It’s not the most fun thing to say or acknowledge, but almost all businesses (so also Awell) have situations where occasionally something important needs to be delivered by a specific deadline. We should be minimizing commitments, but there can always be commitments needed in order to effectively run the company.

How can we do this in an efficient way that sets us up for success?

What’s a High-Integrity Commitment (and what’s not)

A couple of guidelines or principles of what’s not a High-Integrity Commitment:

• Product feedback and feature requests from users

• Bugs as they have their own prioritization & response framework

• A simple task you have to get done to get you unblocked

Signs of when something is potentially a High-Integrity Commitment

• If we don’t do the work, it would have major consequences for Awell or the customer (eg: losing a customer, them not being able to go live, not being able to sign a customer, …). It’s not that these things make it automatically a High-Integrity Commitment, we still reserve ourselves the right to not do things because of reasons, but it’s worth considering it.

• It requires an intervention in the product (actual product work)

Guide to High-Integrity Commitments

Step 1: Buy time

Not just for the sake of buying time, but we feel much safer committing to something when we understand the problem and know if and how we can solve it. Commitments are often made too early, even before we understand the problem and whether we think we'll be able to solve it.

Takeaways:

1. Discovery helps de-risking commitments

2. Ask the customer to give us a little time to discover and investigate a potential solution

Step 2: Make a commitment

Once we identified a solution that will work for the customer & the business, we can now make an informed and high-integrity commitment about when we can deliver and what the expected business results will be.

Principles

Don’t make date-based commitments for regular product work

Committing to dates should only be done for high-integrity commitments, not for “regular” product work.

Why?

• Building software takes time, it’s like running a marathon. There’s already enough pressure to deliver good software and there’s absolutely no value in adding deadlines.

• Regular product work follows a cadence of roughly 6 weeks where projects can either be of a small appetite (2 weeks) or big appetite (6 weeks). This means that at most, the release of something that is known we will deliver is a maximum of 2 or 6 weeks out. Those timelines should be short enough to give perspective without falling into the trap of “when is this exactly released?”.

• Underpromise and overdeliver. If you have to say a project is 6 weeks out for release but then actually we release it 2 weeks early, then we are giving our customers a nice

But what should we do when a customer asks when a certain feature or project will be released (assuming it is in the current cycle)?

• We can tell them we expect it to be released by the end of the cycle and if appropriate, we can give some nuance about small & big appetite projects (2 vs. 6 weeks out).

• We don’t say any dates or weeks but we can provide some directional guidance (eg: end of the Month, end of the quarter)

| Commitments are binary

We either deliver what we promised or we don’t. When a high-integrity commitment is made, we expect it to be delivered. At the first sign of trouble, we should raise the flag and inform the team.

Accountability & Alignment

Given the importance, nature, and impact on the team of high-integrity commitments, leadership (CEO, Head of Engineering, Head of Product) must personally agree to each high-integrity commitment because there’s a reputation at the line and maybe even more importantly, potentially a relationship with a customer/partner, or even legal consequences.

The exception and not the rule

High-integrity commitments should be the exception and not the rule. Otherwise, it’s a slippery slope and has the risk of becoming a roadmap in disguise - and even worse, is externally controlled .

Traps

Too many commitments

If we have too many of these date-driven commitments, it is probably a sign of more serious issues and then we should take a step back.

List of High-Integrity Commitments

We actively keep track of our High-Integrity commitments (internal only).

Why?

• So we know how many High-Integrity Commitments we make.

• These commitments and the corresponding trade-offs are visible to everyone in the company.

• The decision to make (or not make) a High-Integrity commitment is documented & reasoned about in full transparency whereas previously it was often not known why certain things were done (or not done).