<aside> ☝🏼 This is my draft for single focus teams. It’s not set yet, and it’s not policy yet, but it’s the first step in putting together an outline for what SFTs may look like.

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A Single Focus Team (SFT) is a mostly autonomous team that has all the resources (roles, capital, focus, ownership, etc) to complete their work and projects with little to no required outside coordination, or dependency, with other teams. There is still a lot of coordination, teamwork, and collaboration happening inside an SFT.

<aside> ☝🏼 Here’s an Example: Let’s pretend there is a WK Readers SFT. You can imagine this (small) team consisting of an engineer or two, a couple colleagues creating content (especially ones focused on reading-based pedagogical skills), and perhaps a couple copyeditor roles for the English and Japanese, someone to coordinate with authors, and the like. There’d likely be some overlap of roles, but the point is that they have everything they need to add and update features to readers and add new high quality readers at a consistent clip. As Readers grow, and become a larger part of our revenue, we would add additional roles to help support that. If it becomes too large, we could break the team up into a couple separate SFTs if necessary.

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SFTs tend to be more product-focused or even project-focused than other teams. To put this in context, some teams—like Support, Product, and Marketing—will likely remain as their own separate teams. This could certainly change, but will depend on what we need, the size of the company, and other teams. Right now it doesn’t make sense to break them apart.

The Resources an SFT Needs:

When thinking about an SFT, there are several things they will need.

• Roles: SFTs have all the roles necessary to complete their team’s work from start to finish, without having to request help, resources, etc., from outside teams in order to complete a project (for exceptions, see Unavoidable Dependencies). SFTs should have leeway to hire any additional necessary roles that are needed to complete their work and projects to a high standard.
• Capital: SFTs should have access to the capital they need to do their work and complete their projects.
• Focus: SFTs are able to focus on their work and their priorities. Other teams aren’t requesting their help constantly (for exceptions, see Unavoidable Dependencies). SFTs aren’t jumping between multiple projects at the same time, spreading themselves thin. SFTs know what their priorities are, and are able to focus on what is most important, at any given moment.
• Ownership: SFTs have ownership over a domain, product, feature, etc. and are able to set the policy and processes around these things. That doesn’t mean they’re gatekeepers, though. Other teams may depend on owned domains, so the SFT should create processes or methods to access domain information and resources.

The SFT Lead

In addition to these roles, an SFT has a Team Lead, aka an SFT Lead. The SFT Lead role will differ from team to team, but in general their work falls into four major categories:

1. Sets Priorities

At Tofugu, we emphasize giving people and teams freedom in how they work. So, the SFT Lead shouldn’t be micromanaging that how side of things (though, like any colleague one can certainly make suggestions and offer advice).

Instead, the SFT Lead focuses on prioritization. That includes working with the ‣ role, other colleagues, and so on to figure out what is the most progress-driving work the team can do, then helping their team to focus on those things.

• On an ongoing basis, the SFT Lead works with the ‣ role to create and set Team OKRs based on Company Goals, especially at the end of the quarter.
• Emphasizes the most progress-driving work and projects, in context with Team OKRs and the Tofugu Mission. Makes sure that members are prioritizing progress-driving work and projects and not whatever the latest fire seems to be.
• Collects and advocates for SFT members’ “bottom-up” OKRs. Does the same for SFT-specific priorities.
• Helps to coordinate SFT members’ work, as needed. For example, timing and passing finished work off to another member to continue.
• Works with SFT members to break down Team OKRs. Helps team members to create high quality OKRS based off Team OKRs, as well as team and individual role priorities.