Why Setting 10x Ambitious Goals?

“To be able to motivate a team to see potential in them that they don't see in themselves, and to really push them. To set a tempo, to break something down to first principle thinking.”

This is a quote from Brian Chesky in Lenny Rachitsky 's podcast talking about why he encourages his team to set 10X ambitious goals. Being in tech startups for several years, this is a norm that I'm pretty much used to, would love to share a few thoughts on how this thinking facilitates stronger growth of individuals, and also businesses.

Think from the First Principle

"One of the best ways to get unstuck from a problem is to imagine a 10X scale or 10X better or 10X faster where you can't do the current process to do it. You have to think differently about the problem. And to think differently about the problem means you have to deeply understand the problem. And to deeply understand the problem, you have to break it into its components."

10X goals lead the team not to just focus on the optimization of existing solutions, which is impossible to change the game but to think deeply about the problem and apply the first principle to change things fundamentally.

In one of my project experiences, we were doing a good job in terms of lead generation but were struggling to move down to the funnel effectively. At first, we kept brainstorming on how to improve the existing text messaging process of Customer Success, as they're the core of the current sales pipeline, from conducting training on the tone of voice, improving product marketing, revamping lead status tracking, etc. Sadly, the performance was not moving much.

At that point, we made a giant hypothesis that the low conversion rate is because, in the current way of conversation, Customer Success is hard to provide enough context only through text messaging. So we tested multiple new flows to change the current flow fundamentally, the first experimentation is to set up a chatbot before Customer Success as the first touch to add context. However, the results showed that the chatbot did drive more engagement but still had a big gap to move along the funnel. Eventually, we implemented one extra layer of elements, which was phone calling those highly engaged leads with the chatbot for a demo booking, and then closing them there. Interestingly, we found that those “cold leads” sound much warmer than we expected and the conversion rate is decent.

With a 10X mindset going through these small-scale tests, we managed to figure out a completely new solution that solved the problems effectively. It’s not a huge success story, but hope it's enough to showcase how we can apply the first principle for problem-solving.

Move Things Fast

"I think one of the most important things for a founder or leader to do is set the pace of the team. I think the pace of the team is one of the most important things you can do. And that pace is sometimes governed not by how hard people work, but how decisive they are."

10X goals allow the team to focus on the most important problems and move fast to solve them. In the podcast, Brian mentioned that the pace of the team comes from fast decisions. And fast decisions come from a bias of action. Instead of saying “Okay, let’s circle back on this next week”, we should say “Who’s responsible”, or “Let’s check in an hour”.

My learning is also similar, to effectively solve critical tasks, we have to decide the next steps right on the spot, at least who is going to push it forward, so there'll be at least someone to pay extra love and care to the topic. Even if it’s a team with strong chemistry and bonding, it’s always great to have this kind of alignment and to “over-communicate”, making sure everyone is on the same page with the same focus.

And it's also important to set a clear timeline, ideally tight yet feasible, to squeeze an extra round of trial and error. Time is the most precious thing for fast-growing businesses, there are just so many milestones awaiting to hit for the business success. Move things fast allowing the team not to rush with short-sighted plans, and also granting extra time for further problem-solving and experimentation.

Become Visionary

10X goals push you to keep thinking bigger, as key metrics will look impossible but not ridiculous. Being visionary with longer-term planning allows you to think out of the box, connect better on what you are doing now to the future, and get better prepared to build the essential components earlier to prevent becoming the blocker for future growth.?Imagine an e-commerce business, managing to scale the demand, but not being able to translate to the revenue just because of stock shortage or warehouse overload. That's the scenario we want to prevent as much as we can.

Being visionary can be challenging as there’s a sea of tasks flowing to us daily, my take is planning and prioritizing things you will do daily and then blocking enough time for deep thinking and planning. It will allow you to review the work and stay focused on longer-term success, instead of hustling and bustling without direction.

Lean and Agile

All in all, it points back to what we discussed in the last article, we've to be Lean to map out the holistic and long-term strategy, and also Agile to move key projects fast and problem-solve the blockers with the first principle. And this thinking can apply to personal growth as what we discussed in this article before as well. Hope you find this a great read, and see you again next week : )