And now? Ah, good. I see everyone is already here. Sorry for making you wait; there was an overlap with another meeting. My schedule has been packed lately. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble. So, to the essence:

I want to communicate to you some context to make sure we’re all well aligned, on the same page, and we’re not boiling the ocean. I’m here just to check in, give you a helicopter view, then do a deep dive and zoom out back to the big picture.

As per my last message in #general, we needed a major paradigm shift to find the product-market fit. Throughout the last quarter, we worked hard with the tiger team ideating on the product strategy, and we were fully on track to identify the pain points, related low-hanging fruits, and align on key deliverables so we could get full buy-in from stakeholders, but due to time constraints, we had to pivot and dropped the ball.

Our project was mission-critical for the company, and now, due to the key performance metrics being outside of the desired OKR brackets and the vision not being fully aligned with the company North Star, the leadership is planning to restructure the department. My take on it is that we’re making a step in the right direction, optimising processes, and ensuring we keep focused on our top priorities. Full disclosure: it means that some branches will have to be sunset. The workforce rightsizing will be limited, and I will stay the head of the department, so most of you should not expect to be affected in any way at all. The others will receive an email stating otherwise within the next several days.

The times ahead are challenging and exciting, and now, more than ever before, we must leverage team synergy and focus on reaching milestones in time. Now it’s your turn to take action on that. There is a crucial ask for you: engage with each other, mind meld and come up with something buzzworthy, something that would establish our mission to disrupt the status quo in the industry. We are in what we here call “The Blue Ocean”, and it is an uphill battle, so we all have to learn to move fast to be the mouse that churned the cream into butter, and the rest will drown.

I hope you have the capacity to act according to the full delivery cycle: “ideate, productise, dogfood, release, iterate!” For your reference, I will share the “Ways of Thinking 101” keynote. There are eye-opening insights, and I hope you will utilise them properly. Let’s pressure test the market! Just keep me in the loop to make sure we are not cannibalising or reinventing the wheel.

I have a hard stop in a minute, so we don’t have much time left for Q&A. Let’s put a pin on it and circle back to it later so that we have another chance for a drill down. I hope I gave you enough heads-up on the key happenings, do not hesitate to reach out!

In case you want to take it offline, shoot me an email or feel free to jump in Zoom; I’ll have bandwidth starting next month. Looking forward to hearing from you, and have a good weekend, everyone!

Bye! 👋