Most companies are addicted to vague promises disguised as goals. They call them OKRs, KPIs, or “strategic bets” and then wonder why half the work dies in Jira tickets no one closes. CBC exists to cure that disease. It forces clarity before action and accountability before celebration. If you think that sounds “rigid,” that’s because you’re used to working in chaos.
Agreement-Based Execution
CBC doesn’t care about your “north star metric.” It cares about whether you and your team actually agree on what you’re building and who owns what. Every CBC Agreement spells out:
- The Objective: Why this work matters in plain English.
- The Deliverables: Concrete, measurable outputs. No “explore” or “consider.”
- The Accountability: One or more stakeholders. Individuals, not “team A, or team B.”
- The Dependencies: Who and/or what the work depends on, captured upfront.
- The Success Criteria: How we’ll know when it's done, and that the outcome has materialized.
Contrast: OKRs let you write “Delight the customer” and pretend you’ve done strategy. CBC makes you prove you can deliver something that would actually delight a customer.
Commitment Before Execution
In most companies, work starts with a half-baked Jira epic and a Slack thread. CBC flips that. No agreement, no work. Everyone signs off before the first line of code gets written.
- No moving goalposts mid-sprint.
- No pretending dependencies don’t exist.
- No “we’ll figure it out later.”
Example (Startup): A seed-stage fintech wants to launch an MVP in 90 days. Instead of everyone coding whatever they feel like, CBC forces founders and engineers to agree: “MVP = ability to open an account, fund it, and make one transfer.” No crypto side quests, no fancy dashboards, no pivoting mid-month because an investor suggested it.
Explicit Dependency & Risk Management
Dependencies are where projects go to die. CBC surfaces them at the start. If your launch depends on the data team shipping a pipeline by June, that dependency is written into the agreement. If they miss, it's clear where the failure occurred, but better is that it is anticipated, escalated, documented, and made visible as a risk.
Contrast: KPIs assume everyone’s rowing in the same direction. CBC assumes some people will lose their oars and makes that risk visible before you’re halfway across the river.
Structured Flexibility
CBC isn’t about rigidity; it’s about rational execution discipline and adaptation. Agreements can include clauses like:
- Staged commitments: Phase 1 by March, Phase 2 if metrics prove viability.
- Conditional clauses: If vendor X slips, scope Y gets cut automatically.
- Time-boxed renegotiations: You don’t drift, you reset.
Example (Midsize SaaS company): Marketing wants a new referral program. They sign an agreement with Product: Phase 1 = referral tracking in-app. Phase 2 = rewards automation, but only after metrics hit 10% uptake. No endless roadmap items that rot.
Hierarchical Alignment
CBC scales by stacking agreements like contracts in a Jenga tower of accountability. Executive-level agreements roll into department-level, which roll into team-level. Everyone knows which block they’re holding up, and what happens if they yank it out. Everyone can trace the objectives, efforts, and ownership up and down the hierarchy.
Contrast: OKRs “cascade,” which is corporate-speak for “leaders make big goals, and teams scramble to retrofit their work to match.” CBC makes the hierarchy explicit, enforceable, and symmetrical.
Example (Enterprise): A global bank promises regulators “zero critical outages.” That cascades into infrastructure teams, then into SRE squads, each bound by CBC agreements with explicit uptime deliverables. When an outage hits, you don’t get a 60-slide deck on “lessons learned.” You look at the agreement. Who signed what? Who failed? Done.
The Takeaway
CBC is the antidote to vague promises, shifting goals, and accountability/performance theater. It replaces the optimism of OKRs with the sobriety of contracts. In CBC, clarity isn’t optional, accountability isn’t fuzzy, and execution isn’t a vibe – it’s a binding agreement.
