The document summarizes Moz's strategic initiatives and roadmap for 2014. The three strategic initiatives are: 1) Improve retention in every customer cohort, 2) Return to profitability, and 3) Launch Moz Local and learn. Everything Moz works on must map to one of these initiatives and be measurable. Moz also discusses its vision, values, and the process for crafting the roadmap, which involved listing projects, retention data, and team planning meetings. In the future, Moz hopes to make the planning process more inclusive of diverse groups through "Adventure Teams" that are responsible for solutions.
2. Topics:
1. Where We’re At (performed in the style of Star Trek)
2. Re-visiting Moz’s Vision-Based Framework
3. Strategic Initiatives for 2014
4. Our Roadmap & the Launch of Adventure Teams
30. The Reality
Thanks to our line of credit, we still have a long
runway.
Retention hasn’t gotten much worse; it just hasn’t
gotten better.
By being cautious and conservative, we can be
profitable again in June 2014.
The worst part – the waiting & wondering - is behind
us. Now we just need to make our subscription
better and delight our customers.
32. Why Does a Company Exist?
“Many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply
to make money. While this is an important result of a
company’s existence, we have to go deeper and find the
real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we
inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people
get together and exist as an institution that we call a
company so they are able to accomplish something
collectively that they could not accomplish separately—they
make a contribution to society."
- David Packard
34. Defining Core Purpose
Purpose (which should last at least 100 years) should not be
confused with specific goals or business strategies (which
should change many times in 100 years). Whereas you might
achieve a goal or complete a strategy, you cannot fulfill a
purpose; it is like a guiding star on the horizon -- forever
pursued but never reached. Yet although purpose itself does
not change, it does inspire change. The very fact that purpose
can never be fully realized means that an organization can
never stop stimulating change and progress.
- Jim Collins
35. Our Core Purpose (aka “Mission”)
Moz's mission is to help people
do better marketing.
36. Defining Core Values
Core values are the essential and enduring tenets of an
organization. A small set of timeless guiding principles, core
values require no external justification; they have intrinsic
value and importance to those inside the organization…
Ralph S. Larsen, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, puts it this way:
"The core values embodied in our credo might be a
competitive advantage, but that is not why we have them.
We have them because they define for us what we stand
for, and we would hold them even if they became a
competitive disadvantage in certain situations.“
- Jim Collins
37. Our Core Values
Transparent
Authentic
Generous
Fun
Empathetic
Exceptional
38. Defining Strategic Vision
Strategy takes what you want to achieve and develops a plan
to get there. From strategy you can develop tactics and
implement them. For me, strategy is as much about what you
are not going to do as what you are going to do.
Strategy is important because the resources available to
achieve your goals are limited.
- Fred Wilson
39. We Believe (and have evidence) that Marketing
Spend & Effort Will Shift from the Red to the Blue
40. Our Strategic Vision
Power the shift from interruption to
inbound marketing by giving every
marketer affordable software to
measure and improve their efforts.
42. In the future, we might
help marketers in these
areas, too.
43. Defining a BHAG
To build a visionary company, you need to counterbalance its
fixed core ideology with a relentless drive for progress.
One way to bring that drive for progress to life is
through BHAGs (short for Big Hairy Audacious Goals). With his
very first dime store in 1945, Sam Walton set the BHAG to
“make my little Newport store the best, most profitable in
Arkansas within five years.” As the company grew, Walton
set BHAG after BHAG, including the still-in-place goal to
become a $125-billion company by the year 2000. The point is
not to find the “right” BHAGs but to create BHAGs so clear,
compelling, and imaginative that they fuel progress.
- Jim Collins
44. NASA’s 1960s BHAG
To put a man on the surface of the
Moon, and return him safely to the Earth.
45. Our BHAG
A quarter million people paying to
use Moz’s products by May 29th, 2018
47. Earlier This Year, I Talked About Five
1. Increase customer retention in every cohort
2. Return to profitability
3. Reach a broader marketing audience with our
products, content, and brand
4. Remove reliance on Google data
5. Improve Moz’s company culture
48. For 2014, We Only Have Three:
#1: Improve Retention in Every Cohort
#2: Return to Profitability
#3: Launch Moz Local & Learn
49. Why Remove Culture?
Because being TAGFEE is not a temporary, strategic
initiative. It’s not a goal we will accomplish, celebrate, and be
done with. It won’t shift in 12-18 months.
Culture is permanently important – it must infuse all of our
efforts forever.
Having culture as a strategic initiative confuses the definition
and purpose of both culture and strategic initiatives.
50. Why Remove Broader Audience?
We need to focus on delighting our current audience before
we expand into more new markets.
SEO alone continues to grow fast, and both content & social
marketers are including SEO into their workflow (just as
SEOs are including content/social in theirs). If we can build a
great product for this base, we have a great opportunity (and
a lot of learnings we can apply) to reach less SEO-focused
folks in the future.
Moz Local is a big bet on its own and a great way to reach a
broader audience in 2014.
51. Why Remove Dependence on Google?
Google Analytics has been good to us, and doesn’t appear to
be a short term risk (as it did earlier this year).
With the disappearance of keyword traffic data, rankings are
more critical than ever to understanding how
campaigns/pages perform. Hence, we can’t empathetically
serve our customers in the next few years without rankings
data (and Google appears not to be actively working against
us or others who get that data).
52. Why Make Retention Such a Focus?
Retention is extremely well correlated with customer happiness. If
we’re to be empathetic to our customers, retention is the best way to
measure success.
In any future liquidity event, retention will be a huge part of how we’re
valued. Every dollar we make is worth more if we improve retention.
Retention is something everyone at the company can directly and
indirectly impact, and something we can all see and measure
together.
Retention means higher CLTV, which means better margins, and an
easier time staying profitable as we grow.
53. Why Do We Need to Be Profitable?
Profitability lets us control our own destiny vs. being beholden to
raising future rounds of investment, and potentially losing our ability
to prioritize the culture we want.
Profitability means we can make investments in long-term bets (like
we did with Wonk, Local, Moz Analytics, etc).
Being profitable reduces risk that we’d need to take more drastic
cost-cutting measures in the future.
Profitability removes the emotional challenges that a limited runway
create.
54. Everything we work on must be:
1) Mapped to either retention, profitability, or Moz
Local
2) Measurable with numbers that are made
transparent to everyone at the company
3) Prioritized against other things that can move
the needle on these initiatives
56. Here’s How We Crafted the Current Roadmap
List of active and
backlogged projects
from teams
Retention, cancellation,
and usage data from
Alyson
Eteam planning
meeting facilitated by
Tim & Karen
57. Here’s How We Crafted the Current Roadmap
Every priority had to fit 1+ of the following:
Usability, Stability, Accuracy
Discoverability
Highly Requested by Users
Big Innovation / Game Changer
Creates Advantage Over Competition
Reduces Costs
58. Tim & Karen then circulated to each team to get
feedback + input, which led to this:
Adam will share more
about this in his
presentation
59. How Will We Do This in The Future?
Some folks like the top down approach
But we believe great solutions should come from
more diverse groups, and that, long-term, planning
should be more inclusive.
The future process is still TBD, but the hope is to
make the Eteam + Board responsible for defining
problems, and Adventure Teams responsible for
solutions.