It was spring in 2018 when I walked into Mikkel Svane’s office on the seventh floor of Zendesk HQ to pitch a go-to-market strategy for the product we were about to launch. Zendesk had bought my company a year before, and I was convinced that my product would unlock a whole new category for Zendesk beyond customer support. This was my shot to convince the CEO.
MIkkel stared out the window as I delivered my pitch. Pigeons swirled above Market Street as Karl the Fog made a slow retreat. “...and that’s how we’ll create a whole new category, customer experience management,” I finished.
Silence.
I noticed that my hands, clasped tightly on my lap, were sweaty.
“What’s the red thread?” he asked.
Now I was silent. Red thread? What the hell was he talking about?
“Where does this connect to the tasks that our customers already rely on us to solve?”
I offered a few ideas–some pretty good ones, I thought! But my pitch went nowhere. Why? Because I missed the red thread.
What is your red thread?
If you do consulting, marketing, operations, sales or a whole bunch of other jobs, I’ve got a secret for you: there’s a thread hiding in all those documents you write for your client, your boss and your team members.
The problem is, it’s hard to find–and even harder to communicate. But first things first. Before I tell you how to find it, what is this thread?
It’s the hard part of your job. Yes, you have to create a marketing campaign. Or you have to create a sales process. Or an ops manual. But what’s the hard part of your job?
You need to organize a whole bunch of possibilities into a logical sequence. Then you need to connect your thread to their threads. That’s the red thread: “solving a problem which has multiple ways to proceed through an application of logic to all available routes.”
In logic, this is called Ariadne’s thread because she gave Theseus a thread that allowed him to find his way through an otherwise inescapable labyrinth.
How to find your red thread
Your work has a red thread too. It’s the step-by-step process by which you (and others) will approach a complex task. This is what was missing from my pitch.
Jumping into a complex project or document without a red thread is like venturing into a labyrinth without a guide. Everyone gets overwhelmed.
Today, Splotch is launching redThread for Google docs. Here’s how it works:
- Log into Splotch (free!)
- Connect your Google docs
- Select any document that contains a process, plan or sequence (the more complicated the better)
- Splotch will find, extract, and map out the process, step-by-step, in a flowchart.
- Make manual edits—or describe the edits you want, and we’ll make them automatically.
- Every node stays in sync with its source text. If you change the text, the nodes change. Change the nodes to update the text.
In this release, Splotch will show you (and your team) the red thread through the maze of any document you need to navigate. Ariadne to the rescue!