🪦 Killing your startup with process, flatten your organization, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 47th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Lenny’s Podcast, All In, and Rework.
What you need to know
🪦 Killing your startup with process
🥾 Flatten your organization
🫴 Stop hand holding your team
BONUS segment
🧠 Understand people’s thought process
🪦 Killing your startup with process
🥉 Third place (3 min read vs 1 hour 2 mins listening)
You choose… standardization or creativity? By introducing process you can only have one. Or so we think. Eeke de Milliano is Head of Product at Retool. She argues you can roll out new processes while maintaining creative freedoms. You just have to ruffle some feathers along the way.
What they say
The price of process
Process by definition is variance reducing. You're introducing it because you worry that the variance in your organization is too high. You want people to meet a certain standard.
The cost of that is while you're bringing folks up to the average, you're bringing other folks down to the average.
Oftentimes the folks you're bringing down are your highest performers, your most creative thinkers, and the folks who don't really need process to do their best work.
Eeke de Milliano
Giving people special treatment
You need managers to detect the high performers and be like 'This person doesn't need the process'.
You need to give high performers special treatment and be okay with the organizational costs of doing so.
Claire who used to be the COO of Stripe would be like 'Are you willing to break the org for this person?' I always thought that was a really nice framing.
You need to decide who you want to do it for. Some people are just that good you're like 'Yeah of course I'll break the org for them'.
Eeke de Milliano
What I say
Why it matters: Startups are chaotic for a reason. A lack of process means new ways of doing things and moving 10X faster than incumbents. Sure, things will break. Things may not scale. But growing pains are a good problem to have. Until then, delay process for as long as possible.
Between the lines: How do you feel when you’re treated unfairly? Angry. Irrational. Defensive. By having one rule for some and one rule for others, it’s easy to seed discontent among the rank and file. I agree with Eeke that process can kill creativity, but the problem isn’t who should and shouldn’t adhere to process. The problem is the people that need the process.
If you hire the right people you shouldn’t need overbearing processes. This applies regardless of seniority. Take Lucas Wickens, one of the best hires I’ve made. We poached him before he graduated college. Rather than give him guardrails and constraints, he’s enjoyed the freedom to think creatively. He’s since driven millions in additional revenue for Medicspot.
🥾 Flatten your organization
🥈 Second place (3 min read vs 1 hour 12 mins listening)
Meta’s stock has skyrocketed. Why? Because 2023 is the year of efficiency for Zuckerberg and co. Meta is purging middle management and asking directors to become individual contributors. But, how did they get into such a state in the first place? David Sacks shares pivotal lessons to avoid the same fate.
What they say
Individual contributors vs managers
The problem that builds up in these companies is that everybody wants to be a manager.
Every individual contributor (IC) who's a star thinks their career advancement requires them to manage a team.
What happens is you take that star IC and then you create a team around them. They then hire five people. They stop working and just start managing.
You get 20% more productivity out of that six person team than you would have out of the one star IC. You're spending five times more money. It makes no sense.
The problem is it cascades. That IC becomes a manager. They hire five people. One of those five people is a star and says 'Well I want to be a manager'.
There is even more organizational pressure to keep building more teams and more layers.
It's the problem of infinite delegation. Pretty soon the most junior interns in the company are doing all the work and all the best people are just managing.
David Sacks
Mangers managing managers
Here's the quote from Mark Zuckerberg to illustrate your point from a recent All Hands meeting.
"I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers managing managers managing managers managing the people who are doing the work."
Jason Calacanis
Engineers who don't code
The ultimate example of this was at Twitter. When Elon went in the first question he asked in the engineering department was 'Who's checked in code?'
They looked at the code repository and over 50% of the engineering department had not checked in code in months.
You want to know the reasons for that? It's because the engineers were told that if you want to be a manager in this company you don't code. Managers don't code. Only ICs code.
What happens is no one ambitious wants to be an IC. They all want to get promoted.
David Sacks
What I say
Why it matters: David Sacks is spot on. ICs are the true doers in a company. Slowly but surely, the tide is shifting toward ICs being remunerated on par with mangers. Prevailing wisdom is starting to cede that ICs need their own career path. But, is this enough to motivate ICs?
Kieran Flanagan argues more needs to be done to retain star ICs. Companies underinvest in administrative support and automation. By taking away mundane tasks, ICs can do what they do best and solve the hardest problems in your org.
Between the lines: Copy and paste should be a relic of the past. The rise of Zapier and automation tools should eliminate the need for repetitive tasks. But most of us can’t get out of the weeds. So, how do we solve this? Chief Automation Officer, anyone?
🫴 Stop hand holding your team
🥇 First place (4 min read vs 19 mins listening)
We’ve always done it that way. These six words should ring alarm bells every time you hear them. It’s the reason most companies follow these formulaic management principles:
Manager tells employee what to do
Manager tells employee how to do it
Manager tells employee when to do it
What if there’s another way of working? Given many of you are in the startup world, it’s no surprise to hear that there is. I’ll let the 37signals co-founders tell us more.
What they say
Managers of one
Everyone who works here has to manage themselves. They should take care of all the work that needs to be done: organize it, think about it, scope it, and execute on it independently.
For us, management is about coordinating, getting things out of the way for people, being a second opinion. It’s not giving people a list of things to do and laying out their day for them.
A fundamental hiring criteria for us is we don’t want people who require others to tell them what to do.
Every time we’ve hired someone where they were used to getting a to do list every morning, those people didn’t work out here.
Jason Fried
Automated check-ins
Jason and I have not been interested in checking up on people. We’ve created a culture and environment where that is not someone’s full time job.
With our managerial folks, they make things run more smoothly but things would run nonetheless without them.
We’ve built a lot of structures around this. Instead of having standup meetings we use Basecamp’s feature of automated check-ins.
Every afternoon you’re asked ‘What have you worked on today?’ and every Monday morning you’re asked ‘What are you going to work on this week?’
These are two examples of questions that replace a lot of what some managers do.
Managers of one can self report what’s going on and get on with it.
David Heinemeier Hansson
What I say
Why it matters: Automated check-ins act as free accountability coaches. They force us to prioritize high impact projects. We’re faced with a written ledger about our achievements (or lack thereof). We then ask why that is. Did meetings get in the way? Did quick wins distract us? By strengthening this muscle daily, we adopt the right behaviors and habits to hit our future goals.
A specific check-in framework I’ve adopted is One Big Thing by Shaan Puri. He argues the problem with to-do lists is they bury the headline. Instead, ask yourself what’s the one outcome you need to make happen today? This helps:
Turn people into ‘Managers of one’ via accountability and prioritization
Managers to support individuals with priorities and understand workload
Stimulate collaboration by giving others visibility over your priorities
Improve social discussion among remote teams by supporting each others One Big Thing
Between the lines: All of this is great, but the fundamental issue is how people perceive management. The root cause can be solved for by training people on what great management is and why it’s there. As Patrick Campbell says, managers should be there to unblock and support their teams, not the other way round.
BONUS segment
🧠 Understand people’s thought process
When we hire we look at people’s work. We give them a project to do, often a week long.
You can look at that project and walk through the work with that person.
You can get a pretty good sense on how organized they are, how thoughtful they are, what they thought of along the way, and how they manage their time when you talk through their work.
Jason Fried
Don’t give people assessments, evaluate them, and end there. That’s not enough. Understand the process behind their work. Did they use ChatGPT to assist with research and writing? Did they use Midjourney to create an image? It’s no bad thing if they did. It shows they’re early adopters. The important thing is to ask questions about their assessment. It shows you care and gives you a chance to get under the hood in terms of how they think.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
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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.