Marcus Orochena

Keeping things simple

Meaningful Output

2024-10-20

  • one way to measure organization health or success is by evaluating meaningful output against resources spent
  • meaningful output are activities, products, or services that directly contribute to the organization's core objectives. some examples:
    • (software company) shipping software to customers
    • (trucking company) transporting and delivering customers' goods
    • (healthcare provider) administering effective medical treatments
  • in this context, you can divide roles in the organization into two - primary and support roles
    • primary roles directly contribute to meaningful output, examples:
      • (software company) software engineers, marketing, sales
      • (trucking company) truck drivers
      • (healthcare provider) doctors/physicians, nurses
    • support roles make primary roles more effective and efficient
      • (software company) product managers, QA, IT
      • (trucking company) dispatchers, fleet technicians
      • (healthcare provider) medical assistants, administrative staff
  • when developing systems and processes to develop the organization, it's important to maximize meaningful output with a slower rate of resource consumption relative to output growth
  • when organizations do a poor job of this, they may eventually become a bureaucracy
  • some ways to ensure alignment between systems and processes and meaningful growth:
    1. ensure meaningful outputs are clearly defined and communicated to all roles across the organization
    2. understand the difference between different roles and how they affect meaningful output. a common mistake is to introduce a process that increases the output of support roles at the expense of the output of primary roles
    3. ensure incentives are aligned, and that employees are rewarded for increasing the organization's meaningful output, not rewarded for other things (visibility, validating the ego of their supervisors, etc.)
  • there is a simple four-step process for ensuring alignment of a given system or process that can be followed
    1. have a clear problem statement that is aligned with a given meaningful output
    2. have a clear target metric to measure, if the meaningful output cannot be used directly
    3. map out how the system or process affects different roles in the organization
    4. review the metric regularly to determine if the system or process is worth keeping