SPACE+ From Productivity to Strategy and Value

For years, organizations have tried to answer a deceptively simple question: Who is productive? The usual answers, hours worked, tasks completed, messages sent, feel comforting because they are easy to count. They are also famously misleading.

The SPACE framework, introduced by researchers at Microsoft, was an important correction. It reframed productivity as a multi‑dimensional system rather than a single score. At Onabuda, we take this one step further. We call it SPACE+.

SPACE+ keeps the original dimensions intact, but adds a critical lens: strategy and value contribution. Not just what people do, but why it matters.

A quick recap: what SPACE actually measures

SPACE stands for five dimensions that together describe modern knowledge work:

• Satisfaction & well‑being, psychological safety, burnout risk, motivation
• Performance, quality, reliability, impact of outcomes
• Activity, observable actions (commits, tickets, meetings, messages)
• Communication & collaboration, information flow, coordination, dependency management
• Efficiency & flow, focus time, interruptions, handoffs, waiting states

The key insight of SPACE is that no single dimension is sufficient. Optimizing one while ignoring the others reliably creates failure modes. High activity with low flow produces noise. High performance without satisfaction produces attrition.

This is not philosophy; it is measurable reality.

Why SPACE alone is not enough

SPACE tells you how work happens. It does not, by itself, tell you whether that work meaningfully advances company goals.

Two teams can score similarly on SPACE metrics and still create radically different outcomes:

• Team A ships features efficiently,but misaligned with strategy.
• Team B ships less,but unlocks revenue, reduces risk, or compounds long‑term advantage.

This is where SPACE+ enters.

Introducing SPACE+: adding strategy and value

SPACE+ extends the framework with a unifying question:

How does this person’s or team’s SPACE profile translate into strategic impact and value creation?

Instead of treating SPACE dimensions as endpoints, SPACE+ treats them as signals that feed into two higher‑order outputs:

• Strategic alignment, Are efforts connected to priorities that matter now and next?
• Value contribution, What measurable value is created, protected, or enabled?

Value here is intentionally broad:

• Revenue generated or accelerated
• Costs avoided or risks reduced
• Customer satisfaction improved
• Time‑to‑market shortened
• Organizational learning increased

How SPACE+ works at the individual level

Consider an individual contributor outside engineering, say, a product marketer.

• Activity: campaigns launched, documents produced
• Communication: cross‑team alignment, clarity of messaging
• Efficiency: time from insight to launch
• Performance: campaign effectiveness metrics
• Satisfaction: sustainability and engagement

SPACE+ asks the next question: Which strategic bets did this work support?

A marketer who launches fewer campaigns but consistently supports high‑leverage product launches may create more value than one with higher activity but weaker alignment. SPACE+ makes that visible.

How SPACE+ works at the team level

At team scale, patterns emerge.

Data often shows:

• Teams with high communication volume but low efficiency are usually compensating for unclear ownership.
• Teams with strong flow but weak performance are often solving the wrong problems very well.
• Teams with declining satisfaction show predictable drops in performance within 1, 2 quarters.

SPACE+ connects these patterns to outcomes:

• Which teams accelerate strategy?
• Which teams absorb organizational drag?
• Where is value compounding, and where is it leaking?

This turns retrospectives from storytelling sessions into evidence‑based decisions.

Why SPACE+ is not just for developers

The original SPACE research was heavily informed by software teams, but the dimensions are role‑agnostic.

Every knowledge worker:

• Performs activities
• Communicates and collaborates
• Experiences flow or fragmentation
• Produces outcomes of varying quality
• Operates within human limits

Sales, HR, finance, operations, leadership, each maps cleanly onto SPACE. SPACE+ simply ensures that strategic relevance is not optional.

What the data consistently shows

Across organizations applying multi‑dimensional productivity models:

• Activity metrics alone correlate poorly with business outcomes
• Satisfaction scores are leading indicators of retention and delivery risk
• Flow time predicts output quality better than raw speed
• Strategic alignment explains why similar SPACE profiles yield different value

In short: what you measure shapes what you get.

The real reason SPACE+ matters

SPACE+ is not about surveillance or scoring people. It is about making invisible tradeoffs visible.

It gives leaders a way to:

• Reward impact instead of busyness
• Detect systemic friction early
• Align effort with strategy using evidence, not intuition
• Scale performance without burning people out

Productivity without value is noise. Value without sustainability is debt. SPACE+ exists to keep organizations out of both traps.

In complex systems,and modern companies are nothing if not complex, clarity is a competitive advantage.

SPACE+ is one way to earn it.