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 didn't need to manage for direction, 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.
Your people's CraftMe
Built by them, benefits your business.
Their CraftMe starts with the reason, decided from what they've actually lived. Their avatar sits in the dashboard, carrying the way they want to operate and who they want to be while they do it.
What they're aiming at shows you where to deploy them, so the work pays the company and the person doing it. who they want to be while they work shows a manager how to get their best, so nobody's guessing at the one-to-one. It's theirs, carried role to role, so what you're reading is a track record rather than an interview answer.
Nobody could manage HR this way before, because your employees didn't have it written down.
Similar people work well day-to-day, aligned people change the world
A purpose precise enough to disagree with.
Compact starts with the vision that actually runs the company, then everyone you interview builds their own. Work built around a role always comes with somebody waiting on the other end. When that ceiling is removed, your staff perform to their best rather than their manager's expectations.
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.
Their work, connected to each other
Alignment is not a quarterly offsite.
The KPIs and targets that turns direction into behaviour for the team, runs for each individual. Everyone's daily work is traceable to something they said mattered to them, and to something the company said mattered.
Where an individual's work runs on a different blueprint to another's, it cannot be connected. Taking the individuality out of the work is not the best solution.
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 where the work of the people in it has spread apart. Every cycle, that gets checked. You can see where the work is thick, where it has thinned, and which way it's moving. Drift becomes visible before somebody resigns, and the next hire goes where the business is already heading, not into the shape the last person left behind.
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.