Here at Dasheroo we’re a distributed team as I have discussed. We love the ‘structure’ but it does pose challenges, particularly in communications. Sure, we use Slack, Zoom, Basecamp and other collaboration and comms tools and have regular all-hands and 1:1 meetings but is anything lost by not having those spontaneous ‘over the cube’ discussions?

I’m not sure! But it’s certainly something we need to always be mindful of.

But every few months I make sure we have what I call a ‘Mind Meld’. Not a Vulcan Mind Meld where touch technique allows a Vulcan to merge his or her mind with the essence of another’s mind purely by using specialized contact fingertip-points-in a humanoid, usually around the targeted partner’s skull temples. It’s where we bring our ideas together and come out with a futuristic roadmap silly!

So it’s our quarterly planning session. The 5 of us co-founders get together and discuss what we’ve learned and how that should direct our activities going forward. After, we share our thoughts with the team to get their feedback and roll that into our future operational plan.

It’s a time we can assure that we all get together, roll up our sleeves, look each other in the eyes, park our egos at the door and tackle some important issues, including:

• Are we innovating fast enough?
• Are we acting like a lean, scrappy start-up (in the good ways)?
• Are we developing the right features?
• Are we growing fast enough?
• Where are we f’ing up, and how are we gonna fix it?
• What external things have impacted our biz since the last Mind Meld?
• Are we gonna be able to raise more money?
• Do we have what it takes to be a global leader in the business dashboard market, and what will that take? And, are we all still on board?

It’s a super productive full-day meeting, and then we go eat and drink like pigs and have some laughs.

We always hold ourselves accountable for our individual KPIs and progress made on the decisions from prior Mind Melds as well.

I’m really excited about our upcoming one in Austin later this month. We’ll be at the point, approximately 6 months post launch, where we have enough empirical data to help show us where our initial assumptions are hitting and missing. Plus we’ve talked to tons of users and potential users & partners to consider their suggestions as well. This is a fun, exciting, challenging and nerve-racking time for sure.

Because of that I already sense some really big things coming out of this one. Fundamental changes that I believe will position us to be a leader in our space; and I’ll talk about them in a post as soon as we’re all in agreement. Then, it’s all about executing and continuing to evolve based on measuring our successes and failures!

What’s your approach to check-ins on your business strategy, execution and overall KPIs? I’m always looking for new ideas!