Good people

The first step to making great solutions isn’t defining a good problem. It’s ensuring there are good people to solve good problems.

In ‘Good to Great’, Jim Collins observed, “Great companies…start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”

When I joined The Iconic, the company had the right people in the wrong seats. The company was organised in a functional structure by business unit.

One of the company values was, “We get things done.” However, the organisational structure restricted the company’s ability to achieve that.

Collaboration was low, and speed to market was slow. Getting things done required negotiating with multiple business units’ resources and priorities.

Outcomes were weak, and accountability was unclear. Outputs were business unit-centric, not customer-centric, with a lack of direct responsibility for customer touchpoints.

Inspired by Spotify’s agile teams, the Dubberly experience cycle, and startup metrics for pirates, I sat down with The Iconic’s Managing Director, Adam Jacobs, and proposed organising the company in a matrix structure by customer experience cycle.

Roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines changed.

So did the organisational chart.

The result? Cross-functional teams with customer-centric objectives and performance targets.

“By doing that, it means they don’t depend on other parts of the business. They’re completely independent, they can experiment very quickly, they own their own roadmap and they tend to deliver higher-quality technology in a much faster period of time,” Adam Jacobs said in a Financial Review article.

Good people organised to focus on good problems.