It’s a lot easier to preach accountability than to practice it. Accountability is, if not a magic solution to everything, certainly a solution to many things. Business books are full of examples of companies that hit serious difficulties because people refused to take the steps to accountability. People don’t see what they don’t want to see and miss the cues in the early stages, leading to million dollar fiascos later on.

The Oz Principle: The Premise

To discern when you or your organization are slipping below the line between achievement and a dead-end, ask yourself: <ul><li>Do you feel that you have little or no control over your circumstances?</li><li>Do you listen when people tell you that you are not doing all you could be doing?</li><li>Do you blame other people? Are you defensive?</li><li>When discussing the problem, do you talk more about why you can’t do something instead of finding solutions?</li><li>Do you avoid situations that require you to report on your responsibilities?</li></ul>

A Self-Diagnosis

<ul><li>Companies ignore or deny the problem.</li><li>They dodge responsibility.</li><li>They blame others.</li><li>They wait for some higher power to provide orders.</li><li>They focus on protecting themselves and ‘cover their tail’.</li><li>They adopt the wait and watch approach and see if the problem will go away on its own.</li></ul>

The Six-Stage Victim Cycle

At many organizations, “accountability” really means “blame.” People only hear about accountability when something sinks, blows up or crashes. When everything is great, no one asks who’s accountable for the success. It is a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results. Accountability includes success, not just failure.All too often people view unhappy circumstances as accidents of chance; yet when they find themselves in more pleasant circumstances, they automatically take credit for a job well done.

Being Accountable

People who are imbued with a spirit of accountability will: <ul><li>Ask for constructive criticism and candid feedback.</li><li>Demand the truth even when it hurts and face facts, no matter how scary or nasty.</li><li>Don’t waste time or energy on things you cannot control or influence.</li><li>Commit yourself 100% to what you are doing, and if your commitment begins to wane, strive to rekindle it.</li><li>Take full ownership of their work and its results.</li><li>Enjoy responsibility for what happens.</li><li>Always ask yourself, “What else can I do?”</li></ul>

The Spirit Of True Accountability

When people lack courage – think of the timid lion in The Wizard of Oz – they don’t fail to see problems; they deliberately refuse to see problems out of fear. What they can’t see, they can’t solve. Therefore, in their cowardly minds, they are not responsible or accountable. Now, think how laughable their evasions and excuses really are. Instead, do as the cowardly lion did: Get some courage.

The First Step: See The Problem

People in an organization who see a problem and take responsibility for fixing it are golden. People who reject accountability do nothing. If you have ever seen yourself as the victim of a terrible injustice, reflect on that experience and ask yourself: <ul><li>What did you know to be true and that you simply closed your eyes to?</li><li>If you were in the same circumstances again, what would you change?</li><li>What warnings were flashing?</li><li>What did the experience teach you that you could have used but did not?</li><li>Why were you responsible? What did you commit or omit?</li></ul>

The Second Step: Own The Problem

How do you know a problem when you see it? The most dangerous unresolved problems organizations face are: Poor communication, people development, empowerment, misalignment, entitlement, work and personal life imbalance, poor performance, senior management development, and cross-functional strife. Exercise your leadership, wisdom and prudence to distinguish what needs to be done from what does not. Wasting time on unnecessary action takes away time that you need to spend acting effectively.

The Third Step: Solve The Problem

<ul><li>“Stay engaged” – Be awake and focus on the possible.</li><li>“Persist” – Hang in there stubbornly until you have it right.</li><li>“Think differently” – Look for strange and shockingly different points of view.</li><li>“Create new linkages” – Build new and unfamiliar relationships.</li><li>“Take initiative” – Go first; don’t wait for someone else.</li><li>“Stay conscious” – Get involved and stay involved.</li></ul>

Our Solve-It Skillsets

Leaders must apply these principles to themselves and to their organizations. Intervention, itself, is risky. Leaving the team to figure things out for itself is important, but it can also be a way of shirking leadership responsibility. Try to fulfill this checklist of leadership characteristics:<ul><li>Act accountably, the way you want your staff members to act.</li><li>Tolerate occasional “below the line” statements. Recognize that your team members sometimes have to deal with frustration. </li><li>Know a dodge when you see it and an evasion when you hear it.</li><li>Make people accountable in order to empower them.</li></ul>

The Final Step: Do It

Getting Results Through Individual And Organizational Accountability

The definitive book on workplace accountability by the New York Times bestselling authors of How Did That Happen? Since it was originally published in 1994, The Oz Principle has sold nearly 600,000 copies and become the worldwide bible on accountability. Through its practical and invaluable advice, thousands of companies have learned just how vital personal and organizational accountability is for a company to achieve and maintain its best results. At the core of the authors' message is the idea that when people take personal ownership of their organization's goals and accept responsibility for their own performance, they become more invested and work at a higher level to ensure not only their own success, but everyone's. Now more than ever, The Oz Principle is vital to anyone charged with obtaining results. It is a must have, must read, and must apply classic business book.

Stashed ideas

The Oz Principle

There are three broadly defined characteristics that define a “Big Bang Disruptor”: <ul><li>Undisciplined Strategy.</li><li>Unconstrained Growth.</li><li>Unencumbered Development. </li></ul> Big Bang Disruptors don’t follow the stages of the traditional market adoption model. Forget about the gradual steps from “early adoption” to “market maturity”, it’s very much about entering the market with a big bang.

Product Lifecycle: Big Band Disruptors

<ol><li>The Singularity – The key characteristic of this phase is the amount of failed product experiments that signal the change that’s about to arrive.</li><li>The Big Bang – Users abandon old products in favour of new products and services.</li><li>The Big Crunch – This phase signals a quick implosion of Big Bang Disruptors. At this stage, innovation becomes incremental and growth slows.</li><li>Entropy – This is the last phase of dying industries and the stage is set for the next bunch of disruptors to enter the market.</li></ol>

The Four Stages Of Big Bang Disruption

The first key to survival is understanding that big-bang disruptions differ from more-traditional innovations not just in degree but in kind. Besides being cheaper than established offerings, they’re also more inventive and better integrated with other products and services. And today many of them exploit consumers’ growing access to product information and ability to contribute to and share it.

A Different Kind Of Product Innovation

But perhaps the biggest challenge to incumbents is that big-bang innovations come out of the left-field, combining existing technologies that don’t even seem related to your offerings to achieve a dramatically better value proposition. Big-bang disruptors may not even see you as competition. They’re not sizing up your product line and figuring out ways to offer slightly better prices or performance with hopes of gaining a short-term advantage. Usually, they’re just tossing something shiny in the direction of your customers, hoping to attract them to a business that’s different from yours.

The Biggest Challenge

How did Jeff Bezos decide to enter the book business? E-commerce, he realized, was the natural solution for a fragmented market with an enormous number of SKUs; a small, shippable product; and a stable supply chain characterized by many sellers served by a few dominant middlemen. He settled on books not because he had any expertise in publishing but because books were a coldly rational choice. They fit the tool he wanted to apply.

Big Bang Disruptors: Jeff Bezos And Books

Big-bang disruptors are rewriting the rules of industry after industry—and the new rules hold only until the next wave of disruption comes along. There’s almost no time to adapt. Bold strategies are the only way to cope. Big-bang disruptions usually feature not a vertically integrated supply chain but a virtually integrated one: They are manufactured and deployed via the infrastructure of the cloud. In the face of such nimble yet perversely well-resourced competition, your operational assets suddenly morph into liabilities.

Surviving Big-Bang Disruption

Learning to recognize the warning signs is key to survival. But since the early market-based experiments usually fail, the familiar signals sent by low-end customers jumping ship may never arrive. You need new tools to recognize sooner than your competitors do that radical change is on the way, and that means interpreting the real meaning behind seemingly random experiments.

Seeing It Coming

Your truth tellers may be easy to identify, if not to accept. They may be employees far below the ranks of senior management, working on the front lines of competition and change. They may not be your employees at all. Longtime customers, venture capitalists, industry analysts, and science fiction writers may all be truth tellers. Truth tellers are often eccentric, and their lucidity can easily be mistaken for arrogance and stubbornness. Consider such difficult personalities as Steve Jobs and other technology luminaries like Bill Gates, Alan Kay, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Listen To The Truth Tellers

You have to ensure that disruptors can’t make money from their inventions until you’re ready to acquire them or you can win with a product of your own. You can’t stop a big-bang disruption once its unconstrained growth has taken off, but you can make it harder for its developers to cash in. Many big-bang disruptors build market share and network effects by offering their early products free.  You can delay their profitability by lowering prices, locking in customers with long-term contracts, or forming strategic alliances with advertisers and other companies critical to your rivals’ plans.

Slowing The Disruption

It’s up to senior management to confront the reality that even long-successful strategies may be suddenly upended, requiring a radical re-creation of the business. To compete with undisciplined competitors, you have to prepare for the immediate evacuation of current markets and be ready to get rid of once-valuable assets.

A Fast Escape and A Quick Pivot

Diversification has always been a hedge against risk in cyclical industries. As industry change becomes less cyclical and more volatile, having a diverse set of businesses is vital. Fujifilm, a perennial also-ran in the film business, has survived the transformation to digital photography by transitioning to other products and services that draw on subsidiary technologies, ranging from nanotechnology to the manufacture of flat-panel TVs.

A New Kind Of Diversification

You can’t see big-bang disruption coming. You can’t stop it. You can’t overcome it. Old-style disruption posed the innovator’s dilemma. Big-bang disruption is the innovator’s disaster. And it will be keeping executives in every industry in a cold sweat for a long time to come.The impact of big-bang disrupters is certainly amplified for technology- and information-intensive businesses, but most industries are at risk.

Your Business Is Already Getting Disrupted

The good news is that big-bang disruptions hold immense potential for those who can quickly learn the new rules of unencumbered development, unconstrained growth, and undisciplined strategy. Your current business may be replaced by something more dynamic and unstable but also more profitable. And the change will come not over time but suddenly. In other words, not with a whimper—but with a bang.

The Good News

<ul><li>Rule 1. Consult Your Truth-Tellers </li><li>Rule 2. Pinpoint Your Market Entry </li><li>Rule 3. Launch Seemingly Random Market Experiments </li><li>Rule 4. Survive Catastrophic Success</li><li>Rule 5. Capture Winner-Take-All Markets </li><li>Rule 6. Create Bullet Time</li><li>Rule 7. Anticipate Saturation</li><li>Rule 8. Shed Assets Before They Become Liabilities </li><li>Rule 9. Quit While You’re Ahead </li><li>Rule 10. Escape Your Own Black Hole </li><li>Rule 11. Become Someone Else’s Components </li><li>Rule 12. Move to a New Singularity</li></ul>

In Brief: The 12 Rules Of Big Bang Disruption

In recent years a new—disquieting—form of disruptive innovation has emerged. It doesn’t follow the classic model, entering the market as a cheap substitute to a high-end product and then gradually increasing in quality and moving up the customer chain. Instead, the innovation beats incumbents on both price and quality right from the start and quickly sweeps through every customer segment. This kind of “big bang” disruption can devastate entire product lines virtually overnight

It used to take years or even decades for disruptive innovations to dethrone dominant products and services. But now any business can be devastated virtually overnight by something better and cheaper. How can executives protect themselves and harness the power of Big Bang Disruption? Just a few years ago, drivers happily spent more than $200 for a GPS unit. But as smartphones exploded in popularity, free navigation apps exceeded the performance of stand-alone devices. Eighteen months after the debut of the navigation apps, leading GPS manufacturers had lost 85 percent of their market value. Consumer electronics and computer makers have long struggled in a world of exponential technology improvements and short product life spans. But until recently, hotels, taxi services, doctors, and energy companies had little to fear from the information revolution. Those days are gone forever. Software-based products are replacing physical goods. And every service provider must compete with cloud-based tools that offer customers a better way to interact. Today, start-ups with minimal experience and no capital can unravel your strategy before you even begin to grasp what’s happening. Never mind the “innovator’s dilemma”—this is the innovator’s disaster. And it’s happening in nearly every industry. Worse, Big Bang Disruptors may not even see you as competition. They don’t share your approach to customer service, and they’re not sizing up your product line to offer better prices. You may simply be collateral damage in their efforts to win completely different markets. The good news is that any business can master the strategy of the start-ups. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes analyze the origins, economics, and anatomy of Big Bang Disruption. They identify four key stages of the new innovation life cycle, helping you spot potential disruptors in time. And they offer twelve rules for defending your markets, launching disruptors of your own, and getting out while there’s still time. Based on extensive research by the Accenture Institute for High Performance and in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, investors, and executives from more than thirty industries, Big Bang Disruption will arm you with strategies and insights to thrive in this brave new world.

Big Bang Disruption

<ul><li>Empowered Product Teams. These teams are the foundations for business success. They serve customers in ways that work for the business.</li><li>Eradicate the old idea that "Technology" is in service to the business. With this mindset, your business will not transform into a great Product company.</li><li>Coaching is what turns ordinary people into extraordinary product teams. Yet so few product teams get the high-quality coaching they need. Empower Product Leadership to become great coaches.</li></ul>

Empowered: The Three Key Tenets Of The Book

Give teams problems to solve, rather than features to build. Empower them to solve those problems in the best way they see fit.

Leadership is about recognizing that there's greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.

Three critical differences between the strongest product companies and the rest: <ul><li>How the company views the role of technology. </li><li>The role product leaders play. </li><li>How the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.</li></ul>

The Three Critical Differences

<ul>
<li>The Role of Technology - Many companies still have the old IT mindset when it comes to technology. It's viewed as a necessary cost rather than the core business enabler. Technology teams are there “to serve the business”.</li>
<li>Leadership - Does not empower the Product Team. Has a command and control style leadership. Acts in service to the business stakeholders, not to the team.</li>
<li>Empowered Teams - Teams are not empowered to solve problems in ways customers love. Feature teams are responsible for pushing out features(output) rather than enabling outcomes.</li>
</ul>

The Challenges In Traditional Organizations

In traditional organisations, Feature Teams focus on features and projects (output), and as such are not empowered or held accountable to results. Empowered teams are given problems to solve, rather than features to build. Empowered Product teams create solutions that are: <ul><li>Valuable (customers will buy the product)</li><li>Viable (it will meet the needs of the business)</li><li>Usable (so users can actually experience that value)</li><li>Feasible (so the company can effectively market, sell, and support the solution).</li></ul>Together, the teams own the problem and are responsible and accountable for the results.

Feature Teams Vs Empowered Teams

Empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.

Collaboration is at the heart of how strong product teams work. It's a combination of skills and mindset, and it often takes active coaching by the manager to help new product people develop this capability. Characteristics of strong product teams: <ul><li>Tackling risks early</li><li>Solving problems collaboratively</li><li>Being accountable for results.</li></ul>

Collaboration

To empower, decisions are pushed down to the product team level. Three Snaky rules of Decision Making:<ol><li>If you see a snake, kill it. (an important decision that has to be made)</li><li>Don't play with dead snakes. (don't revisit old decisions)</li><li>All opportunities start out looking like snakes. (opportunities often look like problems)</li></ol>

Decision Making

For product leaders, the product team is the product.  Leadership is about recognizing that there's greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge. People look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.  To have truly empowered product teams, your success depends very directly on first‐level people managers. If you are wondering why there are so many weak product companies in the world, these first-level people managers would be the primary culprit.

Product Leadership

<ul><li>Staffing</li><li>Coaching</li><li>Team Objectives</li><li>Deciding which problems should be worked on by which product teams.</li><li>Sharing Strategic Context </li></ul> The litmus test for empowerment is that the team is able to decide the best way to solve the problems they have been assigned (the objectives).  Unless leaders trust the teams this empowerment will not happen.

Management responsibilities

<ul><li>Company Mission - The purpose of the company.</li><li>Company Scorecard - Key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide an understanding of the overall picture and health of the business</li><li>Company Objectives - Specific objectives the company is focused on for this year.</li><li>Product Vision and Principles - The product vision is how we hope to meet customers' needs.</li><li>Team Topology - Describes how each Product team will organise to deliver value.</li><li>Product Strategy - Specifically how we'll meet customer needs in ways that work for the business.</li></ul>

The Six Types Of Strategic Context

<ul><li>Focus on the outcome</li><li>Consider all of the risks—value, usability, feasibility, and business viability. </li><li>Think holistically about all dimensions of the business and the product. </li><li>Anticipate ethical considerations or impacts. </li><li>Solve problems creatively.</li><li>Persist in the face of obstacles. </li><li>Leverage engineering and the art of the possible. </li><li>Leverage design and the power of user experience. </li><li>Leverage data to learn and to make a compelling argument.</li></ul>

Attributes of Great Product People

Leaders must focus on:<ul><li>Spending most of their time and energy on coaching the team.</li><li>Being self-aware of insecurities. Insecure managers have a particularly hard time empowering people.</li><li>Cultivating Diverse Points of View </li><li>Seek Out Teaching Moments - Many, if not most, people are not aware of their own potential. As a coach, you are in a unique position to help them see it.</li><li>Continually Earn the Trust of Your Team. Coaching efforts will be ineffective without trust.</li><li>Establishing personal rapport and trust by sharing some personal challenges.</li></ul>

Developing And Coaching: The Main Job Of A Leader

The Purpose - The primary purpose is to help the product person develop and improve. The Relationship - This is a relationship that depends on trust. The Frequency - Should be no less than 30 minutes, once per week, and is sacred and not to be another one of those “You okay with skipping this week?” Sharing Context - If you are to empower you must provide the strategic context. Thinking and Acting Like a Product Person - Mainly about helping the product person learn to think and act like a strong product person.

Keys To An Effective One-On-One Meeting With The Product Person

A product organization's team topology answers questions such as:  <ul><li>How many product teams should our organization have? </li><li>What is the scope of responsibility of each team? </li><li>What are the skills required for each team, and how many of each skill? </li><li>What are the dependencies between the teams?  </li></ul> Optimise team design for: <ul><li>Empowerment</li><li>Ownership</li><li>Autonomy</li><li>Alignment</li></ul>

Optimized Team Design

<ul><li>You are frequently shifting developers between teams </li><li>You must frequently step in to resolve dependency conflicts </li><li>Your developers complain of too many dependencies on other product teams in order to ship simple things </li><li>Teams have a very limited scope of ownership </li><li>Developers deal with too much complexity in too many areas</li></ul>

Signs Your Team Design Is Not Fit-For-Purpose

If the company is still using feature teams, as most unfortunately are, then the OKR technique is going to be a cultural mismatch, and almost certainly prove a waste of time and effort. In the vast majority of companies that are struggling to value out of OKRs, the role of leadership is largely missing in action. Three prerequisites for OKR's: <ul><li>Move from the feature team model to the empowered product team model </li><li>Stop doing manager objectives and individual objectives, and instead focus on team objectives</li><li>Leaders need to step up and do their part to turn product strategy into action.</li></ul>

Team Objectives: The Right Way

You need to move your product organization from a subservient model to a collaborative model. Four focus areas: <ul><li>The Example Starts at the Top</li><li>Focus and Strategy</li><li>Establishing Trust</li><li>Deliver on Promises </li></ul> Three steps to begin with:<ol><li>Ensure you have strong product leaders in place.</li><li>Empower product leaders with the ability to recruit and develop the staff required for empowered product teams.</li><li>Redefine the relationship with the business.</li></ol>

Start The Transformation

Understanding Empowered Teams and how they function

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership. The book covers: what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.

EMPOWERED

Great leaders are committed to developing other people as leaders, encouraging them to step out of their comfort zone, and helping them learn from their setbacks and mistakes instead of punishing them for it.

Coach others into leadership roles

Great leaders are able to internalize the responsibilities, embody the culture of the company, and walk the talk.

Follow through on company values

This is often neglect in contemporary organizational life. People often join organzations because they enjoy the feeling of being in one and the role of the leader is to invest in the health, development, and growth of that community.
Leaders must also bear the unique responsibility of helping the community feel a sense of unity and collective identity.

Understand the symbolism of a leadership

Great leaders know the difference between leading and doing.
If a leader gets stuck in the process of 'doing' -- letting their ability rest on being the most effective person for that job instead of clustering more than qualified people for the technical skill -- then he is hindering the growth of the organization.

Know the difference between leading and doing

Four Ways Good Leaders Become Great Ones

Ordering someone in the office to come to you may feel like you have authority but can damage their respect for you. Instead, saying in a calm voice, "Would you mind if we chatted for a bit?" or "May I talk to you?" is more effective as people feel they can act of their free will.

"Come here!"

Five common truths that apply to people regardless of age, culture, or race, are:<ol><li>People want to be treated with dignity and respect.</li><li>People want to be asked, not told to do something.</li><li>People want to know why they are asked or ordered to do something.</li><li>People want to be given choices rather than threats.</li><li>People want a second chance.</li></ol> If you want to say something and it goes against any of the 5 rules, it's best not to say them. It's better to explain why something is a certain way. If you don't know, find out.

 “Because those are the rules.”

<h1>The words "Calm down!" makes people feel criticised and suggests their reasons are invalid for being upset.</h1><h1></h1><h1>Instead of saying, "Calm down," try saying, "It's going to be alright. Talk to me. What's the matter?" It shows that you want to understand the person's circumstances better and are open to talking things through.</h1>

“Calm down!”

This phrase is a lie, as most people say it repeatedly. Instead, try saying in a calm voice, “Listen, it’s essential that you get this point, so pay close attention to what I’m about to tell you.” Another technique is to list what you want the person to do and encourage them to consider it.

“I’m not going to say this again.”

This phrase sounds sarcastic and does not help the conversation. It may also seem like you want to duck responsibility. Instead, think of ways to help the person solve the problem or point the person toward someone who can help them if you are unable to help. If neither of the options is possible, offer an apology. For example, “I’m sorry, I do not know what to recommend, but I wish I did.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

The problem with this phrase is that the problem bounces right back onto the person who requires help. It also signals a "you-versus-me" battle rather than an "us" discussion. Choose to soften your language by asking, "What's the matter?" or "How can I help?"

“What’s your problem?”

The question implies that someone is acting out of line and makes people defensive. First choose words of reassurance, then paraphrase what the perceived problem is. “Let me see if I understand your position…”

“Why don’t you be reasonable?”

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Because change often leads to a crisis, you and your team can easily see it as a negative, and approach it with fear. Yet if you think back to when your business started, you capitalized on change as your opportunity. 
That's the model you need to project to your team daily, and remind yourself regularly.

Establish the mindset that change is good

Running an existing business is an all-consuming job: managing employees, vendors, and government regulations. It's hard to find time to really study the market for new trends, and listen to customers. The right approach is to allocate time, maybe an hour a day, for these critical change drivers.
In addition, it is important to stay actively involved in external activities relevant to your business, including industry conferences and panels.

Keep an open channel to customers and influencers

Reminding yourself and the team annually of the big picture is the best way to check your ongoing fit to a changing world.
As a constant learner, your reminder will generate new insights that allow you to prepare for the future, without waiting for a crisis. Be sure to factor in the new realities.

Regularly update and publish your vision and goals

People must be incented to look for and recommend positive changes, rather than just incentivized to follow the existing processes. 
That means providing every employee with the authority and resources to make change decisions in their scope, and be rewarded based on value to the customer.

Institute a formal change process with rewards

Make sure that you use data and expert outside advisors, more than your gut, to prioritize the alternatives for a change. Decisions made in the heat of the moment are likely ones you will regret later.
For your ongoing personal health and well-being, take the time to do the surveys and review data.

Don't let stress and emotion drive pivot decisions

5 Keys to a Business that Meets Change Smoothly and Continuously

Here’s what happens when you upload your résumé to a website and click the submit button:&nbsp;<ul><li>Your résumé is saved to the employer’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS).&nbsp;</li><li>The ATS searches through your résumé for specific keywords that the recruiter has prioritized.&nbsp;</li><li>The ATS archives your résumé, never to be read by humans.</li><li>If your résumé does have enough of the right keywords, the ATS will queue it up for a human to read.&nbsp;</li></ul>

“We’ll keep your résumé on file.”

LinkedIn is not your résumé. GitHub is not your résumé. Your CodePen pens and Dribbble shots are not your résumé. Your résumé is your résumé.&nbsp; Your résumé is an opportunity to show your most important accomplishments into one document to convince recruiters that you're worth looking into. After that, they will look at your portfolio links.

Your foot in the door

Recruiters view résumés for only six seconds. So here's how to make the most of your six seconds.<ul><li>Only use one page. If Elon Musk's résumé can fit onto one page, yours can.&nbsp;</li><li>Don't include a photo.</li><li>Ensure your résumé doesn't have any types. Typos kill.</li><li>Use keywords carefully. Every skill you add is up for scrutiny.</li><li>Use a headline. It's the most important part of your résumé.</li><li>Explain your gaps honestly.</li><li>Don't waste time customizing a cover letter for technical positions.&nbsp;</li><li>Don't waste space stating the obvious.</li><li>Give your résumé a meaningful file name since it will sit in an ATS.</li></ul>

Make the most of your six seconds.

For each relevant job, write the following:&nbsp;<ul><li>The name of the company. If they aren’t well known, add a basic description of the company.&nbsp;</li><li>Your job title and dates of employment.</li><li>A one line description of your responsibilities.&nbsp;</li><li>One or two accomplishments.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Be brief

The best way to avoid dropping your résumé into an ATS space is to secure a personal connection with a recruiter.&nbsp; These are trained professionals whose job is to go find people worth hiring. They will be at job fairs, after-hours networking events, even random happy hours downtown. They are also on LinkedIn.

You gotta do what you gotta do.

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At job interviews in the programming world, the question that gets asked the most is, 'What are the main principles of Object-Oriented Programming?' The four principles of object-oriented programming are:<ul><li>encapsulation</li><li>abstraction</li><li>inheritance&nbsp;</li><li>polymorphism</li></ul>

Object-oriented programming is a common interview question

Consider a program. It has some logically different objects which communicate with each other based on the rules defined in the program.Encapsulation is achieved when each object keeps its state private inside the class. Other objects can't directly access this state but can only call a list of public functions — called methods.&nbsp;If you want to communicate with the object, you should use the methods provided. But (by default), you can’t change the state.&nbsp;

Encapsulation

Abstraction can be viewed as a natural extension of encapsulation.Program in object-oriented design is often very large. Separate objects often communicate with each other. That means maintaining a large codebase like this for years (including changes) is complex. Abstraction is a concept aiming to ease the problem. Each object should only expose a high-level mechanism for using it. This mechanism should hide the internal implementation details. For example, you interact with your phone without knowing what is going on inside it.

Abstraction

In OOP design, one problem is that objects are often very similar but not entirely the same. One way to reuse the common logic and extract the unique logic into a separate class is with inheritance. We can form a hierarchy by creating a (child) class derived from another (parent) class, but implementing its own unique part.

Inheritance

Polymorphism means many shapes in Greek. Sometimes we want to use a collection that contains a mix of classes or have a method implemented for the parent class but would like to use it for the children too. This problem can be solved using polymorphism - a way to use a class precisely like its parent, so there’s no confusion with mixing types. Each child class keeps its own methods as they are.&nbsp;

Polymorphism

Have you noticed how the same cliche questions always get asked at job interviews — over and over again? As trivial as questions like these may be, they are important because they give clues about…

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For Series A/B/C investors , the first part of the Typeform then looked like this:&nbsp;<ul><li>“How much ARR — quite roughly — do you expect a SaaS company to have when it raises its Series A/B/C round?”&nbsp;</li><li>“What kind of y/y ARR growth gets you excited when you’re considering an investment? ”&nbsp;</li><li>“And what kind of y/y ARR growth do you expect in the 12 months following your investment ?”&nbsp;</li><li>“Optional question: What are the Top 3 things you’re looking for when you assess a potential SaaS Series A/B/C investment?”&nbsp;</li></ul>

Wanting to know: From series A/B/C investors

Most of the seed investors asked didn’t give very high ratings for Product/Market Fit, paying customers, and revenue.&nbsp;Founders with a proven track record are somewhat important to most seed investors, but the highest rating by far got the strong technical co-founder. It looks like most seed investors are willing to take a large — maybe surprisingly large — degree of market risk, but they want to minimize the amount of tech risk.

What seed investors are looking for

About two years ago I thought about the question of what it takes to raise capital, in SaaS, in 2016 and tried to give an answer that would fit on the proverbial back of a napkin. The result was the…

Jeffrey Barr@jebarr