Strategy Is Just a Word Until You Execute It

The secret behind our 500K DAU increase in Q1: 'The 4 Disciplines of Execution'

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(Reference book: The 4 Disciplines of Execution)

How do we drive real results? We read countless articles and attend conferences to learn from real-world case studies, but truth be told, these ideas aren't much different from what bestsellers have been saying all along. It's rarely the sheer brilliance of the strategic idea itself; rather, it's the masterful application of that strategy tailored to the specific organization. In most cases, it's not just the leader executing it alone, but the entire team moving together. So, more than the "content of the strategy," the core secret to generating results is "getting all teammates to execute the strategy at the level the leader desires."

DelightRoom in Q1 was no exception. Alarmy's DAU increased by over 20% in just three months, hitting 2.6 million—growth I haven't seen in my four years here. This was entirely the effect of introducing the 4DX methodology to our organization. When you hear about the methodology itself, it actually sounds quite "obvious." The real magic came from "well applying" it to DelightRoom's unique situation, enabling all teammates to execute it properly. Here's a look at how we successfully anchored 4DX—a concept most have probably heard of at least once—into our organization.

Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important (max 2 goals)

Distinguishing between the whirlwind and WIGs (Wildly Important Goals)

It starts off sounding pretty obvious: take on a maximum of two goals. But where it differs slightly is the concept of the "whirlwind." The reason we typically fail to focus on our Wildly Important Goals (hereafter "WIGs") is because we're too busy fending off other urgent (or urgent-seeming) daily tasks. The author acknowledges that if these daily tasks aren't handled, the very survival of the organization or product could be in short-term jeopardy.

He calls this the "whirlwind" and points out that while fending off the whirlwind might keep you alive in the short term, it makes mid-to-long-term survival difficult. Therefore, he urges us to manage the whirlwind appropriately while periodically allocating a specific portion of our time to focus exclusively on WIGs. Honestly, this felt far more realistic than the typical advice to "focus only on your most important goals and drop everything else!"

Because it acknowledged the importance of the chaotic, everyday "whirlwind" while still insisting on dedicating time to WIGs, I started deliberately blocking off specific times on my weekly calendar solely for WIGs.

Discipline 2: Act on lead measures.

Finding the right lead metrics

This is another one you've probably heard somewhere before. "Lead metrics" is a fancy term, but in reality, just finding a proper lead metric is tough. A lead metric needs to meet two conditions to truly earn its name.

First, our team's daily actions must be able to directly influence that metric. Second, the fluctuation of that metric must reliably predict the fluctuation of the WIG. It has to be a metric we can directly push up or down so that the people doing the work can feel a stronger sense of immediate engagement. And because it's connected to the WIG, causing the WIG to rise or fall alongside it, that engagement can be sustained in the long run.

If you choose a specific metric as your lead metric and successfully pump it way up, but the WIG doesn't budge, it means you've picked the wrong lead metric. You then must change your lead metric to one with a stronger link to your WIG. It would be great to nail the right lead metric on the first try, but more often than not, you won't. That's why I believe fast and flexible adjustments are far more critical.

(To get used to 4DX, I even applied it to my personal life. My WIG was reducing my body fat by 3%. I set my "lead metrics" as running 10km and doing intermittent fasting four times a week, tracking my success week by week. Since they were effective lead metrics, I successfully hit my 3% reduction goal in just over a month.)

In our case, we initially set DAU as the lead metric for ad revenue, and daily installs as the lead metric for DAU. The correlation between installs → DAU was verified quickly, but the link between DAU → ad revenue turned out to be weaker than expected, forcing us to make a revision. When we dug into it, we realized that from an ad revenue perspective, "which country" saw the DAU increase was a critical factor. Therefore, instead of using "total install volume" as our lead metric, we adjusted it to "installs by country," breaking it down on a national level. Following that, the link from DAU → ad revenue became much more solid, and we've been managing it successfully as a lead metric ever since.

Discipline 3: Keep a compelling scoreboard.

Making it green

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." It sounds like another cliché, but this book's approach differs because it doesn't just say to measure things; it says, "Measure it and build an accessible scoreboard." In a sports game, if players take the field without knowing the current score, the engagement of both the players and the fans drops off a cliff. Our work is exactly the same. We are sprinting toward our WIG by tracking lead metrics, and we need to be able to easily and simply recognize whether we are currently winning or losing, and by what margin, in order to sustain high levels of engagement.

Since we were already monitoring our respective metrics, this didn't seem like anything special at first, but the reality was quite different. First, we started focusing on the "weekly point spread," pouring our energy into finding ways to close that gap or turn the tables. We mapped out our target lead metric numbers on a monthly and weekly basis, starting each week by judging whether we were winning or losing. If we were losing, we figured out exactly what initiatives were needed and when in order to win. When necessary, we even boldly swapped out ongoing initiatives.

When we're winning, conditional formatting highlights the numbers in "green." Because of this, we naturally find ourselves looking at the scoreboard and discussing, "How do we turn on the green light?"

We set up an integrated scoreboard that every teammate in the company could easily access and grasp at a glance, and we even built a Slack bot for each squad to receive daily updates on their key lead metrics. Afterward, that dashboard became a space where people were constantly hanging out, and the daily Slack bot updates also turned into a hub that always gathered a lot of attention.

Discipline 4: Create a cadence of accountability.

Relentless squad weeklies

Once you've narrowed your WIGs down to one or two, identified lead metrics to drive them up, and introduced a scoreboard to track your success, the final discipline is to hold regular meetings to discuss these with senior leaders and conduct necessary debates.

This meeting, called an accountability meeting, is a time for the leader responsible for the lead metric (in our organization, the PO) to review the past week's performance and share follow-up action plans to sustain or improve those results. It's probably very similar to meetings many organizations are already running.

If I had to point out what differentiates the accountability meeting, it's that it's not a meeting for reporting "what we did" over the past week. Actually, when I first ran these accountability meetings as a PO, I found myself unconsciously just reciting the past week's whirlwind. What was truly important was to focus our conversations around the current status of our WIGs and the movement of our lead metrics, and commit to one or two wildly important things I could do the following week to most definitively change the score on the scoreboard. Only then could we have healthy discussions related to achieving our results, and we found ourselves co-creating strategies that would have been tough to come up with alone. When necessary, we even made the bold decision to drop projects that were already in flight.

In practice, the meeting only takes about 30 minutes. Having run these myself, what I felt was most effective was that we ran them "consistently" and "relentlessly." When you're overly busy, the cheap temptation to just skip this 30-minute meeting for a week inevitably bubbles up. But if you keep skipping it, you lose the ability to make the right adjustments at the right time, and ultimately fail to hit your goals. I genuinely believe that no matter what happened, religiously investing those 30 minutes every single week without fail was the crucial kicker. We call this the "squad weekly."

Looking back now, these new execution disciplines settled into our organization "well" over a short period of time. It didn't happen on its own, though. It started with all the leaders reading this book together and aligning on the temperature of why it was necessary. Spearheaded by WIGs / lead metrics / scoreboards / accountability meetings (Head meetings) at the company-wide level, we established WIGs / lead metrics / scoreboards / accountability meetings at each squad level one by one, and now it has firmly taken root as a major pillar of our organizational culture.

Of course, the detailed processes were applied differently to fit the attributes and needs of each team, but we are all uniformly adhering to these four core disciplines.

1) Distinguishing between the whirlwind and WIGs
2) Finding the right lead metrics
3) Making it green
4) Relentless squad weeklies

Powered by this process, what kind of results will we be able to draw out in Q2?

Once the quarter wraps up, I'll write a follow-up post focusing on our most effective case studies.

Though we initially felt a bit carsick from the extreme flexibility in the early days of adoption,
these four disciplines of execution have seamlessly become second nature to everyone and evolved into a powerful weapon. And that's a wrap on our adoption story!