A couple of months ago, I led a session for our team at Uplimit on Executing Gloriously. It was met with so much positive feedback that I decided to share it externally. Executing Gloriously is a framework for delivering impact to an organization, and it’s one that I have personally used in the very varied roles I’ve held over the last 20 years—from teaching fourth grade, to managing operations functions at Facebook and Coursera, to wearing many hats at Uplimit.
Why “gloriously”? I started describing the framework this way when I came to Uplimit. Since the beginning, we have built Uplimit with our learners, customers, and instructors front and center. We appreciate that choosing to work with an early stage enterprise startup requires trust, and we strive to provide “glorious” experiences for everyone in our ecosystem. It doesn’t mean we are always perfect—much of our work at this stage is oriented around testing and learning—but it captures our commitment to being great partners.
Whether you are working at a lean startup like Uplimit (with only 20 employees and hugely ambitious goals!) or at a larger, more mature organization, the "Executing Gloriously" framework will help you focus on the highest-impact metrics and the levers to move them. This repeatable method ensures you deliver real impact to any organization you're part of.
The framework is simple:
- Jump into the problem
- Set the right metrics and levers
- Execute gloriously against them
- Review and iterate
- Communicate updates and learnings
We’ll walk through each step in more detail.
Step 1: Jump into the problem
Even though it can be tempting to immediately start “doing things” when you take on a new project, it is really important to spend time upfront getting a solid understanding of the problem. One of my youngest son’s favorite books is Let’s Go For a Drive by Mo Willems. The main characters, Elephant and Piggie, decide to go for a drive. They frantically gather a map, sunglasses, umbrellas…but then they realize they don’t have a car. This is what happens if you don’t take time upfront to understand the core problem—you end up solving tangential problems, or solving the wrong problem entirely.
Let’s walk through an example of jumping into the problem. When I was working at Coursera, the CEO and COO asked me if I would consider leading People Operations. I had never led—or even been part of—a People Operations team, but I was up for the challenge and I jumped in.
My first step was to understand the state of People Operations at Coursera. I reviewed our employee pulse surveys and our hiring and attrition data, and I talked to internal stakeholders throughout the organization. This helped me develop a baseline understanding of some of the strengths and areas of opportunity.
In parallel I needed to learn what to do with that information. To do this, I reached out to people who were leading People Ops at other startups our stage and later. I asked how they thought about prioritizing areas of impact in HR, how they designed and implemented initiatives, and how they tracked impact.
This took several weeks, but by the end I had a robust understanding of the People Ops landscape at Coursera and a concrete strategy to share with the Executive Team. Had I just jumped in and started doing things before getting this baseline understanding, it is very unlikely that I would have targeted the biggest opportunities. I would have had sunglasses, but no car.
2. Set the right metrics and levers
After you have developed an understanding of the problem, it’s time to set metrics and levers. The metrics are your goals, and the levers are your best guesses for the activities most likely to influence them. Combined, they provide a blueprint against which you will execute.
Some problems come with very clear metrics attached—customer satisfaction is XX and we want it to be YY. Other times, you will take on problems that are more ambiguous—we want to improve our customer support—and you will need to drill down to define the metrics that matter.
As you prepare to set metrics for your project, keep these guiding principles in mind.
- Metrics should align with business goals. This alignment ensures that your team’s efforts contribute directly to the overall success of the business.
- Metrics should be specific and clear. Metrics need to be precise and easily understood by everyone on your team as well as cross-functional partners. Instead of a vague metric like "improve support," opt for something more specific like "reduce average response time to under 2 hours."
- Metrics should be actionable. Choose metrics that you can influence and measure progress against. When I started working at Facebook, one of the metrics the User Operations team was responsible for was Net Promoter Score, a measure of overall customer loyalty and satisfaction. The problem was that people interacted with Facebook across a wide variety of activities—from staying up to date with friends, to being part of groups, etc.—and our team could only influence their support interactions. We had little ability to impact their overall loyalty to the product.
- Metrics should be focused. Less is more. Between 3-5 metrics is the sweet spot. You want people to be able to remember what they are driving towards.
- Metrics should prevent unintended consequences. Think about the implications of pursuing the metric and whether you need a counterweight metric. For example, in support teams I’ve managed, we often couple metrics like resolution time with customer satisfaction. If you just focus on resolution time, reps can be incentivized to close tickets quickly at the expense of quality. If you focus only on quality, reps may spend more time with each ticket than is necessary to resolve the issue. Having both metrics ensures a clear picture of the operation.
Once you’ve established the metrics, it’s time to brainstorm actions to influence them. To do this, I recommend bringing a team together, listing possible levers, and then identifying levers that are both under your control and likely to be high-impact.
For example, if you’re trying to improve customer satisfaction, you’d start by listing all the factors that affect customer support experiences, such as product design, rep response time, quality of solutions, level of personalization in interactions, and follow-up communication. Then you’d eliminate the levers you can’t control (product changes may fall in this bucket) and that probably won’t have much impact (personalized interactions are likely time consuming with less incremental benefit).
3. Execute gloriously
With all of that work under your belt, you’re ready to start executing. Setting metrics and levers is important, but the process by which you execute has a disproportionate impact on the results you can deliver. In my experience, if you manage a project by closely tracking the actions you take to move your levers—and their impact or lack thereof on the metrics—you can navigate any turbulence as the signals you receive will be very clear. Win or fail, you’ll be able to figure out why you got the outcome you did, and how you should adjust your approach going forward.
When you’re ready to start executing, follow this roadmap:
- Assemble your core team. Keep the team small, including only the essential people who represent the different perspectives needed to move the project forward.
- Review the key metrics and levers and make sure everyone is aligned on what success looks like.
- Ensure reporting mechanisms are put in place so you can track progress. This doesn’t mean you need fancy dashboards; you just need to be able to pull progress against metrics on a regular basis.
- Assign single owners for each task related to your levers. This helps ensure accountability and makes it easy for people to know what they are responsible for. When you give someone a task to take on, be explicit about what needs to be done and by when.
- Set a regular meeting cadence to review progress. For new or high-priority projects, consider daily standups, then adjust the frequency as you establish a steady rhythm.
4. Review and iterate
As your core team begins executing, each meeting should serve as an opportunity to review progress against your defined metrics. You will rarely be 100% on the right track when you embark on an initiative. What is critically important is to build the organizational habit of regularly checking progress against metrics and engaging in honest conversations about where you are succeeding and where you might need to adjust your strategy.
At Uplimit, we've codified this practice—and the growth mindset behind it—into one of our company values: “Our only failure is not learning.” It captures an ethos that execution doesn’t need to be “perfect”, but we expect it to be managed closely with learnings identified along the way.
5. Communicate updates and learnings
As your core team works and iterates toward success, it's important to keep relevant stakeholders informed. Often, the lessons one team uncovers are valuable to other teams, and updates provide opportunities for those not in the core working group to weigh in with relevant perspectives. At Uplimit, project teams share regular updates covering progress against core metrics, what's going well, what’s not going well and adjustments being made, and any overarching observations or reflections.
Mindsets
As powerful as this framework is, it only works if you approach it with the right mindset. In my experience, the teams and individuals that are best able to execute gloriously are also those that embrace the following:
- Ownership: Embrace the idea that you own the metrics and take full responsibility for delivering results. It doesn’t mean you need to do everything yourself (delegating is great!), but it does mean that you are responsible for guiding the initiative to success.
- Growth mindset: View each mistake or setback as an opportunity to learn. Understand that early projects don't need to be perfect; the key is to stay close, quickly identify what works and what doesn’t, and adjust accordingly.
- Willingness to do unscalable things: In the context of a nascent initiative, taking on tedious, manual tasks may be necessary to reach your metrics and can offer insights into what processes you might want to automate later.
Finally, and most importantly, successful executors prioritize results over effort. Executing gloriously isn't about how hard you try, but about the metrics you move and the impact you deliver.