What kind of culture shapes Alarmy?
How do we set goals and prioritize work at DelightRoom? I've put together a quick roundup of the top four questions we get about the culture behind building Alarmy.
1. How do you set goals?
At DelightRoom, we use OKRs to manage our goals. Once the quarterly Company OKRs are set, each team takes time to establish their own Team OKRs to help achieve those higher-level company goals.
Company OKRs
What we consider crucial here is setting the Company OKRs first before moving on to Team OKRs. To ensure every member is moving in the same direction, we first share the company's core direction. Then, we have a feedback period where people can ask questions or share their opinions about that direction.
Team OKRs
After the Company OKRs are locked in, each team sets their Team OKRs to achieve them. During this process, the team largely determines their targets and specific directions, which they then sync with the company. These established team OKRs are shared at our quarterly company-wide workshop.
At DelightRoom, we dedicate one day each quarter to a company-wide OKR review and planning session. This is a meaningful time to align on what results each department has produced, what lessons they've learned, and what direction they'll take in the upcoming quarter based on those insights.
Through this company-wide OKR review and planning session, we ensure that teams aren't just chasing their own goals, but rather checking if we are all heading in the same direction and gaining a deeper understanding of each other's objectives. Furthermore, it fosters an environment where teams actively help one another achieve their goals.
2. How do you prioritize work?
Once OKRs are solidly in place, it's time for each team to create a backlog and tackle it according to priority. No matter how well goals are set, it's hard to drive results if work is done haphazardly with unclear priorities. At DelightRoom, the way each team prioritizes their work comes down to two main keywords.
The ICE Framework
To discuss importance effectively, you need a common language. We use the ICE framework to establish shared work priorities. This prevents arbitrary prioritization and helps us deliver the best possible results with limited resources.
Simply put, we prioritize by considering Impact, Confidence, and Ease. We score tasks along three axes: "How impactful is this?", "How confident are we in this?", and "How little effort will this take?"
By aligning priorities using ICE, teammates easily sync up on why each backlog item matters.
Through this process, PMs, engineers, and designers naturally exchange feedback from their respective viewpoints, allowing work to proceed based on priorities everyone agrees on.
Flexibility
Once goals are clearly aligned and a common language is established, the detailed process for achieving those goals is left up to each team. Because every team faces different circumstances, they build and refine their processes in whatever way they find most effective.
The key here is continuously finding the right operational style for each team, creating the optimal process through team sprint retrospectives.
To achieve this, every team holds a retrospective in two-week sprints, sharing what went well and what fell short, and discussing new things they want to try or change in the next sprint. By attempting this continuous improvement, they evolve their workflow into a highly optimized process for their specific team.
3. I hear you have a user-centric product culture?
When you join DelightRoom, one of the words you'll hear the most is "user". Sure, every company values its users, but we constantly brainstorm and experiment with ways to genuinely think and act from the user's perspective.
VOC Meetings
Every week, our CPO, PMs, Dev Leads, Design Leads, and POM (Product Operation Manager) gather to review VOCs (Voice of Customer). We don't just skim over summarized notes; we look at the original text of every VOC together and discuss them.
The important thing here isn't aiming to implement 100% of the issues and suggestions raised by users. It's about hearing how each team views the matter, syncing our sense of its importance, and closing any gaps in perspective.
In fact, when you first start running VOC meetings, you'll often find a temperature gap where one team thinks "we need to fix this immediately," while another team argues "other issues are more important" regarding the exact same problem. If left unchecked, this degrades cross-team understanding over time, ultimately leading to a clunky product that fails to truly understand its users.
Once you bridge this gap through VOC meetings, everyone gains a better grasp of each other's priorities. You'll notice that instead of complaining, "Why aren't you fixing this faster!?" people start saying, "Ah... this is important, but we're currently tackling an even bigger issue."
Meeting Room Names
At DelightRoom, we are constantly thinking about how to solve our users' problems and change their lives for the better. We regularly come across stories of users whose lives have transformed thanks to our service. To always keep this user-focused mindset close to heart, our meeting rooms are named after a combination of a user's story and their nickname, as shown below.
Retention is King
User frustration often reveals itself directly in retention. At DelightRoom, we analyze retention in every product improvement experiment; if it drops in a statistically significant way, we roll back the change—even if the experiment otherwise succeeded. Plus, since retention alone doesn't capture the whole picture of how users feel, we consistently monitor user feedback regarding any changes.
4. How data-friendly are you?
At DelightRoom, we don't improve the product based on mere gut feelings. We have a culture of verifying whether our hypotheses have been proven statistically significant, and we extract and share insights derived from our metrics.
A/B Testing + Company-Wide Sharing
Every two-week sprint involves numerous A/B tests. Beyond simply verifying hypotheses, we analyze various metrics to gain insights into how users perceive and interact with the features or changes we've introduced (Reference: Alarmy A/B Testing Log #1).
By sharing these insights across the company during town hall presentations, we empower every member to deepen their understanding of the product and our users.
WDAS (Weekly Data Analysis & Seminar)
At DelightRoom, all members have access to our data via Amplitude. As we regularly look at and analyze data, a variety of questions naturally pop up outside of our day-to-day tasks. During WDAS, we analyze and share the data behind those exact curiosities.
We genuinely maintain a data-friendly culture where even those who aren't data analysts easily dive into the numbers, share fun phenomena they've discovered, and uncover fresh insights along the way.
For example, we've had simple analyses like which country wakes up the earliest among Korea, the US, and Japan, to deeper dives during the height of COVID-19 showing how much average wake-up times shifted backward across different US cities due to lockdowns. These were data points pulled by regular members out of sheer curiosity, not by our data analysts.
To wrap things up, at DelightRoom we align everyone in the same direction through clear goal setting, and we work off a foundation where each team hits their optimal priorities. All the while, we maintain a user-centric product development culture rooted in both quantitative and qualitative data.
If you're interested in joining this kind of product culture and redefining the alarm clock from a simple time-telling tool into a wellness service that takes charge of the beginning and end of the day...