Week 6 Ascend Your Start-Up

 In order to Ascend Your Start-Up it is important to align the strategy with a process and in terms of measurements. The two traits that set top companies from others are accountability and alignment. Accountability includes taking ownership of ideas and endeavors to achieve goals. Having a process and aligned priorities can help set a roadmap for repeatability, growth, and open the door to improvements when necessary. Objectives and key results can be determined within each department to obtain a common goal for the overarching organization. Aligning the departments to function as one is imperative to creating success.


Focusing on strengths over weaknesses can provide the core goal to accomplish goals: product development, sales, engineering, vertical business operation, brand, and customers, vision, service, and thought leadership are some areas that can be the main company focus. Establishing a process and practice helps align strategy and drive accountability during execution. Three common disconnects include product/market fit disconnect, define minimum repeatability disconnect, and voice of customer disconnect. Overcoming these hurdles is an initial start of success, but overcoming the process and measurement disconnects will set you apart from others.


Measuring the disconnect starts with asking questions: what is our strength, what are desired outcomes, what does this mean to individual functions, are the resources utilized appropriately, where can we find more strategic resources, what is the backstory, and how does this compare to competitors. Some types of measurements include financials, sales, marketing, customer success, services, training, support, product, human resources, and other important measures such as cyber security, operational costs, and distribution, cost efficiency, and productivity. To drive some of these measurements successful execution is needed within your team. Compensation and overall scores for measuring success can help continue the momentum. 

Throughout the build-up, there should always be options and choices to make. The worst position is to have no options, and you must give up. However, making choices with thoughtfulness and confidence can help prevent some common mistakes and keep going.

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