All the way to the Top: The Snowball Project (Anonymized)

I had the privilege of being in the room the day the snowball started rolling.

This is the anonymized story of a workplace project I'm still proud to have been part of...

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The Problem

Our company already offered a solid product and business was good, but industry reports and self‑appointed gurus kept telling our (mostly happy) customers that the product was under‑performing.

Without a shared benchmark, rumors could fly—even though parts of the product genuinely lagged behind. The company had no objective scorecard to pinpoint where, or by how much, improvement was needed.

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The Spark

That stalemate ended in the meeting that lit the fuse. Leadership pledged to do “whatever it takes,” acknowledged they didn’t yet know what that would involve, and appointed a cross‑functional Focus Team to surface the gaps and chart the way forward.

We all knew the mission was ambitious and technically daunting, and that it would demand a cross‑company effort.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”—Laozi

The team’s first assignment: map the current reality and draft a clear plan of attack.

Within weeks, the Focus Team circled back to leadership with a bold, multi‑pronged recommendation: (1) invest in a next‑gen infrastructure powerful enough to leapfrog the competition, and (2) adopt and promote an industry‑wide measurement standard to track real progress. They also proposed (3) appointing change‑champions inside every team to translate goals into daily action. Management green‑lit the plan —and those pillars became the backbone of everything that followed.

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The Challenge

When we huddled with the engineering wizards who would build the new infrastructure, they gave us both optimism and a challenge:

“We can absolutely get better—maybe even become the best. But how much better do we need to be? And how will we know when we arrive?”

The ideal—make the product better, then best—was clear. The missing piece was the yard‑stick.

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Measuring What Matters

Working with partner companies, the team established an industry‑wide measurement framework and set transparent targets. At last the team had a fair scoreboard.

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Engineering the Leap

Behind the scenes the engineering wizards ripped out and rewrote the core infrastructure—streamlining every bottleneck and architecting a platform so efficient it quietly set a new bar for the industry.

Across the company, change‑champions embedded in every development team pushed the new platform to—and sometimes beyond—its design envelope. They instrumented their code, stared at live dashboards powered by the industry metrics, and turned each spike in the graphs into a fresh optimization challenge. Stand‑ups no longer asked “What did you do?” but “By how much did you move the needle?”—and the brightly colored gauges made the answers visible to all.

Throughout the entire 18‑month climb (and probably to this day), the Focus Team didn’t fade into the background. They refreshed the metrics, published weekly scorecards, coached the change‑champions, and generally kept every eye on the ball—so momentum never slipped.

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The Climb

Eighteen months later, the darker-orange line below tells the story: we started dead last and climbed, month after month, until we led the pack.

Lagging to Leading: The 18-Month Dash Up the Rankings

Three Engines of Change

Looking back on the climb, it became clear that every leap forward—big or small—was powered by three intertwined forces. Strip away the code, the process charts, and the colorful dashboards, and these were the motors that kept momentum roaring:

1. Build world‑class infrastructure.  The engineering wizards rewrote the backbone, turning bottlenecks into boosters and quietly setting a new industry bar.

2. Create a fair scoreboard.  An agreed‑upon, industry‑wide metric gave everyone the same ruler and a common definition of “better.”

3. Champion the change.  Passionate advocates in every team translated data into daily action, ensuring progress never stalled.

Step by step these engines propelled the team higher until, objectively, the product topped the list.

Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest. ’Til your Good becomes Better, and your Better—Best. —Tim Duncan (quoting St. Jerome)

And that’s how a single meeting rolled into a snowball that carried the product to first place.