👑 Counsel from the King of coaches, why practice problem restatements, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 27th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring In Depth, Cartoon Avatars, and The Rework Podcast..
What you need to know
⌛️ Try before you buy when hiring
👑 Counsel from the King of coaches
🔀 Why practice problem restatements
+ 2 BONUS frameworks
🐢 Marxist vs Darwinian management
🧩 Introducing Shape up
⌛️ Try before you buy when hiring
🥉 Third place (4 min read vs 55 mins listening)
Steven Bartel is perfectly positioned to teach us about hiring. He’s co-founder and CEO of Gem, a talent acquisition platform. He talks to recruiters everyday. Steven joined Brett Berson, a partner at First Round and host of In Depth, to discuss everything startup hiring.
What they say
Go the extra mile to see if there’s a fit
There are so many parallels between recruiting and sales.
Hiring is less about having the perfect narrative to get everyone to join your company. It’s more about developing a deep understanding of what’s important to each individual candidate.
We had a lot of our early hires come and work for us for a day or two. If they were free and in between jobs, we’d say ‘Hey, come and work with us for a few weeks and understand what it’s like to work at a startup.’
If we had a candidate in on a Monday, we would invite them to our weekly standup and they could feel like they’re a part of the team and hear everybody’s update.
If we had an exciting customer conversation on a Wednesday, we would invite a candidate along. We would give them a taste of what it would be like to work here.
We had a lot of people self select out of joining our company because they realised a startup wasn’t for them.
This was a lot less about us evaluating them and more about them getting comfortable with joining our startup and what that would look and feel like.
The added benefit was they got a clear understanding of what the role would be and we got a lot of signal on what it would be like to work with them.
Steven Bartel
How to hire second degree connections
We developed a pretty fun trick for sourcing second degree connections. I like to call it the connector node trick.
We came up with a list of 15 to 20 people that we really respected and they would say really good things about me or Nick, my co-founder.
We’d go and source from their connections and name drop by saying ‘Hey, I saw you’re connected to Albert, who we think super highly of.’ We added some personalization and a little bit about Gem, then said ‘Would you ever be up for grabbing a coffee?’
The cool thing was folks would actually go and talk to Albert. It turned into this warm referral and recommendation where they would back channel the connector node, they would say good things, and then they’d get back to us.
It turned our second degree connections into warm ones.
Steven Bartel
What I say
Why it matters: Managers question why over half their staff leave every 3 years. There are a multitude of factors driving voluntary turnover - compensation, culture, flexibility and stability, among others. These factors are often beyond the control of hiring managers. What hiring managers can control is suitability. And that is evaluated through interviews, assessments, reference checks and on the job attitude and aptitude.
Between the lines: The most important hiring takeaway I’ve had to date is to make sure someone is startup worthy. What I mean by this is someone who thrives during change, has a bias to action, and has a rapid rate of learning. You need all 3 to succeed. Every hire I can think of that didn’t work out was missing one of these traits. Steven’s try before you buy framework is one of the only ways to assess all 3.
👑 Counsel from the King of coaches
🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 35 mins listening)
Bill Campbell was a titan among men. He coached some of the best entrepreneurs and leaders of the past 25 years, from Steve Jobs (Apple) and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), to Larry Page (Google) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon).
Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter, was among his roster of clients. Dick opened up to Logan Bartlett about his favorite Coach Campbell lessons.
What they say
Defer most decision making to your team
He wasn’t an executive coach in the traditional sense of a psychologist, like ‘Lie down on the couch and tell me why you hate your board.’ He was more of a management practices and leadership coach.
I remember my first staff meeting as CEO of Twitter with my direct reports. We made a bunch of decisions and I was super impressed with myself. I was like ‘What did you think, Bill?’
Campbell goes ‘Stop making all of the decisions. Don’t tell people what to do. Give them ownership of the problem and they’ll create the solution for themselves. Otherwise, you’re going to be a bottleneck for everything.’
He continued ‘If the thing that you tell them to do doesn’t work, they’ll sit and wait for you to tell them what to do next, instead of figuring out what the solution is. Push decisions down the stack and make decisions only a CEO can make.’
Dick Costolo
Be forthright with your communication
Bill’s whole thing was forthright communication. Don’t manage by trying to be liked. But, it doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole.
When delivering bad feedback, write down what you’re going to say a few days before and make those words come out of your mouth.
Dick Costolo
What I say
Why it matters: One of the simplest, yet best pieces of advice my Dad gave me at 18 was to manage others how you’d want to be managed yourself. This was when I had a boss in retail who took their misery out on everyone else. This advice has stayed with me to this day, and I’ve used this to refine what great management looks like.
Between the lines: Build your own internal map of how a great manager ought to behave and communicate. When you’re presented with lessons from the best like Coach Campbell, grab them with both hands. When you’re treated like a piece of shit on someone’s shoes, take this as an opportunity to vow not to repeat these actions.
BONUS framework
🐢 Marxist vs Darwinian management
A marxist management style is like ‘These 3 people are lagging behind. You need to spend time with them and help them catch up to the other kids.’
What you want to do is improve your entire team. The way to do that is to invest time, energy and effort into the people who are performing and make them even better.
Good investors will tell you the same thing about their portfolio. They’d say ‘I’ve got to spend time with my winners.’
That’s not naturally the way things will go. Your top performers are like ‘I don’t need any help. I’m kicking ass.’ Your poor performers want to talk to you every two hours.
Don’t be in reaction to who wants to spend time with you. Be much more active in spending time with top performers and making sure they get what they need.
Dick Costolo
Given that poor performers will likely be dismissed, and average performers will leave due a lack of progression, it makes sense to adopt a Darwinian approach to management. That’s not to say you should completely ignore the rest of your team. Rather, invest proportionately according to performance.
🔀 Why practice problem restatements
🥇 First place (5 min read vs 26 mins listening)
Say what you will about DHH and Jason Fried, they’ve pioneered a lot of thinking around asynchronous work and how to get the most out of remote teams. This episode is rich with tips on how to run your business efficiently.
What they say
Are you tackling the right problem?
Not only are solutions interchangeable, but problems are too. There may be an adjacent problem you can tackle. It’s called problem restatement.
You go back to your problem and say ‘Do you know what? There’s another version of this that we could do that’s close enough to the pain we’re trying to cure that does sort of the same thing.’
We must make trade offs all the time. The best trade offs are those where you’re not losing something of material value. You’re exchanging one problem for another and they’re roughly equivalent.
In some cases, you pick a problem that’s somewhat worse, but so much easier to do. I’ll take the 80% version here if I can get away with a 5% implementation.
David Heinemeier Hansson
‘Good enough’ helps you do more with less
Sometimes when I talk to people about our pace at 37signals and the size of our team, they go ‘What do you mean you have one programmer doing this big feature over 3 weeks?’
Much of that secret sauce is saying ‘It’s good enough. It’s fine.’ This is how you finish a whole product with a tiny team within a reasonable amount of time, and why large corporations can’t seem to get anything done with teams of 20.
It’s one of those lovely parallels to writing. Kill your darlings is one of those key tenets of good editing. You will delete lines that you like because if you take that line out, even if you really like that line, it’s a better paragraph.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Time constraints are the key to saying no
You need time pressure. You need to be pretty religious about it. Everything will take as long as you let it.
You’ve got to say ‘The walls are closing in here. We’ve got to make some cuts, some decisions, some simplifications.’
It doesn’t mean what we’re shipping is going to be worse. That’s the thing you’ve got to get in your head. You have to leave the possibility open that the simpler version is the better version.
Jason Fried
What I say
Why it matters: Every business should adopt these principles. It’s so, so easy to fall into the habit of scope creep and work on problems that aren’t actually important. By time boxing projects, you force yourself to be ruthless. Ruthless with the types of problems you take on and the simplicity with which you solve them.
Between the lines: One caveat to the good enough approach is that, in my experience, most things that get added to the ‘I’ll do it later’ bucket, never actually get done. This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s something you should consciously be aware of.
Case in point, I set a super aggressive deadline to build thepodup.com. Some tasks moved from the must have to the nice to have bucket in order for me to ship on time. However, things like podcast summaries are only now being started on (10 weeks later) because other projects took precedent. And that’s only because I’m getting support from Aayush, a Podup community writer.
BONUS framework
🧩 Introducing Shape up
The cornerstone of Shape up is to take a chunk of time and say ‘We’re going to work on these things.’
At 37signals it’s every 6 weeks with 2 weeks cool-down. So, every 8 weeks you get to completely change your mind on what to work on.
That’s 6 times a year that you get to change where the product is going. You’re not locked into a roadmap.
That’s the magic of Shape up. You’re creating this space where you have to sit on your hands for the next 6 weeks and let the work that you decided to do get done.
David Heinemeier Hansson
The team at 37signals ignore the traditional 2-week development sprints. In true Jason Fried fashion, he wrote this in a way that attacks those who do things differently:
“We don’t do development sprints or anything remotely tied to a metaphor that includes being tired and worn out at the end.”
Putting Jason’s passive aggressiveness aside, I agree with his sentiment. The scrum framework can be very meeting heavy. Sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint reviews and sprint retrospectives can all puncture productivity. You’ll frequently see an unnecessary number of people invited to meetings, meaning an 8 person, 1-hour call leads to a full day of lost productivity.
Working to 6-8 weeks cycles gives teams the autonomy to execute larger projects while staying within a time constraint. Shape up does an excellent job of utilizing the right skills from the right stakeholders. Senior leaders set out the problem that needs solving and define the key parts of the solution. This is then given to the team to fill in the blanks with how to best execute.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
Have you heard of Scott’s Cheap Flights? It’s a newsletter with alerts on the best flight deals. Well, Zach Busekrus came up with the idea of doing this for AirBnbs. It’s a simple but genius idea. If you swear by AirBnb for your travels, Sponstayneous is the newsletter for you.
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.