What is V2MOM?
V2MOM is an alignment tool developed by Marc Benioff at Salesforce to keep teams aligned as they grow. It is an acronym, and each letter is a section to be filled out in a document:
- Vision — what do you want to achieve (where do you want to go, your North Star)?
- Values — what values are important to you?
- Methods — how are you going to achieve your vision?
- Obstacles — what is preventing you from being successful?
- Measures — how do you know when you have it (quantitive preferred)?
V2MOM documents evolve throughout the year - they are not a one a year event (like OKRs can be). This tool can be used at a team level, a person level or both.
This document is usually short (1 page) to make sure it is read by the teams and kept up to date (e.g. keeping the metrics up to date).
Alignment
To make V2MOM effective each person/teams Vision needs to align with the companies strategic activities. If teams spend their energy making something better that customers do not care about this is poor alignment.
Best practise within roles and teams are table stakes - they are not strategic. They should be done as regular parts of daily work. The vision cannot be to fix poor practise, this is solving a business problem, not a customer problem.
Leaders
When a leader asks a team to create a V2MOM document it allows them to very quickly look at the vision of each team and ensure they are creating value. It is a way of making assumptions concrete - preventing issues down the road.
Keeping it relevant
The Measures section needs to be regularly kept up to date. All the success metrics need to be updated even if they have not changed (a last check date is needed). Otherwise teams will see stagnant metrics and this is a signal to them that this is not important - because we put our time and energy towards things that are important - and we are ignoring this.