I was sitting at a dinner in Denver last October — one we’d put together for a small group of EOS Implementers — and Lisa González was up front running a Process workshop before we all sat down to eat. I didn’t know Lisa very well at the time. I knew she co-authored the EOS Traction Library book on Process and that she was widely considered a Process expert in the EOS community. Beyond that, she was mostly a name I’d heard in conversations with implementers.
She opened the way she apparently always does: by asking the room to think about what a lack of process is actually costing them. The profit leaks. The rework. The leadership time burned answering questions that should already have answers. The turnover that happens when expectations are vague and training is absent. Most of the time, these are costs that don’t show up on a P&L. They just quietly drain profit every day.
I remember sitting there thinking two things. First: we have this problem at Strety and I’ve been ignoring it. Second: this should be in our software.
Table of Contents
- The same blind spot, again
- What Lisa changed about how I think about Process
- Why we had to build it
- Process is live!!
- The pattern continues
The same blind spot, again
If you’ve been following this newsletter series, you’re probably noticing a pattern by now. Every few months I write about how working with an implementer exposed a blind spot I didn’t know I had. It happened with the V/TO — where my startup mentality convinced me that long-range planning was fake. It happened with thinking EOS purity was not all that important — where I was building extras into the software that actually worked against the system. And now it’s happened with Process.
The pattern is consistent: self-implementers undervalue the EOS components that feel slow. The V/TO feels slow because you’re planning years out. Purity feels slow because you have to resist the urge to customize. And Process feels slow because you’re writing down things you think everyone already knows.
At Strety, we had documentation. We had Playbooks. We had onboarding materials that worked reasonably well. Process sat comfortably in the “important but not urgent” bucket — which is exactly where Lisa says it sits for most companies, and exactly where it does the most damage.
What Lisa changed about how I think about Process
I wrote about this shift in more detail a couple months ago, so I’ll keep it brief here. The core lessons:
Process is important for everyone, including startups and small teams. I spent a lot of time telling myself we’d get to it when we were bigger. That’s backwards. The earlier you build the muscle, the easier everything else gets — hiring, delegating, scaling.
Process also doesn’t have to be heavy. Lisa’s approach starts with your handful of core processes, breaks them into sub-processes, and lays out the major steps clearly. You don’t need a 40-page SOP for every task. You need the right level of clarity so your people can execute the right and best way.
You can start simple and build over time. Core processes, a few sub-processes, clear steps underneath. That’s the starting point, and honestly for a lot of teams it’s enough to change how they operate.
And the one that hit me hardest: process is a living thing. It should evolve with your business. The moment you treat it like a doc you write once and file away, it starts dying. This is where Lisa’s emphasis on FBA (Followed By All) really changed my thinking. Documenting a process is nice, but it’s just the beginning. Making sure people are trained on it and actually following it is where the real value lives. FBA is the ongoing accountability piece that keeps Process alive inside the business.
Why we had to build it
Here’s where the product guy in me couldn’t let this go.
There are solid process and documentation tools out there. But the most complete process tools live elsewhere, disconnected from where you actually run EOS. That gap matters more than people realize, because process should be connected to how you operate — the people who own processes, the meetings where you review them, the rocks that improve them.
Strety’s whole thesis has always been about collapsing the tool sprawl for EOS companies. One place to run the business. We had the V/TO, L10 Meetings, Rocks, Scorecards, Issues, Accountability Chart, People Management, Projects, Playbooks — and Process was the piece that was missing.
So we built it. And we built it working hand in hand with process expert Lisa González.
That part was deliberate. I didn’t want to ship a document editor and call it Process. I wanted to build a tool that reflected how Process actually works when it’s done well, with the guidance of someone who literally wrote the book on it. Lisa’s fingerprints are on the design decisions, the workflow, and especially the emphasis on FBA — and FBA as more than “marked as read” — FBA as the complete, necessary framework for doing process right. She pushed hard on that piece, and she was right to. Most process tools stop at documentation. Ours doesn’t.
Here’s what Lisa said about it herself:
“When it comes to the Process component, many teams stop at getting their processes documented, when 80% of the heavy lifting in Process is getting it Followed By All. In my partnership with Strety, we’ve created the first digital framework to drive process accountability and make FBA a reality for companies running on EOS.”
Process is live!!
Process in Strety includes the three-step process documenter — the same framework from the EOS model — and it’s the only process tool with the FBA framework built in. That means you’re not just documenting your core processes, sub-processes, and steps. You’re managing whether those processes are actually being followed, trained on, and kept current. All inside the same place where you run your L10s, track your Rocks, and manage your people.
That last part is what makes this feel right. Process shouldn’t live in a Google Doc that gets written during a quarterly and then forgotten until the next one. It should live where the work lives, connected to the people and the rhythm of how your team actually operates.
We’ve been using it internally at Strety and it’s already changing how we delegate and onboard. Lisa would probably say something about how we should have started earlier. She’d be right 🙂
The pattern continues
Every chapter of this newsletter series has basically been me admitting that working with an implementer exposed something I thought I had figured out on my own. V/TO, purity, process — and I’m sure there’s more coming.
But this one is a little different because it didn’t just change how we run the company. It changed the product. Sitting in that Denver dinner, watching Lisa walk a room of experienced implementers through the real cost of weak process, planted the seed for a feature that I think a lot of EOS companies have been waiting for.
Grateful to Lisa for the partnership on this one and to the EOSI community for continuing to push us to build the right things. More to come.