A month ago the SocialRank team sat down to discuss what the next few months of product would look like. We also got to talking about our company’s guiding principles and what we find important when making decisions. With Ammar and Zhanna being the catalysts we came up with our company ethos which we now call CAAH.
CAAH stands for Clean, Accessible, Actionable, and Happiness. Each one is a guiding light when we do anything at SocialRank going forward.
We had a bit of a debate within the team as to whether companies purposefully put in place guiding principles when they start or if they have a bit of historical revisionism, taking the things that worked and putting together their ethos after the fact. We decided it was a good idea to be proactive and put something in place that feels like it could cover every aspect of the business from design and product to partnerships and analytics.
CAAH was put in place for us, but can be applied to any business. Most of this stuff is obvious and things any team would want to do when building a business. With CAAH we are saying we are prioritizing these things and will be thinking about them with every company decision.
When we think of Clean, we think of the beautiful user experience for design, we think of simplicity in deal terms, we think of clearness of website copy.
When we think of Accessible, we think of our product and how we make it easy for anyone, ranging from a brand or non profit to an individual being easily able to get access to our product. Time to Value (TtV) is one of the most important things we think about around accessibility. How quickly will someone get value from our product? How accessible is it to them? But accessible doesn’t only apply to our users, it also applies to our company decision-making. Prioritization is key. How quickly will the feature we prioritize be accessible to users? Accessibility gives us a leg up with competition.
When we think of Actionable, we think of our users using SocialRank to do something with the people they find, their audience. Whether it is running a surprise and delight campaign, a local event, or a better promoted campaign through tailored audiences, we want SocialRank to be actionable.
When we think of Happiness, we think of our users and employees and what will make them and us happy. For users it is obvious, make sure they are happy using your product. If a user is upset, it should drive us to do better. For our team, life is short and building a company takes a toll. Your team is your family and happiness is one of the most important things, if not most important. Make sure you check in with your individual team members periodically to make sure they are happy in their work. If they aren’t, find out why and figure out with them how they can do work that makes them happy.
And that is as far as we have come with our company ethos. It has come up a few times since, specifically when we come to an impasse on a business or product decision, we bring CAAH up and ask ourselves if it fits with our guiding principles. If it does - we proceed. If not, we try to figure out how to make it work or decide it is not a good fit.
While the concept of CAAH is the guiding principles we look to, it doesn’t mean we are any good at them yet. Right now, our product needs to be more actionable, some features are accessible yet, pieces of the product can be more clean and lots more. It is where we want to go, but just because we want to follow CAAH, doesn’t mean we are successful, by any means, at it yet.
One small example: we just released SocialRank for Instagram on Tuesday. We lined up a few brands to showcase in the launch. We had a very simple showcase - use SocialRank, find a follower or two, and reward them publicly at launch. One very big brand wanted to do something more complex. They wanted more features than what we’d have ready by launch. We were running a tight ship for the launch and this almost became a distraction. It might have if we hadn’t brought up CAAH and saw it wasn’t clean and wasn’t accessible; it was complex and time consuming. We didn’t do it and that is okay.
I really like our company ethos and think that if you are building a business you should definitely have this type of talk with your team.