreadsheet + analysis is done prior by each department head
  • Metrics breakdown - the Leadership team (same attendants from monthly goals meeting) attends these.
    • CS + GTM + Product breakdown key metrics
  • Discussion - any notes from the metrics breakdown are discussed during this time

Weekly All-Hands

• Goal: Share and monitor our business metrics, learn deeper about our customers, share any announcements.
• Cadence: Every Friday
• Structure:
  • Metrics - previously this was thorough across CS, GTM, Product. However, got feedback that the in-depth number crunching was boring / not all that useful for people who don’t seem it everyday. So this has become more high-level and limited to 1 slide!
  • Customer Insights - people love this (esp. devs) who are not as close to customers. We share our customer feature request votes, themes from support tickets (with screenshots), and anything else coming directly from customers. Both good and bad. Interestingly, the “bad” is more interesting for devs who want to know how to best solve these problems!
  • Announcements - any company announcements
  • Kudos! 🎉 - new! Call out wins in the team. Celebrate each other and the company! 🙂
  • Demos - people can share works in progress, feature demos, automations made in customer success operations, go to market channel analysis - anything under the sun! 🌻 It’s a chance for other people to see what others are working on, and gain wider context across the company.