The first four of you did not need alignment.
You were in the room, you had the same argument every week, and everyone knew exactly why the company existed. You built it together, after all. Then you hired someone new.
The moment it breaks
The new people are good, but they came for the job.
You all understood your vision. Now the thing that made this worth starting is just a paragraph on a careers page. If your first hire has not got a paragraph of their own, it is difficult to compare notes.
There are twelve of you. One person not pointed at the same thing and everybody feels it. No engagement survey tells you that.
Stated precisely
A purpose precise enough to disagree with.
Compact starts with the purpose that actually runs the company, stated precisely enough to disagree with. Then everyone in the business builds their own, from their own history, in their own words. Not a workshop and not a poster.
What you get is a company whose purpose is a real overlap between real people, and a clear view of where that overlap is thin.
What people do on a Wednesday
Alignment lives in the daily work.
The same loop that turns direction into behaviour for one person runs for a team. Everyone's daily work is traceable to something they said mattered to them, and to something the company said mattered.
Where those two cannot be connected, you can see it, and that is usually a role problem rather than a person problem.
Before the exit interview
Drift is either visible or it is not.
Everyone measures output. Almost nobody measures whether the company is still pointed where it said it was, or whether the people in it still are. Every cycle, that gets checked. Drift becomes visible before somebody resigns, rather than in the exit interview.
Your people's CraftMe
Built by them, owned by them.
This is the part that is different, and it is an architectural choice rather than a policy. Every person's artefact belongs to the person. They build it for themselves and they choose what to share. When somebody joins, you can tell what they are pointed at, because they chose to tell you. When they leave, they take it with them.
The record belongs to the person, and it leaves when they do. That is what putting people first looks like when it is built into the software rather than written into the values.
Compact
Compact does not yet exist. We are in the research phase, talking to founders and people leads about what actually breaks. It will be built with three or four purpose-led companies as design partners, scoped properly and worked on together.
Three or four companies, worked on properly.
This gets built with design partners, not for a list. If what breaks here is familiar, the useful thing is a conversation about how it broke for you.