Pravir was hired by the CEO of Duck-duck Technologies to lead new initiatives. Duck-duck is a leader in the food-delivery space with a good product-market fit but still not fully profitable. The CEO and the board saw opportunities beyond food delivery. They wanted to make big bets on adjacent spaces. The startup was considering entering grocery, pharma delivery and also wanted to integrate supplies to restaurants. There were too many exciting things to dream about and pull off. Needless to say that Pravir was very excited. He was previously an entrepreneur himself and specialized in building 0 to 1 products and was the right guy for this job.
Pravir and his small team created 3 business plans of which the CEO liked two of them. They were allotted a small team of Engineers to execute these two projects.
However, things did not move as planned. Two months passed, but the product/engg teams hardly delivered anything useful. Engineers were regularly pulled out of these projects into other “important” work. Pravir and his team were very frustrated and escalated this to the product & engg leadership. All they got to hear back were excuses. It was always some other high priority in the core food delivery business that took away all the resources. As this trend continued, Pravir escalated this problem to the CEO and when the CEO questioned the engineering leadership they cited some important issues that needed the help of these two engineers. The CEO acknowledged that the reasons were genuine and couldn’t help Pravir. Pravir got so frustrated that he wondered why he was hired in the first place when was neither given the resources nor the authority.
The deep dive…Â
He pondered over this situation and realized that he might be missing something here. To understand this better, he started joining his peers from different teams including product & engineering for tea and lunch. During those friendly informal conversations, he tried to grasp the mood of the people and what they thought about new initiatives.
This is what he found – Most people felt that the company should be focusing on core business (i.e. food delivery), make that business profitable, and then only think of starting new businesses. They felt the management wasn’t “focused”. This was a revelation for Pravir.
Pravir now looked at this from their point of view and that did make sense. He introspected whether this was indeed the right time for the company to start something new. He figured out that the window of opportunity was very small and the company could miss out on these opportunities to some other startup if they don’t act NOW.
Action…
With this clarity, he went about convincing the key stakeholders who control the resources required for the success of new initiatives. Instead of waiting for them to tell him their concerns about new initiatives, he brought up the uncomfortable topics himself and shared the facts that the stakeholders were earlier not aware of.
He even conducted a few brown bag sessions attended by frontline employees of all departments to explain his vision and them excited.
The impact…
Slowly things started changing. Pravir saw that the stakeholders are more appreciative of the work that his team does. The allocated engineers are now fully engaged to build for new initiatives. In addition, few more folks volunteered to build prototypes over the weekend and they gave some fresh ideas to Pravir. Didn’t some burning problems in core business take away resources from new initiatives this time? Yes, there were burning problems that surfaced time and again but the product/Engg leadership team found alternate/creative ways to tackle them without disturbing the resources allocated to new initiatives.
Lessons
1. New initiatives in a company would invite critics for the right reasons. The criticism is exacerbated when the core business itself is not profitable/stable. It is very important to address the concerns and even better if you can talk openly about potential concerns irrespective of whether people explicitly question or not.
2. Employees tend to unconsciously resist doing things that they feel are not right for the company irrespective of the directives by the management. The “problem” is severe for large and complex organizations.
3. Escalations are suited to address ineptitude and not for “alignment”. Influence is the answer for alignment.
4. It is important for leaders to keep their ears on the ground and learn what’s the mood of different stakeholders.
