A coach describes working with a funded SaaS company that struggled despite talent and product-market fit. He introduced a one-page job scorecard to clarify outcomes, actions, essential skills, values fit, and key metrics; the team later overcomplicated the scorecards into multi-page documents, which undermined their usefulness. The coach emphasizes simplicity, warns against perfectionism and overworking tools, and recommends accountability (buddies, coaches) to preserve clarity. A closing promotional segment advertises Align’s Scoreboard software (aligntoday.com) as a tool for tracking KPIs and priorities.
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So let's talk about a SaaS company that I was coaching some years ago. SaaS company had great talent on the team, plenty of funding, a good product, and yet the people were really struggling and frustrated and they weren't sure what to do. And the people felt like they were failing. And in fact, the CEO of the company often felt like the people were failing. So to clear things up, we introduced the job scorecard. It's one of the core tools that we use with our teams in the people side of things to bring clarity to both hiring and performance management over time. Job scorecard, simpler, easier than something like a job description because it hones in and focuses on one page. It gets clear, what are the outcomes, what are the actions, what are the essential skills? How does a person fit the company values? What does this job do? What are the key metrics? So all that simply set on one simple page. And we introduced that with this team. We did the first draft of them and then I heard over the course of the coming quarter that it wasn't working, that people were frustrated that it hadn't fixed the problems that it was supposed to fix. And I'm like, oh God, how could that be? What could go on? So I was going back to meet with the team and I got in a day early to go do some individual one on one meetings before the quarterly planning session. And I went around and I said, talk to me about this job scorecard and share with me yours and where is it an issue and that kind of thing. And people pulled out their final or near final draft of their job scorecard and they had all gone from one page to seven or eight pages and people's eyes glazed over, they didn't know what to do. It was completely frustrating for them. And I suddenly saw the problem. Very often you and I as leaders in businesses, over complicate things. We take a one page business plan and we make it 98 pages. We take a one page job scorecard, we make it eight or 10 pages, and in doing so, we screw up the elegant simplicity of something that works. So I think this is the key thing. A job scorecard is a really powerful tool, like many of our tools, but you can undo it by insisting on and overworking it. I think that at the heart of it is perfectionism. Trying to get every last thing in there and get it so right and fussing over it will actually do violence, do damage to the elegance and the potential opportunity of this to be a powerful tool. So look around you, where are you getting in the way of something either making something too long or like too long in time, drawing it out, not getting it done and putting into use or taking a simple thing and making it more complicated, adding more pages, more things, things to a plan, a tool or whatever than there really need to be. Where are you doing that? That gets in the way of your business? That robs the clarity and the focus of it and just overwhelms people with all the details. It's really easy to do when you're trying to manage something and you see the complexity of a thing, but it's also powerful to resist it. And you can certainly get help with a buddy, an accountability buddy, an advisor, coach, like whatever. All those kinds of things can make a difference to help you step outside of your own world and your own perspective and help bring clarity and simplicity to things. I hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again soon.
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