I learned from Simon’s “Start with Why” about the three layers of the onion: why, how, and what. Companies differentiate themselves from other competitors based on the values they offer that others don’t have, the how. They elaborate on the mechanics of how they manage to fill the gaps, the how. But Simon highlighted that people don’t buy what you do, but why you do it.

Simon quoted how Apple market their products by starting with stating their beliefs on challenging the status quo and thinking differently. Beautifully designed, simple to use, and user-friendly, the “how”. The final “what” is that they just so happened to sell computers, phones, tablets, etc.

From Accelerate (2018) by Forsgren, Humble, and Kim, there are 3 types of organizational culture: pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. To make the story short, the highest-performing organization, defined by profitability, market share, and productivity, fosters a generative culture focused on its mission. How to accomplish the goal? Everything is subject to good performance.

Armed with this knowledge, I think it’s clear and explicit what the best way to open a demo.

A demo to a director with an influence over 200-engineers strong was coming. This was the reason why I was researching these. We’re building a deployment portal, and we need to demo it to them so they can adopt our ecosystem. We’ve been building this portal over the last 9 months, and we were not quite ready yet to open our product to wider users, by the nature of deployment platform, or because I had some strategic mistakes on my product and technical leadership. So it’s pretty high-stakes, but not really, as I don’t expect them to adopt right away given the maturity of the platform. Hence, the strategy here is to ensure they realize our purpose.

I started by stating our 3 beliefs. These are a set of how we think the reality should work. They strongly resonate with our beliefs, but was still concerned about the feature-set of our platform, i.e. the maturity. This was expected. But, here’s the kicker that convinced me, imagine if we do the presentation on the same month, same day, but fast-forward 1 year, it’ll be super easy to convince them to adopt our tooling.

If the vision and purpose are clear, people will follow. There will come a day when this strategy shines its values. Let the time flow, and I will come back with plenty of evidence.

TODO: refine, fix the flow of story.

TODO: 1) talk about Founder Mode by Chesky; 2) explain the initial journey of building deployment portal.