Building the Operating System for My Business

This is all a bit of “Inside Yeret Agility,” so why would you, dear listener, care? One of my insights is that many of these approaches describe systems that you can use. Matt Gray even calls his approach an Operating System (FounderOS).

As a business owner/founder (whether you’re a service-oriented solopreneur like me, a creator, an agency owner, or a startup/scaleup leader) you have different systems in your business that all need to work well for the business to create value for the right customers and then capture value. How you run this system can, of course, dramatically affect how well your business runs.

As a software engineer who switched from developing/tweaking software to developing/tweaking processes and organizations, my metaphor is that each system runs on a certain “operating system/code” . E.g., your Sales system could be running on “ad hoc” or “MEDDIC”. Marketing could be using content/inbound marketing. I’m not talking about the tools used (like Workday, Salesforce, Hubspot) but about the structures, processes, and ways of working.

At any point in time, you could be investing time in installing or improving the “code” in any of these systems. I’ve found myself tempted to spread thin across all systems or focus on a system without evidence that it’s the right place to invest.

This led me back to a system of systems view - an overall operating system that you use to manage your “development efforts.” Every business has this system of systems. What “code” this system runs could vary from “ad-hoc,” to annual plans.

If we accept systems thinking - that notion that investing in developing/tweaking/replacing the “code” in the right system is crucial to affect the overall performance of your business, it is then essential to think about what “code” needs to run for this vital system of systems.

We want something that will help us see the whole - this is where value stream thinking, or thinking in pipelines/chains, and having the right metrics/telemetry is necessary. How does value flow or get stuck? Whether its the customer journey, employee journey, new product / capabilities journey, what are our constraints/bottlenecks?

Where should we focus? Goldratt would urge us to always look for the constraint and focus on it. Sometimes its awareness/attention. Sometimes its conversion. Sometimes its poor delivery. Sometimes its finding talent to grow.

Once you have some data/evidence you can make an informed bet to focus on improving what’s going on at a certain constraint. Getting from a decision to improve to actually improving is a different story. One obstacle is your limited capacity to work ON the business since you must also RUN the business.

Another is that even if you identify a constraint in a certain area, dealing with it might require tweaking/overhauling multiple systems (e.g., churn could go back to sales selling to the wrong clients, marketing using lousy messaging, and even the wrong ideal customer profile). When you’re a solopreneur like me, I can look in the mirror and have a tough chat with myself about any of these things. As your organization grows and specializes in tackling these constraints, it becomes a cross-functional endeavor, not to mention integration hell.

Integration hell. Where have we heard this term before? Hmmmm. So, what should we do to derisk this work on scaling constraints? What sort of operating system would be a good fit here? That would leverage cross-functional teams empowered to achieve an outcome, who work on small slices, integrating frequently, trying things out, and deciding whether to pivot or persevere.

Software developers started to organize their work in cross-functional teams (crossing functions inside technology/IT/Product) running iterative cycles focused on working integrated software to derisk software development. Over time, we started to see departments such as Marketing use similar techniques in their function (cross-functional here means Digital/Field/Event/Social/Product Marketing/etc,).

Growth Hacking is essentially using similar techniques to focus on growth, and here cross-functional does cut across several functions. Terms like RevOps and the rise of the CRO in the scale-up world indicate the understanding that we need to think in systems rather than focus on siloes. OKRs show promise of enabling the right behaviors but are more often than not abused and misunderstood.

The next step in this evolution is to upgrade the operating system for the system of systems to give it these evidence-informed, frequent inspection and adaptation cycles run by empowered cross-functional teams capability. What’s the appropriate name for this new OS? I don’t know. I’m a developer, not a marketer…

Anyhow, I’ll get back to developing/tweaking my own systems. It’s fun to be a developer again :-)

Running your company as a product — with evidence, iteration, and clear accountability — is how modern high-performing organizations operate. Explore Company as a Product advisory or let’s talk.