Aligned

Epilogue

Your superpower is the collaborative culture you develop

Three years later…

“I’m so glad you connected me with your cousin,” the barista says to Irie as she sets up a pourover for her. “His coffee is 25% of my business now.”

“That makes me happy,” says Irie, anticipating the warm brew. “And you make it much better than I do at home.”

“Or at the office,” says a familiar voice from behind Irie. Turning, she sees Sparks standing there looking unabashed.

Irie laughs. “That’s true!” she says.

Taking their Jamaican coffees to a table by a window, Irie and Sparks sit down as they do every Monday before work.

“Friday was fun,” Irie says in an ironic tone.

“The all-hands played out just like you said it would,” Sparks says, seriously. “When you announced we were moving into wearables, there was a lot of excitement. You got Philippe to talk about the economics, Ella talked about cross-sell opportunities between the devices and the apps, Alex and José talked about user reactions to our research prototypes. I still can’t believe you got Sergey excited about talking to an AI on his watch.”

“I think the rigor we put into the process leading up to today helped,” Irie says. “Going from idea to business plan to launching this whole initiative required a bunch of workshops, a whole new DACI, objectives, decision criteria, roadmap, and on and on. You even previewed some of this with our hardware partners to make sure they wouldn’t all pull out of our app business if we competed with ...