In a startup, your priorities change weekly. Sometimes daily. That’s not dysfunction — it’s the whole advantage. You’re small enough to turn on a dime, and turning on a dime is how you find product-market fit before you run out of money.
Then you scale, and the same instinct starts to kill you. The daily pivot that felt like agility now reads as whiplash to a team of two hundred. People can’t tell what matters this month. Work gets started and quietly abandoned. Everyone’s busy and nothing compounds. The thing that made you fast is now the thing making you slow.
The fix is goal setting — done at a higher altitude than the one you’re used to. And that altitude is the part founders find hardest. In the early days you set goals for the quarter, maybe the month. As a scaleup CEO you’re setting the direction for the year and beyond. Not quarterly OKRs you set and forget — a strategic vision that can actually guide the company’s trajectory for twelve months or more. Thinking that far out feels unnatural at first. Do it anyway.
Why I use V2MOM
There are plenty of frameworks — OKRs are the most common in tech, and they’re fine. Use what works for you. I use V2MOM, the method Salesforce popularized. I learned it running the Data.com business unit there, and I’ve used it ever since. It stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures. It’s simple, and it forces the thing that matters: getting everyone aligned not just on what we’re doing, but why and how.
Here’s how I actually run it. I draft my V2MOM in a Google Doc and hand it to my exec team for feedback. It’s not a co-creation exercise — it’s a collaborative one. I own the document, but I want them poking holes in it, telling me where something feels off. Once it’s refined, the whole company gets it. Everyone can read it, comment on it, and understand where we’re headed. It covers every major function and the measures we’ll use to track progress, and every one of my execs should understand not just their piece but how the pieces fit.
No secret projects
Once it exists, we don’t file it away. We come back to it constantly — all-hands, quarterly offsites, leadership reviews. It’s a living document, and it’s supposed to be in the room when we make decisions.
Every member of my exec team writes and publishes their own V2MOM too, laying out how their function ladders up to the company goals. The whole company can see all of them. That’s the point. No secret projects, no hidden agendas, no team quietly optimizing for something the rest of us can’t see. Transparency is what turns alignment into accountability.
Be ready to adapt — but don’t overreact
Things change. Markets shift, competitors show up, the economy does what it does. Sometimes you’ll need to adjust the plan, and that’s fine — just tread lightly. Moving the goalposts every few weeks does more damage than whatever you were trying to fix; the team stops trusting that this quarter’s priority will survive to next quarter. When you do change direction, say why, plainly, so nobody’s guessing.
Here’s the truth most people don’t expect: in most years, my V2MOM doesn’t change at all. Not a word. It’s a broad document about the direction of the company, and direction isn’t something that should be shifting all the time. If you find yourself rewriting it constantly, the problem isn’t the document — it’s your planning process at the start of the year.
Direction, not micromanaging
The whole thing only works if you remember what you’re actually doing. You’re not prescribing how every task gets done. You hired experts for a reason — set the direction, name the problems that need solving, be clear about what the result has to look like, and then get out of the way. The measures exist to guide your team, not to fence them in. Leave them the room to find a better path to the target than the one you’d have drawn yourself.
That’s the framework. It only works if it’s alive — top of mind all year, not a document you write in January and rediscover in December. Which is really a question of cadence, and that’s the next post.
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