As you know we’ve been self implementing EOS for a long time. And if you count the previous company, it’s been about 10 years running on EOS for the Strety Leadership team. But it wasn’t until our-off site with Lisa Gonzalez a few weeks ago that we actually started using the V/TO seriously. Crazy right?
The Parts of the V/TO We Were Comfortable With
Don’t worry, I’m not so crazy that I skipped the V/TO altogether. We always had our core values dialed in. We pored over those core values (Humble, Passionate, Good) in the previous company and moved them over to Strety when we launched. We kept poring over them even as a tiny startup and realized Strety was a little different than previous co… so we added a 4th core value (FAFO). Regardless of the what and the how, our values were on the V/TO since day 1 and we use them religiously in hiring decisions.
Where things got a lot fuzzier was everything that came after that in the V/TO. The three-year picture and the one-year plan were areas where I’d just enter a bunch of random items to have it filled out. And don’t get me started on the Core Focus, Core Target (10 year target) and Marketing Strategy… I could never figure those out enough to set them in stone in our V/TO.
So while our V/TO technically “existed”, it wasn’t really driving quarterly rocks or anything else besides our values-driven decisions in hiring. Definitely piecemeal vs pure. I can feel EOS Implementers cringing reading this first part. (It gets better, but first — worse.)
We Know “V/TO Lite” Is a Self-Implementer Thing
We also knew this wasn’t just us. In fact, when we started building Strety, we barely invested in V/TO features largely because so many of our early customers were EOS self-implementers and simply didn’t use them. They didn’t even ask about it.
Similar to us, people cared about values but then only focused on weekly execution (L10s) for each quarter’s rocks. And since we’re really self-centered (not really but you get it)… we always build features with ourselves in mind as customer #1. So the market signal was matching what we were thinking ourselves internally: “Build the basics of V/TO now and come back to it.”
The Startup Mindset That Got in the Way of a Good V/TO
I think a lot of this came down to how I naturally think as a software guy. Over the last 15 years, I’ve been building software companies from zero to [insert larger number here]. The reality for software is that things change constantly. Products evolve fast, customers surprise you, and you learn things quickly that force you to adapt.
Because of that, long-range planning always felt a little fake to me. Spending real time debating what things might look like three years from now seemed unnecessary when I was sure something meaningful would change in the next six months to impact those predictions.
So instead, we always defaulted to something vague and inspiring for our team…. like “we want to grow and stay independent” and trusted that we’d figure out the details as we went. And to be honest, everyone on the team knew instinctively what that meant… enough to stay motivated and know what type of company we were building.
Then we went to Vegas… with an Implementer.
What Changed With an Implementer in the Room
Heading into the room with Lisa for the first time, I was worried about this part since I knew the V/TO was THE hot topic at EOS Annuals.
I was excited but curious if the team would also think it would be a “fake” type of exercise as I’ve sometimes felt before. It turned out that sitting down and doing the exercises slowly, intentionally, and together as a leadership team made a much bigger difference than I expected.
The key was that I wasn’t facilitating, so it wasn’t up to me to say “let’s move on” when I felt what we had was sufficient. Lisa guided us through it with a lot of intention and was clutch to keep us working on the V/TO when I would have likely moved on. Can’t beat that value.
Low Hanging Fruit: Core Target, Core Focus, Marketing Strategy
These parts of the V/TO were easy for us because our Core Target came in clearly late in Q4 2025. We want to have 20,000 Organizations Running on EOS in Strety. That’s been our mantra as of late because it’s a BIG number, it’s not revenue motivated, it’s focused, and it’ll take some time to get there. So that was an easy one we documented and moved on.
For Core Focus and Marketing Strategy, we decided to skip over the deep dive for time’s sake and because our strategy and our uniques are pretty clear; we just didn’t want to spend time wordsmithing everything. We’re focused on software for EOS, full stop.
The 3-Year picture was when things got fun!
The three-year picture was always impossible for me in my startup mentality. But as Lisa helped us work through it, we all realized it was more of an exercise in clarity on the kind of company we actually want to be building, not just revenue or headcount, but the feel of the business, the level of complexity we’re willing to take on, etc. It was more of a question of: “How will this company look in three years so that we all still love working here?”
That conversation alone ended up being one of my favorite parts of the day hands down.
How the One-Year Plan and Rocks Finally Clicked
Once we had dialed in the three-year view with big smiles on our faces with how awesome it would be then, the one-year plan was up next. And instead of being a list of goals that felt either aspirational or arbitrary, it became a much more grounded checkpoint on “what needs to happen this year to help get us to that professional utopia in 2028?” We dialed those in fairly quickly as well, including measurables we clarified in the room at a painstaking effort to be clear on “what done looks like.”
From there, the Rocks became much easier to define. Instead of feeling reactive or disconnected, they became the few things that were clearly worth focusing on over the quarter. The bets we were consciously choosing as a team to get us to the one-year plan.
What surprised me most was how calming that alignment felt for all of us. Before working through it with an implementer, I had always kind of thought that dialing in a three-year plan would feel constraining. In practice, it actually gave us a foundation of clarity to make our shorter-term planning feel relevant.
The Irony I Didn’t See Coming
This was quite the journey… from under-building V/TO features in our product and in our company early on because we, self-implementers, didn’t seem to care about them… to now being massive fans and building out some sweet features to make our V/TO even more awesome.
Needles to say now, but the V/TO clicked for me only with an Implementer in the room. Maybe it was the timing of where our business is when we stepped into the room for our Annual. But I honestly think self-implemented organizations just don’t care too much about long range planning: they care about solving for calm weekly operations immediately. But that’s precisely where the V/TO shines and helps, and I didn’t fully “get it” until now.