MSPOTs: the Secret to Focus and Alignment
When you’re a startup, focus and alignment are everything. There are so many things you can do to move the needle, what are the best possible things to do?
When you’re a scale-up, focus and alignment are everything. There are so many people working on so many projects, how do you keep everyone moving in the same direction?
At every stage of growth, focus and alignment are everything. It’s the difference between moving fast or stumbling, taking on too much or not doing enough.
At HubSpot, our primary tool for creating focus and alignment–at every stage of growth and every level of the company is MSPOTs.
A brief history of MSPOTs
Back when Marc Benioff was working at Oracle, before he built one of the most impressive SaaS companies ever (Salesforce), he found himself frustrated by the lack of company vision and alignment:
What I yearned for at Oracle was clarity on our vision and the goals we wanted to achieve. As I started to manage my own divisions, I found that I personally lacked the tools to spell out what we needed to do and a simple a process to communicate it. The problem only increased as the teams that I was managing increased.
He started talking to leadership and personal development experts, even spiritual gurus, about this problem, and eventually, he started to see some common threads in their advice. This led to the development of V2MOMs, an acronym that stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures.
This simple framework became the “glue” that kept the team focused and moving in the same direction.
When we were growing HubSpot, V2MOMs became the primary source of inspiration for how we thought about focus and alignment.
How MSPOTs work
Our version of V2MOMs is MSPOTs, slightly different, a little more “HubSpotty,” but the goal is the same — create focus and alignment.
Our acronym stands for:
- Mission: What is our big-picture vision?
- Strategy: How are we going to get there?
- Plays: What are the core plays of that strategy?
- Omissions: What will we not be doing as a result of our chosen strategy?
- Targets: How will we hold ourselves accountable to these goals?
Seems easy right? Just pop some ideas into a PowerPoint template and you’ve got yourself some MSPOTs!
…not so fast.
MSPOTs are not an end in and of themselves. MSPOTs can help you get to focus and alignment, but they don’t create it. Alignment and focus comes from doing the hard work of thinking, planning, and communicating.
For us, the highest-level MSPOT is set by the executive team. That’s where we determine the strategic direction in which we’re heading. But the execution of that strategy is very bottoms-up. Every VP is working with their directors, managers, and individual contributors to solve the “how.” This is where buy-in is created, and this is where the power of MSPOTs comes from.
Here’s how it works for us.
This past July, our executive team packed our bags and headed to Maine for our 3-day, annual off-site. This is when we view our business through the widest frame — thinking about where we want to be in 5 years, looking at market trends, and how we’ll stay competitive. Think of this as phase one of MSPOT planning. We’re starting to focus.
Phase two is when we started coming up with the plan for how to move toward that strategic vision in the upcoming year. Over the next few months, based on the discussions at the July off-site, each department began fleshing out its MSPOTs, thinking about how any individual team could contribute to the big-picture vision of the company. Now we’re starting to align.
In Q4, we enter phase 3. We begin dedicating about 50% of our monthly, 9-hour HELM meetings to translating the big ideas from the offsite into actionable plays, distilling the contributions of each team, and aligning around selected plays.
While we might only spend a few hours translating all this thinking into our MSPOTs template, it’s safe to assume that we’re spending about 1,080 executive hours on the thinking and planning that goes into those MSPOTs. That’s a half million dollar plus investment in getting focus and alignment right.
And we do this every year.
Then throughout the year, at every HELM meeting, and every team meeting we’re looking at the MSPOTs. There it is — color-coded in red and green — where we’re excelling and where we’re coming up short. We’re constantly using data to hold ourselves accountable to the strategy we laid out in our MSPOTs. That’s focus.
Focus doesn’t just happen. It’s a byproduct of shared vision. And vision comes from talking, sharing, looking at data, and updating assumptions. If you’re not doing that work upfront, don’t bother with MSPOTs, or V2MOMs or OKRs, or finding the one metric that matters, or any other goal-setting framework — none of them will work.
How MSPOTs have evolved
We adopted MSPOTs from V2MOMs, and we’ve continued to tweak this framework over the years. I think this is important. It’s comforting to slap an “approved” framework onto your business, it gives you a lot of confidence, but you need to figure out what works for you.
And while the framework has stayed the same for over half a decade, MSPOTs are evolving alongside us.
For example, the O in MSPOT used to stand for Obstacle, but over time, we found that one of the biggest challenge to hitting our goals was that other really fantastic plays come up along the way. We needed guardrails to help us know when something was in misalignment with the strategy we laid out at the start of the year — what we would NOT do. It’s easy to get distracted, and then before you know it, you’re missing your core objectives. So the O became Omissions.
A few months ago some members of our executive team went out to the west coast to meet with Facebook, a company we admire for being absolutely rigorous about committing to goals. One thing they shared is that they actually expect to miss their goals. In fact, they only expect to hit about 70% of any goal. If they’re hitting 80% that means they didn’t set an aggressive enough goal.
We loved this.
Our MSPOTs have historically included both Targets and Stretch Goals. This year, we’re throwing out stretch targets and moving toward an approach that’s closer to Facebook’s. We’re not quite ready to say we only want to hit 70% of our goals :) but we are pushing ourselves to hold our teams and ourselves to a higher standard.
Give it a try
In our culture code we talk about hiring people with HEART (humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, transparent. We define effective as people who get shit done and take ownership for their success. You might also call this autonomy.
And in an autonomous culture, people can only be effective when they have a clear direction on where the company is going. This is what Marc Benioff was looking for at Oracle. This is where so many companies end up wasting valuable talent. MSPOTs are an incredibly valuable tool to keep your employees focused on the path forward, and focus is everything.
