👫 Get on the same page. Get more important work done!

I'm pressing pause with the thought to send
You see, I'm shaking up, breaking up a bet
I'm the Bran Man cracking the dope of intellect

Alright, enough rapping for today. Here are your golden nuggets for today:

🏎️ How to align your team and get more important work done

🏭 How to build a deep tech startup and save the world

‍

Get on the same page. Get more important work done

A few years ago, I finished the week completely exhausted. Later that night, I had a beer with a friend of mine who asked me why I was so tired.

I blanked.

I couldn't come up with a good answer.

I was trying to remember everything I had done that week, but nothing stood out. I remembered it was a busy week though. But I felt like I had spun my wheel for no reason.

I got busy with little tasks without achieving anything meaningful. I hadn't made any progress on my priorities.

That's when I started looking for a way to stay focused and make sure that my team was too.

My fancy strategy decks from my management consulting years didn't help. I tried OKRs but felt there was still something missing.

The problem is that most OKR frameworks focus on what you want to accomplish, but not how. They're great for setting strategy and direction, but they don't help you identify the tactical tasks that will get those things done.

The real stumbling block ain't the strategies or the OKRs, it's how they align with daily tasks. That's where most OKR frameworks fall short.

A strategy and OKRs that people understand

When we started using Notion, I saw an opportunity to right the wrongs. We didn't waste any time and built an ingenious template for our OKRs and strategy.

We built it for ourselves, but it works for any executive, manager, startup team, or ambitious entrepreneur who wants to synchronize daily work with big-picture goals.

This tool is a direct application of Andy Grove's OKR model and Richard Rumelt's kernel of good strategy.

But there's no fluff. We made sure of that.

‍

Here's how we designed, in 5 steps, our Strategy & OKRs Notion Template to solve our alignment and focus issues.

1. Explain in a few sentences your current challenges. You cannot come up with goals and strategies if you don't agree on where you are today.
2. Develop a strategy that you can explain in a few sentences. The strategy should be your means to overcoming your challenges and reaching your goals.
3. Pick 3-5 objectives for the quarter. Your objectives should be sub-elements of your strategy
4. For each objective, add 3-4 key results. They will help you measure if you're on track to reaching your objectives.
5. Then you need a roadmap: a short list of top projects. These are HOW you will hit your OKRs.

To connect everything, we added a full Project, Task, and Sprint functionality. This way, every project and task is closely linked with your OKRs. It's like magic!

We also included a bonus to make it easy for you: 4 x comprehensive examples of strategies and OKRs relevant to various business scenarios:

• SaaS Startups
• Freelance UI/UX Designers
• Social Media Agencies
• Series C B2C Tech Startups.

Get the template now for just $11!

‍

‍

🏭 Carbon Removal and How to Build a Deep Tech Startup

We like meaningful businesses. Businesses that have a positive impact, are inspiring and leave the world a better place.

Ucaneo Biotech is a great example. The team has taken the bull by the horns with an audacious goal – remove 1M tons of CO2 from the air by 2030.

Carla Glassl, their co-founder and CTO, dropped by recently and gave me a good look into their world. Ucaneo is working on some truly novel tech: the world's first cell-free Direct Air Capture technology reversing climate change with synthetic biology.

They're dead set on giving our planet the breather it needs. But this is not all sunshine and rainbow (as Sly would say).

In this fun and enlightening conversation, we talk about the intricate world of climate tech and the challenges of bringing a hardware product to market.

Carla shares a ton of advice and anecdotes about:

• The importance of assembling a World Cup-level team
• Hacks to reduce experiment timelines with hardware
• Her plan to scale a climate tech with a modular container approach
• The secret to getting to the finish line
• The investor landscape for climate tech
• Her timeline for Ucaneo's product development.
• Carla's outlook on climate tech and why putting a value on CO2 is critical

And she doesn't shy away from sharing some of the mistakes she's made.

If not already done, you can listen to the full episode here.

‍

If you struggling or have any comments/questions, we'd love to hear from you. Just hit reply, and I'll personally respond to you!

If you want to get better results, faster, here's how we can help.

• Read our free blog articles or listen to our podcast episodes: we share actionable strategies and talk to leaders who are building meaningful companies.
• Enroll in our Growth Marketing Course, which has helped 3,023 founders and marketers grow their business with a simple 4-step process.
• Use our Notion Templates to boost your productivity. We use them ourselves on a daily basis. They're based on 10,000s hours of research and experimenting.
• Are you an ambitious founders, marketers, or solopreneurs looking to speed up your progress? Apply for our coaching program, you'll get on an individual call every two weeks and get a ton of clarity, support, and resources.
• If you have a question or topic you'd like me to cover on the podcast or simply have feedback, just leave me a short voice message. I listen to all of them.