Company mission, division of labor, and group KPIs

The advantage of small firms is they're small, and, hence, mobile. Not only very small portion of formality is required and no overhead in staff, processes, and operations is produced, small  companies live a very coherent life. When the number of employees is below "the magic number 150" they're led by one mission, have the very same strategy, and focus on one mission.

As a company grows division of labor becomes an indispensable factor of the company structure. That implies that every big division in the company is driven by the mission it's responsible for. More loosely coupled cooperation between the divisions is a natural consequence of company growth. Developers are less exposed to customer needs, professional services - to developers, marketing to professional services, support to marketing, training to support, etc. Each of the groups expands, gets its own life inside the company, own executive leads, and the most vitally important - own KPIs.

In pursuing group KPIs it's easy to lose the coherence of "one firm - one mission".  A professional services group might be wrongly measured only by revenue they bring to the company (not by minimizing the time/efforts/money of customers to deploy the product). A training group -  by the number of courses it develops, or even worse, again by revenue it brings to the company. An R&D group - by the number of bugs (I guess nobody today measures the number of coded functions or lines of code per day). Business development group - by the pipeline it creates (not by actual money it helped the sales to harvests).

Instead,  company overarching KPIs have to be the ultimate target and prevail over any formal defiitions imposed by the division of labor. Especially for new products and not productized services it's crucial for each group to be able to deviate from the predefined KPI and be flexible to perform necessary tasks leading to the completion of the company mission. Groups must build horisontal virtual teams and set up joint KPI that can be reached only via cooperation.

Professional services group needs to have capacity to transfer knowledge to the ecosystem without causing damage to the bonus of its experts. Training group - to invest in creating free self-studying content allowing people to learn the products and pass certifications on their own (which may be viewed at first glance as cannibalization of its revenue).  Sales - to spend time in rolling feedback back to product management. Each group has to look at what needs to be done for the ultimate company goal and be free to digress from its predefined path for the sake of  higher aim.