Part 4 of 7: It takes a SPARC to ignite growth

The SPARC framework ensures a holistic approach to investments across the 7As. Ignite growth across the 7As customer journey with clear priorities and intentional investment.

• Strategy: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? What will we prioritize and invest in – and perhaps most importantly what will we not? What will we strive to excel in? How will we find and remove friction across the 7As customer journey? How will we create customer-led growth and build product-market fitness? Are we being ambitious, bold, creative, and decisive enough? What’s the Level of Impact? What’s the Level of Effort? What’s the ROI?

• People: What kinds of people will we need? What are the capabilities we need to navigate the headwinds? Who is the best, brightest, rightest, and fittest for each role? How do we empower and elevate our people to fully realize their potential for peak performance?

• Alignment: Who will lead each of our strategic priorities? How will we structure our teams internally, formally, informally, and align together to support our customers, each other, and other teams? How will we assemble, agree, and align the highest-performing teams on the highest-impact goals and strategies?

• Routines: How will we make strategic decisions and tradeoffs? How will we operationalize the strategy? How will we get things done within our team and with others? How will we create consistent, healthy habits? What’s the best way to get work done? How can we improve how the work is done? How will we make the routine effortlessly routine to make space for strategy and creativity? Is this process making the work better than it was? What are the soul-sucking routines and ways of working that we need to eliminate or evolve?

• Culture: How will we elevate play, purpose, and potential? What will we high-five, celebrate, and recognize and reward our people for? How will we create an environment and culture for our people and company to thrive and grow? How will we define what high performance looks like? How will we measure performance qualitatively and quantitatively? What are the soft and hard metrics that matter? What are our values? How will we walk the talk on our values?

Next up, Part 5 will introduce the ruthlessly clarifying PST audit/assessment/action framework for prioritizing investments.