PicoBlog

Let me hit you with an incredibly obvious statement

Everything you do at work should tie back to improving outcomes for your customers or the performance of the company. 

That’s what work is, right? That’s why your job exists. If you think about how to advance in your career, “get better results for your customers and your company” is probably near the top of the list.

I’d argue — and I am arguing — that most work is actually not about this statement at all. I think this statement is describes most work environments better:

Left to their own devices, teams will slowly start to prioritize things that reduce their day to day stress.

I looked for the most MBA textbook-style cover image I could think of for this article because I’m about to use dumb phrases to describe two types of work:

• Internal value refers to value that is primarily for people who work here at your company. When you create internal value, you do it by improving your communication, improving processes, making things less frantic, etc.

• External value is value you create for your customers. It's value experienced by people outside of your company, and is what you create when we publish content, offer promos, build a community, or generally engage in marketing/product development. A business (in theory) grows by creating a lot of external value and capturing a percentage of it.

Most teams slip into working more on internal value than external value.

In fact, I think almost every team spends too much time on internal value because it’s what affects us (as people, as teammates) directly. Internal value slows things down, makes processes more defined, and leads to more talking. Of course people want to work on things that make their days less stressful. 

Internal value tasks can be really important. When they’re important, it’s because they translate closely to external value. Imagine a set of processes for communication between product, support, and marketing — standards that lay out information like:

• What product will ship and when it will ship

• How support relays feedback on new features back to the product team

• Marketing timelines and activities related to product launches

• When marketing teams share launch materials with support

• How changes to the overall timelines are made

All of this will make everyone’s life easier. It’s also going to translate into external value basically immediately — customers will get better information and education about new features, better answers from support, and better products when the next features ship.

The first reason these types of processes exist is for internal value. They reduce franticness and confusion. But you only have to go one more hop to hit external value — how customers get a better experience as a result of this work.

The problem is that many internal value tasks have more steps before they hit external value. 

In What’s your job, like, really? I talked about the difference between pain-saving work and value-generating work. 

The cruel twist of time spent removing pains is that it ultimately adds pain. “If I did everything my bosses asked me to do I’d get fired,” because it takes away from shippable work that creates value for the company.

I’ve spoken to people who “automated” reporting that takes them 10 minutes a month — which means one hour of setting up the automation doesn’t pay itself back for 6 months. (Plus, the process of pulling reports manually made it easier to notice outliers and catch problems). 

This isn’t value-generating work. It’s pain-saving work designed to avoid an annoying task. I’ve known project managers who continually roll out new processes so they don’t have to keep following up with everyone individually, and every 6 months there was a new process, everyone got confused, and following up individually still had the best results. Yes chasing people down isn’t fun. But what if they’d just followed up?

The goal is not to create internal value. I don’t want my teams to work frantically and we’ll do what we can to avoid that — but our customers don’t actually care if we’re frantic, as long as they get an excellent product with excellent service.

It’s when internal value comes at the expense of external value that there’s a problem. And it happens a lot.

The tension between internal and external value is that:

• Over-focusing on internal value can lead to an organization that moves slowly and doesn't create enough external value (which will kill the org)

• Under-focusing on internal value can lead to major burnout and infrastructure problems that ultimately block the creation of external value (which can kill the org)

People in an organization tend to gravitate towards internal value, because IV work helps avoid pains they experience regularly. This is completely understandable. You can't neglect internal value. 

But also, you can't work primarily on internal value projects.

The simplest way to tell if something is an internal value or external value task is to ask "how would a customer respond if I told them about this?" Or for some projects “what would a customer think if they saw this?”

If a project leads to external value, your customers (at least some of them) should be excited about it. So an easy way to take stock of your ideas is to picture showing the finished project to a customer. 

Here are a few examples of internal value tasks (that are not necessarily bad ideas):

• Having a calendar for comms across every channel. The existence of the calendar is an internal value task. The comms themselves might create external value, but customers don't care if you have a calendar or not.

• Develop a clear ICP (ideal customer profile). Eventually this should create external value by making customers more likely to buy your product and use it well. But the creation of the profile itself is an internal value task — a customer wouldn't care that you have a new ICP.

• More flexibility with your CMS. Everyone wants more flexibility and autonomy from their CMS (if you don’t, please email me and let me know how you did it). Your ability to make the CMS do what you want it to do is an internal value thing (a customer wouldn’t care if you told them it was easier to make pages). Creating better pages could lead to external value, but the external value comes from specific pages.

Nothing wrong with these ideas! You’ll probably do all of them at some point.

This only becomes an issue when internal value tasks creep up your to-do list and start dominating your time.

You need to avoid overfocusing on internal value, and also you need to make the investments in internal value projects that you’ll need to continue to grow (and not rip your hair out). How do you resolve the tension?

My answer: tie internal value work to external value projects. 

You can do this in two ways:

Method one is more relevant to things like calendars — a comms calendar is internal value that creates external value. You can turn a product release calendar (internal value) into external value more quickly by building a changelog and setting up product update webinars for partners and affiliates (among other things). The work that you do internally can feed things that you publish. 

Method two is trickier, and takes some planning. You look for your internal limitations and choose a campaign that forces you to overcome them. 

A couple of examples:

• You want better internal understanding of your customers. Once you have voice-of-customer info, you can use it in your copy (method one), but how do you make time to get it? Instead of fighting to get a survey out, run a contest with a prize — the contest application has your research questions, you can interview the winner for a customer story, and you might even be able to publish the results as original research content.

• You want more layout options and components in your CMS. You can try to wrestle for developer time or contractor budget. Or you can propose a campaign to build the big marketplace that executive leadership wants and build your CMS work into the scope. 

The advantages of tying your internal value work into a major campaign:

You’ll get what you want, and create more external value as a result, if you look for ways to tie your process/infrastructure/messaging/communication improvements to tangible things that your customers experience. 

I wrote about this internal / external value tension (not using those terms) in Stop thinking with your tool: 

A person I spoke to said “when I came in I knew we absolutely needed a style guide, so I pushed really hard to get it done.” This same person is now having trouble getting the resources they want to do original research content. 

Maybe it’s good to have a style guide, but what’s the impact on the business? Maybe original research makes for good content, but what’s the impact on the business? That’s what this person’s director is thinking when they hear these ideas — along with thoughts like “the sales team is asking for case studies again” and “we really need to be better at testing creative for paid” and “how am I going to drive another 1000 MQLs this quarter?” 

A lot of the time — honestly, even most of the time — people who ask "I want to create X documentation" or "can we work on Y process" are going to wind up frustrated. The answer is going to be “not now,” because there’s a more pressing external value task. 

That's frustrating for everyone involved. People affected by the processes are frustrated because they have to keep doing things they don't like, and the people who say no are frustrated because they feel like the team isn’t working on things that are important to customers. 

If you can translate your internal value work into external value, you can point all the teams towards the same goal. You can get people to say yes to your ideas. 

And you can actually get things done. 

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