Intro

Think of how we work like playing chess without turns: Making 10x more moves creates a decisive advantage, even if our moves aren't great.

We only want to build optionality before overextending our pieces (especially our king)

Roadmap → OKR’s → Timelines

1. Our roadmap shows our long-term trajectory, our OKRS direct our quarterly direction, and our timelines manage the week-to-week.
   1. OKRs provide high-level, quarterly goals that our timelines are built around.
2. Responsibility is allocated - check the RACI matrix
   1. Our OKRs have allocated ownership on a per-team basis.
   2. Our timeline projects have a project lead.
   3. RACI matrices are updated every 6 months.

How roadmaps, OKRs, and timelines work together here

Working Principles

1. Decouple and parallelise all possible work, even if it requires rework later.
   1. Example: complete regulatory reports before we have our tech-ready and tested — it will take 6 months to review anyway, and we can rework when completed
2. Integrating working parts or processes is almost always preferable to invention.
   1. Inventing new technology is expensive. A suboptimal (but functional) integration of existing technology we can quickly bring to market is always preferable.
3. Focus on saving time rather than saving money.
   1. Each day we delay our critical path creates extreme opportunity costs at least equal to our burn rate (>$10k per day) and, in practice, insanely higher. Immediately execute spend that accelerates the critical path enough to recover our burn rate.
4. Optionality is critical for ambiguous, early stages.
   1. Explore various pathways in parallel and wait until the last moment to make a decision that closes off optionality.
   2. For reversible decisions, collect, at most, 40 to 70% of the desired information before committing to a path.
      1. High-speed, reversible decisions are a 10x accelerant

Velocity

1. Velocity Mantra: communicate every day on time estimates for everything along our critical path, and follow up with the following questions
   • What would it take to move this piece of work 10x faster?
   • If we were to deliver this 10x faster, what needs to happen?
2. Scope of delivery: Set smaller, concrete objectives with shortened time frames to make our sense of incremental but meaningful gains more tangible
   • Wherever possible, compress delivery into a day or a week
3. Choice management: Reduce the burden of choice management and allocate more time and energy to better, higher-quality work.
   • It is better to be precisely wrong than generally correct. Have the courage to focus.
4. Velocity Compounds with Time: Since every element along our critical path builds on previous elements, going faster today is an exponential accelerant towards the long-term mission at Aquila
   1. If we believe pursuing our mission could create $100B+ value within 10-20 years, then every day we delay, pushing our critical path back, has an opportunity cost of >$1M

10x and 1%

• Moving 10x faster by thinking outside the box is often ****possible, and improving a workflow/process by 1% is always possible.
  • 10x improvements are step changes, and we need to ask how we can do things 10x better at least daily to inspire radical innovation.
  • 1% improvements are what we do every moment of every day.
• When in doubt, focus on maximising our rate of learning.