Disoriented Teams

While listening to a podcast recently, I picked up the most random bit of trivia: the word orientation comes from The Orient (aka the East). In olden times (before product management, before SaaS, before even the cloud), when a traveler was lost, they situated themselves by confirming they knew which way east was; to be “oriented” means to know where you are relative to your ultimate goal (The Orient).

to be “oriented” means to know where you are relative to your ultimate goal

This got me thinking about how much time teams (product teams, marketing teams, etc) spend on goal management. Defining the goal, instrumenting the metric, forecasting the target, reviewing results. And an organizational leader expends a lot of energy agonizing about progress - do the bets ladder up to the goal, is the pace of execution efficient, is the team focused on the highest-leverage work. It’s almost like we’ve convinced ourselves that optimizing the output of a team has the biggest impact on business outc…