"Setting the goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan." — Tom Landry
If we want to change our business circumstances, we must follow a sequence that most organizations get backwards. First, define the goals. Second, define who you must become to achieve them. Third, identify what you must do to get there. Most businesses believe they must first obtain the resources, then do the necessary work, and eventually become who they want to be. The order matters enormously.
At GalleryWatch, we needed to become the bipartisan, trusted partner of legislative and committee staff. To become that, we hired non-political staff, marketed equally to organizations across the full political spectrum, and took deliberate care never to offer political commentary of any kind. These were not PR decisions — they were identity decisions.
The result was that within a year, we were invited into the Speaker of the House's office to discuss the speed at which public record information should be made available to the public. That conversation was proof of concept for everything we had committed to being.
Roadmap Considerations
◆ Who do you need to become? Define the identity and character of the organization that can achieve these goals. ◆ What disciplines must you execute on? These are the specific, repeatable behaviors that bring the goals closer over time. ◆ What is it you want to achieve? State this with measurable specificity — not as a direction, but as a destination.
Part Iii
Infrastructure Alignment Chapters 27–42
The architecture of a SaaS service is the result of dozens of decisions made before the first sprint. This section ensures those decisions are made deliberately — not by default.