Great execution gives you the wiggle room to get things wrong. And that's important.
Great tech businesses - in fact all great businesses - have great execution. An ability to take a course of action, and deliver (on time). Indeed, great execution may be more important than great strategy. Because a strategy that can't be executed is worthless. But more, great execution gives you the wiggle room to get things wrong. And that's important.
At Joyous we're making some big changes to our database architecture at the moment. And some of this is undoing some other big changes we made to the same architecture about six months ago. This story may well be familiar to my audience in tech 😂. But sometimes deep impactful lessons are only learnt by getting things wrong to start with. The sort of lessons that lead to long term strategic advantage – they often need sweat and tears.
Our product and engineering team is confident in its ability to execute. So, we know that when we pull the trigger on these new changes, well, they'll get done. And we also know that even then there is always a chance that we still won't have it perfect. But that's ok, because we can execute again, if needed.
Everyone in the team is proud of this strength in execution. Because most folk have worked somewhere with poor execution before Joyous. In those environments, where getting something done is slow and unpredictable, if you make a mistake you don't learn from it, you live with it! Poor execution robs you of the ability to move forward. And that makes everyone less happy. 🙁
It's easy to see how competitive advantage has its basis in great execution.
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Ruby Kolesky, co-CEO and ❤️ of Product at Joyous doesn't like the word execution. She thinks it has guillotine-like negative connotations. She may well be right. But she also points out that it's a teachable skill. In fact it's a responsibility to our teams – to teach everyone who joins Joyous, our ways of getting stuff done.
And, great execution may be simpler than you think.
For Joyous great execution is based a handful of simple Patterns. Established ways that everyone does things, that are so pervasive across the business that they don't need explanation. Easy to learn. Easy to use.
I'll share more in future articles about all our patterns, and I'd love to hear the patterns that help you get stuff done. But for now, welcome to Work is _____. Feel free to fill in the blank. And as a fun exercise, why don't you score your organization's ability to execute. It's illuminating.
