What are priorities?
How to define, set and share priorities with your team
Hey there,
This week I had a really good conversation with our lead engineer, who previously worked with teams at awesome companies like Zalando, Apple & others. He shared that the best way to align and enable autonomy in the team, in his experience is a simple list of priorities that can be completed, each with a brief explanation of why they matter and which outcomes are impacted. And this kinda hit me. Over the years we tried many different ways at Bunch, and we’ve found a good way to accomplish clarity on goals and also on tasks, but that “middle layer” (let’s call them bets or priorities) that was still a bit fuzzy in our team. This inspired me to rethink our goal-review process (the process where goals are broken down into initiatives) and include a clear list of accomplishable projects = priorities that gets reviewed and refined by the team and then implemented and delivered over the course of the quarter.
Not sure how you all feel about your process from goals to actual work that gets done to achieve certain outcomes, and how much “outputs” vs. true outcomes play a role, but I def. think we can always do better in these things, so I researched a few resources that I used to redefine the process from goals to outcomes at Bunch:
How to set priorities that align and motivate your team
👉 Setting Goals, Objectives & Tasks
Top Takeaways: They have an interesting and actionable suggestion on how to formulate objectives
👉 The Elite 8%: How successful startup founders set and achieve company goals by Jenna Abdou
Top Takeaways: These are actual original statements of successful startup founders, including Melanie Perkins from Canva on how they set goals with their teams
👉 Setting goals for your startup – what you need to know (Part 1) by Raheem Adebayo
Top Takeaways: This resources is awesome because it suggests to not only make goals part of the communication of the plan of action, but also the blockers that prevent you from achieving the goals today. And then also link the list of accomplishable priorities that you can feed from your own ideas and of course your teams ideas!
👉 The Startup Theory IV: Create and Prioritize Objectives Like a Pro by Sinziana Chitea
Top Takeaways: THIS IS AWESOME. If you look at one resource from this list, this is it. It’s comprehensive, it enables you to go all the way from objectives to hypothesis to experiments to run and projects to do.
News from Bunch
We have our first AMA (Ask Me Anything) of 2022 coming up! This time we are honored to host Ryan Donovan, CTO of Hootsuite on January 12th at 6 pm CEST, 12 pm EST, 9 am PST right in Slack! 🎉
You can ask Ryan about anything and everything leadership, but to highlight a few things, he has some great, actionable insights on:
🏅 Successful tactics to improve team collaboration
🛠 What it takes to build successful tech & product teams
👂 Training and improving your listening skills
🤝 Cross-functional leadership
Download the Bunch AI coach to get access to our exclusive community if you want to join Ryan’s AMA. It’s free and awesome.
Once you download the AI coach, you’ll get the link to join the community in our Welcome email and also get the link to join the AMA directly in your Bunch app.
Tips from the Bunch AI Coach:
Check out this week‘s tip “Inspire your team to hit their goals” by Neil Fiore PhD, Author of The Now Habit, it’s an awesome tool to truly drive outstanding results in your team.
Have a great start to your week!
Darja
PS: Download the AI coach to get 1% better in just 2 min a day