Alignment
is Everything

The Playbook
Peter: When I talk to other founders there's a lot of talk about strategy. But one thing is having these great conversations that people like you and I love, but how does it materialize? And as you said, there are a lot of opportunities, but we will only follow through on a few of them. Which means that there'll be some trade off. How do they materialize? Are they written down?

We have what we call a playbook. If we take that right, the playbook is defining what is the ideal customer profile? Then that goes down to then what are the reasons to buy, what are their pains, what are their gains, what are their benefits, what market, what roles? And then we're bullet pointing it and we're sharing it with every single person in the company. Because the person in customer success needs to know it. They need to know who they're talking to. They need to understand their pains. And it's a bible. Everybody should be able to know exactly what is in the playbook.  If I ask them in the morning before coffee, who's our ideal customer profile? Well, they know it. So that's one way of doing it.

Peter: Yeah, but that all sounds really good, everything here is perfect. Everything is turning out just as we wanted it to do. Right now we are drinking beers, the best month ever and all these things. But when is it difficult? Because now we've heard about all the perfect examples and it's not just an example, it's what you do. So that's brilliant. But when is strategy difficult?

Well, it's difficult when you don't align on what you want to do. When your management team isn't 100% aligned.

Peter: Are you 100% aligned or have you always been?

I think everybody is like in all honesty, if you're 100% aligned it would be just one person dictating.

Peter: One thing is sort of agreeing. Another thing is “are you aligned?” Because you can agree that okay, we all think this is brilliant but we can all say okay, we are aligned that we know that maybe we are a little bit fluffy here or maybe we don't agree fully here but we commit to it. So that's the agreement and the alignment. But I agree that the team represents different roles and perspectives and that's a key strength also.

Because otherwise the strategy will not reflect the company and if it doesn't reflect the company you don't get buy in. Yeah, that's another danger. One thing is that management defines strategy, but if the rest of the team doesn't buy into it, it's never going to be achievable.

Everything is going great right now. Yes. One of the things that we weren't as good as I would have liked us to be looking back in time is communicating. I found out that even when I sometimes think that I’ve communicated what the strategy is, apparently not everybody knew.

So what I found out is that over communication is a word that doesn't exist, especially when you talk about strategy. You cannot communicate enough.

Peter: One thing is that you have sort of had your process and you have written it down in your strategy playbook. It is really clear to you, you have the playbook, you have talked about it, but still there's always more to do and that's where communication kicks in. But how do the teams and employees do strategy? What you have written down is what I call the intent, but let's say I'm one of your sales guys - what is the consequence for me? I can read the playbook, but then suddenly I get an inbound from someone that doesn't exist on that list. What do I do?

I think what we really understand is where we add the most value. And as soon as you know who that is, life becomes so much easier. In the beginning, we were selling to a broader crowd of people. And what we can see is that our first kind of customers were loving the product, but they weren't willing to pay as much for it. And on top of that, they were extremely expensive. When it comes to onboarding, they have so many questions. When we changed the ICP to the same product, what happened was first we saw that they were willing to pay a much higher price for it. Secondly, the buying process was a little longer, but the onboarding process was drastically shorter. And the NPS scores went through the roof.

Peter: So talking about alignment, if I came in from the outside or someone did and talked to each team member, how aligned do you think they really are? And do you see differences also between teams?

So, different cultures see strategies and respond to strategies in different ways. My experience is both from my days of Trustpilot where I had a really big team and with people all over the world to also being here where I think we have 10 different nationalities, people act differently when it comes to how they interpret strategy, how they execute on strategy and the way they communicate around strategy.

In Denmark we are very consensus driven. We want to take everybody along, but in the US, it's much more “this is a strategy, now go execute”. I'm generalizing here, right. They will definitely be able to execute on the strategy. But understanding why the strategy is the way it is, well, that's maybe a different question where things might not just go and execute on the strategy because they want you to explain to them why is it that we're doing this?

And then imagine we're onboarding people like let's say every month or every second month, they need to know the strategy.

Peter: And how do you do that? I know some companies have the strategy in here or in some hidden document somewhere, but others bring it into the onboarding and spend a lot of time talking about that and really getting it into the roots of it with these new employees because they know that it's really key to success.

Yeah. So what we do today, is we have one session talking about why we founded Openli and why is it so important? But then telling them this is our strategy - when they don’t even know who the employees they're sitting next to are. I think it's difficult in the sense that you don't want information overload. They’re still trying to learn names and figuring out where the best bathroom is.

But this we can definitely do better.

Peter: The consequence of onboarding new employees knowing that they don't fully get the strategy, what is the consequence for you guys, you and Søren and the rest of the management team?

If we don't catch them, the consequence will be they will be running on their own, not really knowing what the purpose is. That's why we have the entire company revisiting the strategy every quarter.

What we're also doing is that each team has a weekly stand up where they're kind of like, how are we tracking against our targets, how we're tracking against our goals, how are we doing on the strategy side? Meaning the new employees will be introduced maybe indirectly to the strategy during those meetings.

Peter: It sounds more like tracking on goals, and are we hitting our targets.

Yes, but at every weekly standup the first slide is what is the strategy and what is the overall goal. That slide never gets deleted. It's always slide one.

What is the dream strategy for Openli?

Peter: So strategy is the sum of all these choices and trade offs - it’s like a spider net. If that spider net is really strong and coherent and different from the rest, then you are unique. So to become sustainable and have that competitive advantage, it's about really understanding what makes you unique. Do you have any examples of where you’ve actually made decisions as to how you want to be true as a company? Or other ways that make you unique?

For us it's also about tone of voice. When you're in the space of privacy rights the easiest thing to do is communicate very complex, very long and very much to the letter of the law - and it's more difficult to simplify something that is complex and that is also back to what we're really focusing on.

So tone of voice and the messaging to not make it blue and corporate. And then using the marketing strategy that's focused around founder led branding and the community, you are hopefully humanizing it. And what often software isn't - is humanized.

Peter: When we talk about strategy then what is your dream? So if everything was possible within the field of strategy at Openli then what would you do? You talk about time and resources and these things, but okay, now everything is possible.

A dream scenario. That’s a little scary. To think that everything is possible.

I think the long term vision is the privacy platform for everybody out there. And when you have that ambition what I would love is to be able to build a community that invites every single person within the ICP and let them get to know us. That will require quite a lot of head counts and quite a lot of budget. So that's also something that would then be a part of my strategy of getting there.