FAQ
- Neil Emeigh
We recognize that cramming something like a purpose statement (something that should last hundreds of years) into one sentence can lead to many questions and clarifications. The intent of every one of our principles (purpose, vision, mission, BHAG) is to be succinct and memorable in their one sentence form, while offering a larger narrative around that one sentence on their individual pages.
Even still, you may have questions on some of the finer points - so here is our living FAQ to answer those!
Q: What’s next with this Playbook?
Ans: This is just the first iteration! A step in the right direction. There is no greater inspiration (in our opinion) than Gitlab’s fully open handbook: The Handbook. We intend to follow their leadership in setting good, context-leading, guides on how (and why) our company runs. The next major steps (as of April 2024) that we will be doing is:
Distill Purpose, Mission, and Vision into a 1-sentence structure so that it retains its essence and is memorable. The context is here for launch day, but we will make it easy to remember in the near future.
Defining clear goals around the principles described so far. Yes, we have a BHAG, but that’s 16 (!) years away. We want to bring more clarity to our day-to-day, and that will be a critical next step to go from theory into practice. For example, if we need to reach 2m people by 2040, then how many customers do we need to help bring their great ideas to life in 2024? These are the questions we’ll work backwards from and define a strategy accordingly.
Assessing how we are doing with our major stakeholders of our business, inspired by Conscious Capitalism, and then building a roadmap on how we can elevate our service to each. The book recommends reviewing 6, but encourages that we select the ones we feel are authentic to us: customers, employees, vendors, profit, community, and environment. We will review each of these and determine where we’re lacking and prioritize activities from there.
Reviewing our core values. In Feb 2023, we announced Sprious 3.0. In that announcement, we admitted: “Hey! This won’t be 100% perfect, but it will be close.”. We feel we accomplished that goal, but have noticed some core values are used and talked about more than others, which is great data to go back to the drawing board!
Q: At Sprious, we’ve had a few mission statements by now. What makes these different? Will this change again in the future?
On the Purpose page, it explains that a purpose statement should be true for hundreds of years. That’s hard to wrap one’s mind around! But, as we interviewed team members about the new purpose statement, we heard a resounding refrain: “Wow… this is it!”. So, the purpose statement will never change. It’s intentionally broad and will always be true to us.
However, where things may change is within the Mission . As stated on its page, a mission statement can and should change to reflect our present-day strategy. Today, that looks a certain way, but will it look the same 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now? The exact mission itself may change to accommodate our present day strategy, however, it will always serve its role in bridging the gap between our purpose and our vision.
The BHAG also comes with an expiration date - 2040, in the current implementation. We will always have a BHAG, but not the same BHAG.
Q: How do these concepts apply to my day-to-day life at Sprious? What does it all mean in practice?
Ans: These concepts are a means to bring inspiration, motivation, and focus to our organization. If everyone is bought into them, we all may row the boat in the same direction. However, as noted, we also intend to drill these ideas down into more tangible goals for us all to work towards in the coming months. In the meantime, we ask that everyone consider every decision through a lens of these four concepts. Let’s take some examples:
Example 1: We want to launch a new marketing campaign
The questions the marketing team should be asking themselves first and foremost: “Will this campaign help more people bring their great ideas to life?”, “Does this campaign bring the best out of people, giving them a chance to express their individual genius and do something really great?”, and more like these. The importance is that we are starting our campaign discussions with the purpose in mind, flowing through to our vision, mission, and BHAG.
Example 2: We want to build a new product
We should be asking ourselves: “Who is the target audience? Is it for enterprises, or consumers?” and “Does this product represent a ‘hammer’ which allows someone to build something great, or is it more like an end-product which doesn’t allow a great idea to be brought to life?” Questions like these will hold us accountable in deciding which products and features we will build as we aim to help as many people as possible bring their great ideas to life.
Q: You mention in our BHAG that we will aim to target B2C/SMB customers, rather than B2B. Does that mean we will never accept business from enterprise customers? Does it mean we will turn away our existing enterprise customers?
Ans: The short answer is “no, we will not turn away existing or new enterprise customers”. The point here is that we will target B2C and SMBs with our marketing, customer support, products, sales, and more, but if an enterprise reviews our product and determines it is a good fit for them, then by all means we would love to work with them! Some examples of how this will look in practice:
Product: our products will be self-service and will never require a sales person to talk to you before you can use the product (such is the case with B2B products). The products will be built in a way that aims to serve as many people as possible in the target market, rather than specialized for only a certain group of talent.
Marketing: Our marketing will reflect content and acquisition channels that “help everyone bring their great ideas to life”. Videos on our site, blog content we publish, and more, will focus on helping consumers, rather than explaining complex B2B topics. Our efforts will be based on a “1 to many” approach.
Sales: Sales personnel will be looped in if and when a customer seeks to understand our product more, but we will never require someone to talk to a sales person. We believe our product should be intuitive enough that it should sell itself, but we also respect the desires of some customers needing help and that’s where our sales team will come in to guide them along.
Customer Success/Support: Our CS team is trained to help all customers. In our early days when our founder started the company, he was regularly doing support to hundreds of customers paying for our lowest tier product ($2.50/mo) because he felt so strongly that each person was valuable to the company.
Q: That sounds nice, but I see us putting a lot of attention and excitement behind some enterprises. How do you reconcile that with the B2C/SMB focus?
Ans: Once again, practicality comes into the picture. If an enterprise client says “we like your product, and we want to pay you an amount of money that justifies the effort to support us”, then we’re not going to say “nope, sorry” - it wouldn’t be reasonable business practice to do so. The intent is that we won’t go out of our way to build product/marketing/sales to target this persona, but if they fall in love with our product and people, then we would love to welcome them on board!
Q: How can I ask questions or suggest changes to the Playbook?
Ans: Please fill out your question/suggestion in this form: https://forms.gle/4uG6FZgBdWyXyMh2A