Setting KPIs to drive your culture

You know them, those glossy posters on your office walls, proudly displaying your company's values. They look great, but let's be honest - how often do they actually influence decision-making?

The hard truth is that values only become actionable when they're included in performance metrics. People, whether they're individual contributors, team leads, or functional managers, will naturally gravitate towards behaviors that hit targets and advance their careers. So, if we want to cultivate a specific culture, we need to ensure our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are in alignment with our desired values.

Let's break it down:

1. Individual Contributors: KPIs to measure effort and attitude as well as ability.

2. Teams: KPIs to measure outcomes instead of time and cost

3. Functional Managers: KPIs to measure people management and strategy instead of utilisation rates and predictability.

Ready to dive deeper into aligning your company's values with its performance metrics? I've explored this topic in depth in my article below.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Defining KPIs to drive the Culture you Want by Rory Madden
They say culture east strategy for breakfast. But people respond to incentives. Intentionally setting the KPIs based on your Values and Principles helps to influence the organisational culture.

Questions about Team Topologies by Andy Butcher
A great post where Andy digs into some of the complexities of team design with input from Matthew Skelton from Team Topologies.

Product Direction

Advanced Techniques for Enhancing Product Quality with LLM: A Guide to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by Go Practice
Explore advanced methods for boosting product quality using large language models (LLMs), focusing on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Learn how integrating search results can enhance your product's features and user experience.

OKRs Beyond Outcomes by Tim Herbig
Solely focusing on Outcomes isn’t always the best choice for every product team. Instead, expanding their perspective of what OKRs can do for their progress and success beyond Outcomes is critical.

Continuous Research

The 5 Stages of UX-Career Progression by Rachel Krause
Individuals at different career stages have different challenges, opportunities, and ways to level up.

How To Start A UXR Practice From Scratch In 90 Days by Caitlin Sullivan
Caitlin helps early-stage startups set up successful UX research practices. Here, she shares her 7-step, 90-day process when starting from scratch.

Continuous Design

Rethinking The Role Of Your UX Teams And Move Beyond Firefighting by Paul Boag
Most UX teams are significantly under-resourced. Paul explains how UX teams can be transformed into a significant driver of customer-centric innovation within organizations.

Should You Pursue A Career In Design Engineering? by Sean Voisen
Sean shares perspectives on this emerging discipline that can help you determine whether it’s right for you

Continuous Delivery

How to Document Software Architecture: Techniques and Best Practices by Luca Mezzalira
Documenting software architecture is essential for aligning teams, scaling businesses, and empowering developers.

Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment by Nelson Elhage
An overview of the tools and environment Stripe engineers used written by a former Striper.

UXDX EMEA Spotlight:
Transforming Internal Platform Management for Product Team Success

Learn how deliveroo are adopting a customer-centric approach for internal teams to significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their platform development at UXDX EMEA.

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Video of the Week:
How to Build an AI Powered Development Process

Anthony from Airtable shares the inside scoop on how his team has transformed their entire product development process using AI. From automating tedious tasks to uncovering hidden insights, learn how AI supercharged their feedback management, accelerated project timelines, and revolutionized prioritization. If you're looking to scale smarter and streamline your workflows, this is a must-watch!👇👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: What is the culture at your company?

34.76% of people said their company culture was mostly Pathological. While it is given a bad sounding name it is not all bad. As one person commented:

Bureuacratic came in second place with 28% of the vote. Again, bureacuratic structures have their place. When companies are successful they want to ensure that poor service and bad decisions don’t kill the “golden goose”. The challenge is that the pendulum swings too far and companies become too set in their ways which increases the risk of failure as they can’t react quickly enough to changing conditions.

Finally, generative (22.56%) and mix (14.63%) rounded out the poll.