Map the People
Want to know what people are working on? Just ask them!
TL;DR - After hearing your feedback about my love for lengthy posts (guilty as charged!), here’s a quick rundown for those who want the essentials. If you’re up for the full story, keep reading!
The Story: Inspired by a conversation with VC James Cham, I’m sharing how a 5-question survey at Mozilla helped us map our people to key initiatives with surprising results.
The Approach: A simple, 2-minute survey asking employees to allocate their time across Mozilla’s strategic initiatives revealed where resources were actually going—no guesswork or spreadsheets needed.
The Takeaway: Sometimes the quickest way to get clear on headcount and resource allocation is just to ask!
Read on for all the details and see how this approach transformed our planning.
I ran into one of my favorite VCs, James Cham, of Bloomberg Beta, at the Masters of Scale conference a few weeks ago. As we were introducing each other to others during the breaks, James said to another attendee: “Jim has one of the best CFO stories I’ve ever heard!”
I replied, “I do?”
James continued to retell a story I had told him about 4 years ago. I must have learned something about storytelling over the years since James remembered my story and was now retelling it!
The story was from my time at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, around 2014. We were in the middle of our annual planning/budgeting sessions and asking the same powerful planning questions I wrote about in the Agile Planning post a few weeks back. I was growing increasingly frustrated with the inability of some of our executive leaders to map their people to our core Mozilla strategic objectives and initiatives.
Mozilla had 1,200 employees at the time after doubling our headcount over the prior 3 years in our quest to launch Firefox OS, our worldwide effort to take on the two giants - Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS for an open source emerging markets mobile operating system.
As the CFO, I wanted to know how many people were working not only on Firefox OS but also our handful of other strategic objectives (Firefox Browser, Identity, Marketplace Apps, Labs/Innovation, as well as our support functions).
One day I wondered, “What if I just asked everyone what they were working on?”
What if I just used Google’s Survey tool, coded up questions, and promised people it would take them less than 2 minutes to answer my survey?
So in less than a few hours, I created Version 1.0 of my “What Are You Working On?” Survey and was ready to send it to the All@Mozilla email alias. My final hook for getting great participation was asking everyone to reply as “a favor for the CFO” and, again promised them it would take less than 2 minutes to respond.
Your Name _________
Your Manager ________
Your Department ________
What % of Time Are You Working On Each of the Following “Mozilla Strategic Initiatives?”
My final question was a simple text narrative box for people to fill in any comments like what they wanted to be working on and anything else they wanted to share with me.
Only 5 questions, but question 4 was not as easy as it looked on the surface. I realized I needed to know the amount of time each person was working on one of our handful of key strategic initiatives and decided rough %s would be good enough for this exercise… and yes, any respondent’s %s had to add to 100%.
So I reached out to one of my favorite Dev wizards, Rob Tucker, along with my VP of Finance, Winnie Aoieong, and we mocked up a cool set of sliders that each person answering the survey could quickly slide to note the % of their time on each initiative while the backend calculated to 100% to ensure accuracy and completeness.
Version 2.0 was much better and we finally launched it to All@Mozilla about a week later and asked people what they were working on over the last 30 days. I made the assumption that the data over 30 days wouldn’t be statistically different than what I was really looking for (the last Quarter - 90 days). I also instinctively knew that asking people a “90 day question” would produce significantly more friction than a simple “last 30 days” question.
We received an amazing 95% response rate within the first 24 hours since the answers to the questions and the sliders really did take less than 2 minutes. We downloaded 1,100 employee answers and used a simple Excel pivot table to tabulate the results.
I now had my answer of “What Are People Working On” and the results surprised everyone on our executive team. It turned out about 10% of our Engineering Team was still working on improving or experimenting with MathML, an important browser spec for sure, but one of the engineering projects our engineer leaders had reportedly told their teams to stop/pause development over a year earlier to help allocate resources to our newer initiatives. This was but one example of a surprise in headcount planning. A year later, engineers were still working on MathML and we just found “more capacity!”
It turns out that once you know what people are actually working on, it really helps with the additional headcount asks for the next 12 months! The constant refrains of being under resourced and not having enough headcount began to fade with new headcount detailed data. We now had a more powerful tool to cross-check headcount requests against our strategic objectives.
5 Questions, 2 Minute Survey: You, Too, Can Produce Results Like This!
PS… I’m comfortable sharing this data under the premise that the proverbial statute of limitations has run out on this type of data 10 years later. Mozilla’s business model has changed dramatically since this time, and none of the VP names here are still at Mozilla. So, I’m sharing for the greater good of transparency in hopes of sharing knowledge.
And to think, all we had to do was ASK PEOPLE!
Lesson learned: it’s way faster to collect over 1,000 responses in less than 2 minutes than it is to ask your dozen leaders to map their people and the number of FTEs (full-time equivalents) on an excel based set of strategic objectives and initiatives.
The survey was so easy and so frictionless that we continued to run the survey for several quarters after the original launch to continue to refine the data on our own quest toward moving to more Agile Planning.
Some day, I may have to turn this into an actual planning product!
